+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+This is a book that contains stories written by Howard Phihps Lovecraft that is
+beheved to be in the pubhc domain and were downloaded from the web. It was
+not created for profit - only for the purpose of having the stories in a singular
+location so as to be readily available for reading. The cover image is a 'doctored'
+photo that I took at Saint Kevin's Monastery, Ireland. The image was altered
+using the cartoon effect in GIMP. Use it as you wish.
+
+
+
+Notes On Writing Weird Fiction
+
+H. P. Lovecraft
+
+My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more
+clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of
+wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by
+certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and
+images encountered in art and literature. I choose weird stories because they suit
+my inclination best - one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to
+achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the
+galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and
+frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our
+sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror
+because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends
+itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the
+strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing
+picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or "outsideness" without
+laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so
+many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most
+profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time
+seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.
+
+While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a
+narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as
+old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons
+who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to
+escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted
+lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to
+us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming
+sunsets momentarily suggest. These persons include great authors as well as
+insignificant amateurs like myself - Dunsany, Poe, Arthur Machen, M. R. James,
+Algernon Blackwood, and Walter de la Mare being typical masters in this field.
+
+As to how I write a story - there is no one way. Each one of my tales has a
+different history. Once or twice I have literally written out a dream; but usually I
+start with a mood or idea or image which I wish to express, and revolve it in my
+mind until I can think of a good way of embodying it in some chain of dramatic
+occurrences capable of being recorded in concrete terms. I tend to run through a
+mental list of the basic conditions or situations best adapted to such a mood or
+idea or image, and then begin to speculate on logical and naturally motivated
+
+
+
+explanations of the given mood or idea or image in terms of the basic condition
+or situation chosen.
+
+The actual process of writing is of course as varied as the choice of theme and
+initial conception; but if the history of all my tales were analysed, it is just
+possible that the following set of rules might be deduced from the average
+procedure:
+
+1) Prepare a synopsis or scenario of events in the order of their absolute
+occurrence - not the order of their narration. Describe with enough fulness to
+cover all vital points and motivate all incidents planned. Details, comments, and
+estimates of consequences are sometimes desirable in this temporary framework
+
+2) Prepare a second synopsis or scenario of events - this one in order of narration
+(not actual occurrence), with ample fulness and detail, and with notes as to
+changing perspective, stresses, and climax. Change the original synopsis to fit if
+such a change will increase the dramatic force or general effectiveness of the
+story. Interpolate or delete incidents at will - never being bound by the original
+conception even if the ultimate result be a tale wholly different from that first
+planned. Let additions and alterations be made whenever suggested by anything
+in the for mulating process.
+
+3) Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the
+second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the
+developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any
+previous design. If the development suddenly reveals new opportunities for
+dramatic effect or vivid story telling, add whatever is thought advantageous -
+going back and reconciling the early parts to the new plan. Insert and delete
+whole sections if necessary or desirable, trying different beginnings and endings
+until the best arrangement is found. But be sure that all references throughout
+the story are thoroughly reconciled with the final design. Remove all possible
+superfluities - words, sentences, paragraphs, or whole episodes or elements -
+observing the usual precautions about the reconciling of all references.
+
+4) Revise the entire text, paying attention to vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose,
+proportioning of parts, niceties of tone, grace and convincingness of transitions
+(scene to scene, slow and detailed action to rapid and sketchy time-covering
+action and vice versa... etc., etc., etc.), effectiveness of beginning, ending,
+climaxes, etc., dramatic suspense and interest, plausibility and atmosphere, and
+various other elements.
+
+5) Prepare a neatly typed copy - not hesitating to add final revisory touches
+where they seem in order.
+
+
+
+The first of these stages is often purely a mental one - a set of conditions and
+happenings being worked out in my head, and never set down until I am ready
+to prepare a detailed synopsis of events in order of narration. Then, too, I
+sometimes begin even the actual writing before I know how I shall develop the
+idea - this beginning forming a problem to be motivated and exploited.
+
+There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story; one expressing a mood or
+feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general
+situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a
+definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax. In another way, weird
+tales may be grouped into two rough categories - those in which the marvel or
+horror concerns some condition or phenomenon, and those in which it concerns
+some action of persons in connexion with a bizarre condition or phenomenon.
+
+Each weird story - to speak more particularly of the horror type - seems to
+involve five definite elements: (a) some basic, underlying horror or abnormality -
+condition, entity, etc. - , (b) the general effects or bearings of the horror, (c) the
+mode of manifestation - object embodying the horror and phenomena observed -
+, (d) the types of fear-reaction pertaining to the horror, and (e) the specific effects
+of the horror in relation to the given set of conditions.
+
+In writing a weird story I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and
+atmosphere, and place the emphasis where it belongs. One cannot, except in
+immature pulp charlatan-fiction, present an account of impossible, improbable,
+or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace narrative of objective acts and
+conventional emotions. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special
+handicap to over come, and this can be accomplished only through the
+maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching
+on the one given marvel. This marvel must be treated very impressively and
+deliberately - with a careful emotional "build-up" - else it will seem flat and
+unconvincing. Being the principal thing in the story, its mere existence should
+overshadow the characters and events. But the characters and events must be
+consistent and natural except where they touch the single marvel. In relation to
+the central wonder, the characters should shew the same overwhelming emotion
+which similar characters would shew toward such a wonder in real life. Never
+have a wonder taken for granted. Even when the characters are supposed to be
+accustomed to the wonder I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness
+corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious
+fantasy.
+
+Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that
+a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.
+The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and
+
+
+
+unconvincing. Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion -
+imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail which express
+shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the
+unreal. Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no
+substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism.
+
+These are the rules or standards which I have followed - consciously or
+unconsciously - ever since I first attempted the serious writing of fantasy. That
+my results are successful may well be disputed - but I feel at least sure that, had I
+ignored the considerations mentioned in the last few paragraphs, they would
+have been much worse than they are.
+
+
+
+History of the Necronomicon
+
+Written 1927
+
+Published 1938
+
+Original title Al Azif — azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that
+nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons.
+
+Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaa, in Yemen, who is said to
+have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He
+visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent
+ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia — the Roba el Khaliyeh or
+"Empty Space" of the ancients — and "Dahna" or "Crimson" desert of the
+modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and
+monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told
+by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in
+Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death
+or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is
+said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent, biographer) to have been seized by an invisible
+monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of
+fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have
+seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a
+certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than
+mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities
+whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.
+
+In A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho' surreptitious
+circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into
+Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople under the title Necronomicon.
+For a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was
+suppressed and burnt by the patriarch Michael. After this it is only heard of
+furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation later in the Middle
+Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice — once in the fifteenth century in
+black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (prob. Spanish)
+— both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and
+place by internal typographical evidence only. The work both Latin and Greek
+was banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which
+called attention to it. The Arabic original was lost as early as Wormius' time, as
+indicated by his prefatory note; and no sight of the Greek copy — which was
+printed in Italy between 1500 and 1550 — has been reported since the burning of
+a certain Salem man's library in 1692. An English translation made by Dr. Dee
+
+
+
+was never printed, and exists only in fragments recovered from the original
+manuscript. Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th cent.) is known to be in the
+British Museum under lock and key, while another (17th cent.) is in the
+Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century edition is in the Widener
+Library at Harvard, and in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. Also
+in the library of the University of Buenos Ayres. Numerous other copies
+probably exist in secret, and a fifteenth-century one is persistently rumoured to
+form part of the collection of a celebrated American millionaire. A still vaguer
+rumour credits the preservation of a sixteenth-century Greek text in the Salem
+family of Pickman; but if it was so preserved, it vanished with the artist R. U.
+Pickman, who disappeared early in 1926. The book is rigidly suppressed by the
+authorities of most countries, and by all branches of organised ecclesiasticism.
+Reading leads to terrible consequences. It was from rumours of this book (of
+which relatively few of the general public know) that R. W. Chambers is said to
+have derived the idea of his early novel The King in Yellow.
+
+Chronology
+
+Al Azif written circa 730 A.D. at Damascus by Abdul Alhazred
+
+Tr. to Greek 950 A.D. as Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas
+
+Burnt by Patriarch Michael 1050 (i.e., Greek text). Arabic text now lost.
+
+Olaus translates Gr. to Latin 1228
+
+1232 Latin ed. (and Gr.) suppr. by Pope Gregory IX
+
+14... Black-letter printed edition (Germany)
+
+15. . . Gr. text printed in Italy
+
+16. . . Spanish reprint of Latin text
+
+This should be supplemented with a letter written to Clark Ashton Smith on
+November 27, 1927:
+
+I have had no chance to produce new material this autumn, but have been
+classifying notes & synopses in preparation for some monstrous tales later on. In
+particular I have drawn up some data on the celebrated & unmentionable
+Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred! It seems that this shocking
+blasphemy was produced by a native of Sanaa, in Yemen, who flourished about
+700 A.D. & made many mysterious pilgrimages to Babylon's ruins, Memphis's
+catacombs, & the devil-haunted & untrodden wastes of the great southern
+deserts of Arabia — the Roba el Khaliyeh, where he claimed to have found
+records of things older than mankind, & to have learnt the worship of Yog-
+Sothoth & Cthulhu. The book was a product of Abdul's old age, which was spent
+in Damascus, & the original title was Al Azif — azif (cf. Henley's notes to
+Vathek) being the name applied to those strange night noises (of insects) which
+the Arabs attribute to the howling of daemons. Alhazred died — or disappeared
+
+
+
+— under terrible circumstances in the year 738. In 950 Al Azif was translated into
+Greek by the Byzantine Theodorus Philetas under the title Necronomicon, & a
+century later it was burnt at the order of Michael, Patriarch of Constantinople. It
+was translated into Latin by Olaus in 1228, but placed on the Index
+Expurgatorius by Pope Gregory IX in 1232. The original Arabic was lost before
+Olaus' time, & the last known Greek copy perished in Salem in 1692. The work
+was printed in the 15th, 16th, & 17th centuries, but few copies are extant.
+Wherever existing, it is carefully guarded for the sake of the world's welfare &
+sanity. Once a man read through the copy in the library of Miskatonic University
+at Arkham — read it through & fled wild-eyed into the hills. . . but that is another
+story!
+
+In yet another letter (to James Blish and William Miller, 1936), Lovecraft says:
+
+You are fortunate in securing copies of the hellish and abhorred Necronomicon.
+Are they the Latin texts printed in Germany in the fifteenth century, or the Greek
+version printed in Italy in 1567, or the Spanish translation of 1623? Or do these
+copies represent different texts?
+
+
+
+At the Mountains of Madness
+
+Written Feb-22 Mar 1931
+
+Published February-April 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 16, No. 6 February
+1936), p. 8-32; Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 1936), p. 125-55; Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 1936), p.
+132-50.
+
+
+I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice
+without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for
+opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt
+and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more
+reluctant because my warning may be in vain.
+
+Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I suppressed
+what will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing left. The
+hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor,
+for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of
+the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of
+course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures, notwithstanding a strangeness of
+technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.
+
+In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders
+who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data
+on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and
+highly baffling myth cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter
+the exploring world in general from any rash and over-ambitious program in the
+region of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively
+obscure men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small
+university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly
+bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.
+
+It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the
+fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist, my object in leading
+the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level
+specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by
+the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering
+department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did
+hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along
+
+
+
+previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto
+unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.
+
+Pabodie's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was
+unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the
+ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill
+in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head,
+jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting
+paraphernalia, cording, rubbish- removal auger, and sectional piping for bores
+five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep all formed, with needed
+accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry. This was
+made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects
+were fashioned. Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed especially for the
+tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added
+fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport
+our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various
+suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would
+serve us.
+
+We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season - or longer, if
+absolutely necessary - would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges
+and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by
+Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made
+by aeroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological
+significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material -
+especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic
+specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as
+possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of
+this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge
+of the earth's past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even
+tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine
+fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a
+matter of common information; and we hoped to expand that information in
+variety, accuracy, and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs,
+we would enlarge the aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable
+size and condition.
+
+Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper
+soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land surfaces -
+these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile
+thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could not afford to waste
+drilling the depth of any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though
+Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of
+
+
+
+borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven
+dynamo. It is this plan - which we could not put into effect except experimentally
+on an expedition such as ours - that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition
+proposes to follow, despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the
+antarctic.
+
+The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless
+reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later
+articles of Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the University -
+Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the physics department -
+also a meteorologist - and myself, representing geology and having nominal
+command - besides sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic
+and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aeroplane
+pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them
+understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and
+I. In addition, of course, our two ships - wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice
+conditions and having auxiliary steam - were fully manned.
+
+The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions,
+financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough,
+despite the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp
+materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston,
+and there our ships were loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our
+specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen,
+transportation, and camp construction we profited by the excellent example of
+our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual
+number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition - ample
+though it was - so little noticed by the world at large.
+
+As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930,
+taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and
+stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final
+supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before,
+hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains - J. B. Douglas, commanding the
+brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg
+Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic - both veteran whalers in
+antarctic waters.
+
+As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the
+north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62°
+South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs - table-like objects with vertical sides
+- and just before reaching the antarctic circle, which we crossed on October 20th
+with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field
+
+
+
+
+ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage
+through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigors to come. On many
+occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a
+strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which distant bergs became
+the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.
+
+Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly
+packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175° On
+the morning of October 26th a strong land blink appeared on the south, and
+before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-
+clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At
+last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its
+cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range
+discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail
+down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of
+McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9'.
+
+The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of
+mystery loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon
+or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy
+reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of
+exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept ranging,
+intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held
+vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes
+extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic
+reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the
+scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas
+Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly
+fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad
+Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into
+that monstrous book at the college library.
+
+On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily
+lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts.
+Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry
+Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the
+great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet like the
+rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the
+afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of
+smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriae peak towered up some twelve thousand, seven
+hundred feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama,
+while beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror, ten thousand, nine
+hundred feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano.
+
+
+
+
+that
+
+
+restlessly roll
+
+
+currents
+
+
+down Yaanek
+
+
+cHmes
+
+
+of the pole
+
+
+roll
+
+
+down Mount Yaanek
+
+
+
+Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate
+assistants - a brilliant young fellow named Danforth - pointed out what looked
+like lava on the snowy slope, remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840,
+had undoubtedly been the source of Poe's image when he wrote seven years
+later:
+
+the lavas
+
+Their sulphurous
+
+In the ultimate
+
+That groan as they
+
+In the realms of the boreal pole.
+
+Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of
+Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe's only long
+story - the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore,
+and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins
+squawked and flapped their fins, while many fat seals were visible on the water,
+swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
+
+Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after
+midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the
+ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy
+arrangement. Our sensations on first treading Antarctic soil were poignant and
+complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton
+expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano's
+slope was only a provisional one, headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham.
+We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline
+tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aerial,
+aeroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless
+outfits - besides those in the planes - capable of communicating with the
+Arkham's large outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be
+likely to visit. The ship's outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to
+convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on
+Kingsport Head, Massachusetts. We hoped to complete our work during a single
+antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible, we would winter on the
+Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for another
+summer's supplies.
+
+I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early
+work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several
+points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie's apparatus
+accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the
+small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges
+
+
+
+
+and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge aeroplanes at the camp atop
+the barrier. The health of our land party - twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan
+sledge dogs - was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no
+really destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the
+thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25° above, and our experience with
+New England winters had accustomed us to rigors of this sort. The barrier camp
+was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions,
+dynamite, and other supplies.
+
+Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the
+fifth being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache to
+form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes
+were lost. Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we
+would employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache
+and another permanent base on the great plateau from six hundred to seven
+hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite the almost
+unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the
+plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate bases, taking our chances
+in the interest of economy and probable efficiency.
+
+Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop flight of
+our squadron on November 21st over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on
+the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines. Wind
+troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the
+one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead, between
+Latitudes 83° and 84°, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest
+valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a
+frowning and mountainous coast line. At last we were truly entering the white,
+aeon-dead world of the ultimate south. Even as we realized it we saw the peak of
+Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost fifteen
+thousand feet.
+
+The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude
+86° 7', East Longitude 174° 23', and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings
+and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short
+aeroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent
+of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students - Gedney and
+Carroll - on December 13 - 15. We were some eight thousand, five hundred feet
+above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only
+twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made
+considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed
+dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of
+securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones
+
+
+
+
+thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with the
+great bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts
+lying eastward below South America - which we then thought to form a separate
+and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross
+and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.
+
+In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their
+nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments; notably
+ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such moUusks as linguellae and
+gastropods - all of which seemed of real significance in connection with the
+region's primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated marking,
+about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake pieced together from three
+fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted aperture. These fragments
+came from a point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range; and Lake,
+as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and
+provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple
+effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than
+a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since
+the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may
+exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression.
+
+On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six students, and myself
+flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down
+once by a sudden high wind, which, fortunately, did not develop into a typical
+storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one of several observation flights,
+during others of which we tried to discern new topographical features in areas
+unreached by previous explorers. Our early flights were disappointing in this
+latter respect, though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly
+fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage
+had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as
+enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold,
+silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under
+the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble
+in flying owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one
+mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.
+
+At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five hundred miles
+eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a
+point which would probably be on the smaller continental division, as we
+mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable
+for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent - lime juice
+well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures
+generally above zero enabling us to do without our thickest furs. It was now
+
+
+
+
+midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to conclude work by
+March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night. Several
+savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped
+damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aeroplane shelters
+and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp
+buildings with snow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost
+uncanny.
+
+The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of Lake's
+strange and dogged insistence on a westward - or rather, northwestward -
+prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base. It seems that he had
+pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular
+striated marking in the slate; reading into it certain contradictions in nature and
+geological period which whetted his curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid
+to sink more borings and blastings in the west- stretching formation to which the
+exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely convinced that the
+marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable
+organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock
+which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date - Cambrian if not actually pre-
+Cambrian - as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved
+life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These
+fragments, with their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a
+thousand million years old.
+
+
+Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of
+Lake's start northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or
+penetrated by human imagination, though we did not mention his wild hopes of
+revolutionizing the entire sciences of biology and geology. His preliminary
+sledging and boring journey of January 11th to 18th with Pabodie and five others
+- marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of the great
+pressure ridges in the ice - had brought up more and more of the Archaean slate;
+and even I was interested by the singular profusion of evident fossil markings in
+that unbelievably ancient stratum. These markings, however, were of very
+primitive life forms involving no great paradox except that any life forms should
+occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed
+to see the good sense of Lake's demand for an interlude in our time- saving
+program - an interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many men, and the
+whole of the expedition's mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the end, veto the
+plan, though I decided not to accompany the northwestward party despite
+Lake's plea for my geological advice. While they were gone, I would remain at
+the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final plans for the eastward
+
+
+
+
+shift. In preparation for this transfer, one of the planes had begun to move up a
+good gasohne supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait temporarily. I
+kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time
+without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long
+death.
+
+Lake's sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall, sent out its own
+reports from the shortwave transmitters on the planes; these being
+simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the
+Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world on
+wave lengths up to fifty meters. The start was made January 22nd at 4 A.M., and
+the first wireless message we received came only two hours later, when Lake
+spoke of descending and starting a small- scale ice-melting and bore at a point
+some three hundred miles away from us. Six hours after that a second and very
+excited message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft
+had been sunk and blasted, culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with
+several markings approximately like the one which had caused the original
+puzzlement.
+
+Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the
+teeth of a raw and piercing gale; and when I dispatched a message of protest
+against further hazards. Lake replied curtly that his new specimens made any
+hazard worth taking. I saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny,
+and that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole expedition's
+success; but it was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that
+treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomed mysteries
+which stretched off for some fifteen hundred miles to the half-known, half-
+suspected coast line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.
+
+Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message from
+Lake's moving plane, which almost reversed my sentiments and made me wish I
+had accompanied the party:
+
+"10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied mountain range ahead
+higher than any hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas, allowing for height of
+plateau. Probable Latitude 76° 15', Longitude 113° 10' E. Reaches far as can see to
+right and left. Suspicion of two smoking cones. All peaks black and bare of snow.
+Gale blowing off them impedes navigation."
+
+After that Pabodie, the men and I hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thought of
+this titanic mountain rampart seven hundred miles away inflamed our deepest
+sense of adventure; and we rejoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves
+personally, had been its discoverers. In half an hour Lake called us again:
+
+
+
+
+"Moulton's plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody hurt and
+perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three for return or further
+moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel needed just now. Mountains
+surpass anything in imagination. Am going up scouting in Carroll's plane, with
+all weight out.
+
+"You can't imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over thirty-five
+thousand feet. Everest out of the running. Atwood to work out height with
+theodolite while Carroll and I go up. Probably wrong about cones, for formations
+look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in. Queer
+skyline effects - regular sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole thing
+marvelous in red-gold light of low sun. Like land of mystery in a dream or
+gateway to forbidden world of untrodden wonder. Wish you were here to
+study."
+
+Though it was technically sleeping time, not one of us listeners thought for a
+moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound,
+where the supply cache and the Arkham were also getting the messages; for
+Captain Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the important find,
+and Sherman, the cache operator, seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of
+course, about the damaged aeroplane, but hoped it could be easily mended.
+Then, at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake:
+
+"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try really tall peaks in present
+weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing, and hard going at this altitude,
+but worth it. Great range fairly solid, hence can't get any glimpses beyond. Main
+summits exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks like pre-Cambrian
+slate, with plain signs of many other upheaved strata. Was wrong about
+volcanism. Goes farther in either direction than we can see. Swept clear of snow
+above about twenty-one thousand feet.
+
+"Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with
+exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like the old
+Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings. Impressive from
+distance. Flew close to some, and Carroll thought they were formed of smaller
+separate pieces, but that is probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and
+rounded off as if exposed to storms and climate changes for millions of years.
+"Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock than any visible
+strata on slopes proper, hence of evidently crystalline origin. Close flying shows
+many cave mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or semicircular.
+You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one
+peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand feet. Am up
+twenty-one thousand, five hundred myself, in devilish, gnawing cold. Wind
+
+
+
+
+whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves, but no flying danger
+so far."
+
+From then on for another half hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment, and
+expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied that I
+would join him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and I would
+work out the best gasoline plan - just where and how to concentrate our supply
+in view of the expedition's altered character. Obviously, Lake's boring
+operations, as well as his aeroplane activities, would require a great deal for the
+new base which he planned to establish at the foot of the mountains; and it was
+possible that the eastward flight might not be made, after all, this season. In
+connection with this business I called Captain Douglas and asked him to get as
+much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single dog team we
+had left there. A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and
+McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish.
+
+Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where
+Moulton's plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already
+progressed somewhat. The ice sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and
+there visible, and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very point before
+making any sledge trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable
+majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations at being in the
+lee of vast, silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at
+the world's rim. Atwood's theodolite observations had placed the height of the
+five tallest peaks at from thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand feet. The
+windswept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the
+occasional existence of prodigious gales, violent beyond anything we had so far
+encountered. His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher
+foothills rose abruptly. I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his
+words-flashed across a glacial void of seven hundred miles - as he urged that we
+all hasten with the matter and get the strange, new region disposed of as soon as
+possible. He was about to rest now, after a continuous day's work of almost
+unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.
+
+In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Captain
+Douglas at their widely separated bases. It was agreed that one of Lake's planes
+would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well as for all
+the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending on our decision
+about an easterly trip, could wait for a few days, since Lake had enough for
+immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually the old southern base ought to be
+restocked, but if we postponed the easterly trip we would not use it till the next
+summer, and, meanwhile. Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route
+between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.
+
+
+
+
+Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case
+might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from
+Lake's base to the Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our conical
+tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided
+to complete the job of making a permanent village. Owing to a very liberal tent
+supply. Lake had with him all that his base would need, even after our arrival. I
+wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready for the northwestward move after
+one day's work and one night's rest.
+
+Our labors, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M., for about that time Lake
+began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day
+had started unpropitiously, since an aeroplane survey of the nearly-exposed rock
+surfaces showed an entire absence of those Archaean and primordial strata for
+which he was looking, and which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks
+that loomed up at a tantalizing distance from the camp. Most of the rocks
+glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian
+and Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy black outcropping suggesting a
+hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake, whose plans all hinged on
+unearthing specimens more than five hundred million years older. It was clear to
+him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he had found the
+odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills to
+the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves.
+
+He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the expedition's
+general program; hence he set up the drill and put five men to work with it while
+the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged aeroplane. The
+softest visible rock - a sandstone about a quarter of a mile from the camp - had
+been chosen for the first sampling; and the drill made excellent progress without
+much supplementary blasting. It was about three hours afterward, following the
+first really heavy blast of the operation, that the shouting of the drill crew was
+heard; and that young Gedney - the acting foreman - rushed into the camp with
+the startling news.
+
+They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place to a
+vein of Comanchian limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echini,
+and spirifera, and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine
+vertebrate bones - the latter probably of teleosts, sharks, and ganoids. This, in
+itself, was important enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils the
+expedition had yet secured; but when shortly afterward the drill head dropped
+through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intense
+wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast had laid
+open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps five feet
+across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a section of
+
+
+
+
+shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago by the
+trickling ground waters of a bygone tropic world.
+
+The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended off
+indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which suggested
+its membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and floor were
+abundantly equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met
+in columnar form: but important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and
+bones, which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown
+jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan
+palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained
+representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the
+greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year. Mollusks,
+crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals - great
+and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp
+shouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong
+through the biting cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to
+secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons.
+
+When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled a
+message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to
+dispatch it by wireless. This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the
+identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of
+labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur
+vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx
+debris, Miocene sharks' teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other bones of archaic
+mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons, and titanotheres.
+There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer, or bovine
+animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the
+Oligocene Age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead,
+and inaccessible state for at least thirty million years.
+
+On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in the
+highest degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such
+typical imbedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably
+Comanchian and not a particle earlier, the free fragments in the hollow space
+included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as peculiar
+to far older periods - even rudimentary fishes, mollusks, and corals as remote as
+the Silunan or Ordovician. The inevitable inference was that in this part of the
+world there had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity between the
+life of over three hundred million years ago and that of only thirty million years
+ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene Age when the
+cavern was closed was of course past all speculation. In any event, the coming of
+
+
+
+
+the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some five hundred thousand years ago - a
+mere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavity - must have put an end to
+any of the primal forms which had locally managed to outlive their common
+terms.
+
+Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin
+written and dispatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get
+back. After that Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes, transmitting
+to me - and to the Arkham for relaying to the outside world - the frequent
+postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession of messengers. Those who
+followed the newspapers will remember the excitement created among men of
+science by that afternoon's reports - reports which have finally led, after all these
+years, to the organization of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition which I
+am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give the messages
+literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe translated them
+from the pencil shorthand:
+
+"Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone
+fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in
+Archaean slate, proving that source survived from over six hundred million
+years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate morphological
+changes and decrease in average size. Comanchian prints apparently more
+primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones. Emphasize importance of
+discovery in press. Will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics
+and physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions.
+
+"Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of
+organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells. Was evolved
+and specialized not later than a thousand million years ago, when planet was
+young and recently uninhabitable for any life forms or normal protoplasmic
+structure. Question arises when, where, and how development took place."
+
+"Later. Examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and marine saurians
+and primitive mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries to bony structure
+not attributable to any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any period, of
+two sorts - straight, penetrant bores, and apparently hacking incisions. One or
+two cases of cleanly severed bones. Not many specimens affected. Am sending to
+camp for electric torches. Will extend search area underground by hacking away
+stalactites."
+
+"Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and
+an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation - greenish, but
+no evidences to place its period. Has curious smoothness and regularity. Shaped
+
+
+
+
+like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage at inward
+angles and in center of surface. Small, smooth depression in center of unbroken
+surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source and weathering. Probably some
+freak of water action. Carroll, with magnifier, thinks he can make out additional
+markings of geologic significance. Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs
+growing uneasy as we work, and seem to hate this soapstone. Must see if it has
+any peculiar odor. Will report again when Mills gets back with light and we start
+on underground area."
+
+"10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground
+at 9:45 with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown
+nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine
+radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but
+astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends and
+around sides. Six feet end to end, three and five- tenths feet central diameter,
+tapering to one foot at each end. Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of
+staves. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at equator in middle of these
+ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious growths - combs or wings that fold
+up and spread out like fans. All greatly damaged but one, which gives almost
+seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal
+myth, especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon.
+
+"Their wings seem to be membranous, stretched on frame work of glandular
+tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends of body
+shriveled, giving no clue to interior or to what has been broken off there. Must
+dissect when we get back to camp. Can't decide whether vegetable or animal.
+Many features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set all hands
+cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens. Additional scarred bones
+found, but these must wait. Having trouble with dogs. They can't endure the
+new specimen, and would probably tear it to pieces if we didn't keep it at a
+distance from them."
+
+"11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest - I might say
+transcendent - importance. Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station at
+once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints in rocks. Mills,
+Boudreau, and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at underground point
+forty feet from aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and configured
+soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found - star-shaped, but no
+marks of breakage except at some of the points.
+
+"Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have
+brought all to surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the things.
+
+
+
+
+Give close attention to description and repeat back for accuracy Papers must get
+this right.
+
+"Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel torso three and
+five-tenths feet central diameter, one foot end diameters. Dark gray, flexible, and
+infinitely tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same color, found folded,
+spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of
+lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around
+equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five
+systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but
+expansible to maximum length of over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid.
+Single stalks three inches diameter branch after six inches into five substalks,
+each of which branches after eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or
+tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.
+
+"At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like suggestions,
+holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-
+inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors.
+
+"Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible
+yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of top probably
+breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish
+membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an
+eye.
+
+"Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped
+head and end in saclike swellings of same color which, upon pressure, open to
+bell-shaped orifices two inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white
+tooth like projections - probably mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of
+starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous
+neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.
+
+"At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head
+arrangements exist. Bulbous light-gray pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions,
+holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement.
+
+"Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter
+at base to about two and five-tenths at point. To each point is attached small end
+of a greenish five- veined membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide at
+farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which has made prints in rocks
+from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old.
+
+
+
+
+"From inner angles of starfish arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes
+tapering from three inches diameter at base to one at tip. Orifices at tips. All
+these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms
+with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort, marine or
+otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As
+found, all these projections tightly folded over pseudoneck and end of torso,
+corresponding to projections at other end.
+
+"Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now
+favor animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata
+without loss of certain primitive features. Echinoderm resemblances
+unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences.
+
+"Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use in
+water navigation. Symmetry is curiously vegetablelike, suggesting vegetable 's
+essential up-and- down structure rather than animal's fore-and-aft structure.
+Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa
+hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin.
+
+"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of
+primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes
+inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton
+Smith's nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak of
+Elder Things supposed to have created all earth life as jest or mistake. Students
+have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative treatment of
+very ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has
+spoken of - Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.
+
+"Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early Eocene
+period, judging from associated specimens. Massive stalagmites deposited above
+them. Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented damage. State of
+preservation miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action. No more found so
+far, but will resume search later. Job now to get fourteen huge specimens to camp
+without dogs, which bark furiously and can't be trusted near them.
+
+"With nine men - three left to guard the dogs - we ought to manage the three
+sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must establish plane communication
+with McMurdo Sound and begin shipping material. But I've got to dissect one of
+these things before we take any rest. Wish I had a real laboratory here. Dyer
+better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip. First the world's
+greatest mountains, and then this. If this last isn't the high spot of the expedition,
+I don't know what is. We're made scientifically. Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill
+that opened up the cave. Now will Arkham please repeat description?"
+
+
+
+
+The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost
+beyond description, nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm.
+McTighe, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the
+droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand version
+as soon as Lake's operator signed off. All appreciated the epoch-making
+significance of the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the
+Arkham's operator had repeated back the descriptive parts as requested; and my
+example was followed by Sherman from his station at the McMurdo Sound
+supply cache, as well as by Captain Douglas of the Arkham. Later, as head of the
+expedition, I added some remarks to be relayed through the Arkham to the
+outside world. Of course, rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement; and
+my only wish was to get to Lake's camp as quickly as I could. It disappointed me
+when he sent word that a rising mountain gale made early aerial travel
+impossible.
+
+But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment. Lake,
+sending more messages, told of the completely successful transportation of the
+fourteen great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard pull, for the things were
+surprisingly heavy; but nine men had accomplished it very neatly. Now some of
+the party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance from the camp,
+to which the dogs could be brought for greater convenience in feeding. The
+specimens were laid out on the hard snow near the camp, save for one on which
+Lake was making crude attempts at dissection.
+
+This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected, for, despite
+the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the deceptively
+flexible tissues of the chosen specimen - a powerful and intact one - lost nothing
+of their more than leathery toughness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might
+make the requisite incisions without violence destructive enough to upset all the
+structural niceties he was looking for. He had, it is true, seven more perfect
+specimens; but these were too few to use up recklessly unless the cave might
+later yield an unlimited supply. Accordingly he removed the specimen and
+dragged in one which, though having remnants of the starfish arrangements at
+both ends, was badly crushed and partly disrupted along one of the great torso
+furrows.
+
+Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative
+indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly
+able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left us all awed
+and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing
+was no product of any cell growth science knows about. There had been scarcely
+any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhaps forty million years, the
+internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost
+
+
+
+
+indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing's form of
+organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution
+utterly beyond our powers of speculation. At first all that Lake found was dry,
+but as the heated tent produced its thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent
+and offensive odor was encountered toward the thing's uninjured side. It was
+not blood, but a thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering the same purpose.
+By the time Lake reached this stage, all thirty-seven dogs had been brought to the
+still uncompleted corral near the camp, and even at that distance set up a savage
+barking and show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell.
+
+Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection merely
+deepened its mystery. All guesses about its external members had been correct,
+and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call the thing animal;
+but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was
+left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste
+matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one
+would say that its respiration apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon
+dioxide, and there were odd evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of
+shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully developed
+breathing systems - gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian, and probably
+adapted to long airless hibernation periods as well. Vocal organs seemed present
+in connection with the main respiratory system, but they presented anomalies
+beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable utterance,
+seemed barely conceivable, but musical piping notes covering a wide range were
+highly probable. The muscular system was almost prematurely developed.
+
+The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake
+aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had
+a set of ganglial centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialized
+development. Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced, and there were
+signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head,
+involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it has more
+than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing
+analogy. It must. Lake thought, have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and
+delicately differentiated functions in its primal world - much like the ants and
+bees of today. It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams, especially the
+Pteridophyta, having spore cases at the tips of the wings and evidently
+developing from a thallus or prothallus.
+
+But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate, but was
+clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of the
+essentials of animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical
+contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated; yet one could not be exact
+
+
+
+
+as to the limit of its later adaptations. The wings, after all, held a persistent
+suggestion of the aerial. How it could have undergone its tremendously complex
+evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so
+far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths
+about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth life
+as a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside told by
+a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic's English department.
+
+Naturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints having been
+made by a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens, but quickly rejected
+this too-facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the
+older fossils. If anything, the later contours showed decadence rather than higher
+evolution. The size of the pseudofeet had decreased, and the whole morphology
+seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just
+examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more
+complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether,
+little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a
+provisional name - jocosely dubbing his finds "The Elder Ones."
+
+At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone further work and get a little rest,
+he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from the laboratory
+tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest. The ceaseless
+antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so that the head points
+and tubes of two or three showed signs of unfolding; but Lake did not believe
+there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost subzero air. He
+did, however, move all the undissected specimens close together and throw a
+spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct solar rays. That would also
+help to keep their possible scent away from the dogs, whose hostile unrest was
+really becoming a problem, even at their substantial distance and behind the
+higher and higher snow walls which an increased quota of the men were
+hastening to raise around their quarters. He had to weight down the corners of
+the tent cloth with heavy blocks of snow to hold it in place amidst the rising gale,
+for the titan mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early
+apprehensions about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood's
+supervision precautions were taken to bank the tents, new dog corral, and crude
+aeroplane shelters with snow on the mountainward side. These latter shelters,
+begun with hard snow blocks during odd moments, were by no means as high as
+they should have been; and Lake finally detached all hands from other tasks to
+work on them.
+
+It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all to
+share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a little
+higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether, and repeated his
+
+
+
+
+praise of the really marvelous drills that had helped him make his discovery.
+Atwood also sent greetings and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of
+congratulations, owning up that he was right about the western trip, and we all
+agreed to get in touch by wireless at ten in the morning. If the gale was then
+over. Lake would send a plane for the party at my base. Just before retiring I
+dispatched a final message to the Arkham with instructions about toning down
+the day's news for the outside world, since the full details seemed radical enough
+to rouse a wave of incredulity until further substantiated.
+
+
+None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning. Both the
+excitement of Lake's discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against
+such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we were, that we could not
+help wondering how much worse it was at Lake's camp, directly under the vast
+unknown peaks that bred and delivered it. McTighe was awake at ten o'clock
+and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but some electrical condition in
+the disturbed air to the westward seemed to prevent communication. We did,
+however, get the Arkham, and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly
+trying to reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was
+blowing at McMurdo Sound, despite its persistent rage where we were.
+
+Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals,
+but invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy of wind stampeded
+out of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of our camp; but it eventually
+died down, with only a moderate relapse at 2 P.M. After three o'clock it was very
+quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Reflecting that he had four
+planes, each provided with an excellent short-wave outfit, we could not imagine
+any ordinary accident capable of crippling all his wireless equipment at once.
+Nevertheless the stony silence continued, and when we thought of the delirious
+force the wind must have had in his locality we could not help making the more
+direful conjectures.
+
+By six o'clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a wireless
+consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward
+investigation. The fifth aeroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo Sound
+supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape and ready for
+instant use, and it seemed that the very emergency for which it had been saved
+was now upon us. I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with
+the plane and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible, the air
+conditions being apparently highly favorable. We then talked over the personnel
+of the coming investigation party, and decided that we would include all hands,
+together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me. Even so great a
+
+
+
+
+load would not be too much for one of the huge planes built to our special orders
+for heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with
+the wireless, but all to no purpose.
+
+Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30, and reported
+a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at
+midnight, and all hands at once discussed the next move. It was risky business
+sailing over the antarctic in a single aeroplane without any line of bases, but no
+one drew back from what seemed like the plainest necessity. We turned in at two
+o'clock for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but were up
+again in four hours to finish the loading and packing.
+
+At 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe's
+pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other
+items including the plane's wireless outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly
+quiet, and relatively mild in temperature, and we anticipated very little trouble
+in reaching the latitude and longitude designated by Lake as the site of his camp.
+Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of
+our journey, for silence continued to answer all calls dispatched to the camp.
+
+Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection
+because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-
+four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its
+accustomed conception of external nature and nature's laws. Thenceforward the
+ten of us - but the student Danforth and myself above all others - were to face a
+hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our
+emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if
+we could. The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving
+plane, telling of our nonstop course, our two battles with treacherous upper-air
+gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey
+shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow
+cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless
+leagues of frozen plateau. There came a point, though, when our sensations
+could not be conveyed in any words the press would understand, and a latter
+point when we had to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship.
+
+The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and pinnacles
+ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane.
+Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence; hence we knew
+that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only because of their abnormal
+height. Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing
+us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious
+sense of fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against
+
+
+
+
+the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle
+there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential
+revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a
+frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote
+time, space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil
+things - mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some
+accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held
+ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially
+spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness,
+desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral
+world.
+
+It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the
+higher mountain skyline - regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes,
+which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his
+comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple ruins, on
+cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There
+was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly
+continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught
+sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy
+consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how disturbingly this
+lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal
+writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory
+of man - or of his predecessors - is long, and it may well be that certain tales have
+come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia
+and earlier than any human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted
+at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have
+suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as
+Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a
+region I would care to be in or near, nor did I relish the proximity of a world that
+had ever bred such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had
+just mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred
+Necronomicon, or talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist
+Wilmarth at the university.
+
+This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre mirage
+which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew near the
+mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations of the foothills. I
+had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them
+quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present example; but this one had
+a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as
+the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of
+the troubled ice vapors above our heads.
+
+
+
+
+The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to
+human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying
+monstrous perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones,
+sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and
+there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks;
+and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous
+rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one
+overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either
+alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids,
+and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile
+structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other
+at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and
+oppressive in its sheer gigantism. The general type of mirage was not unlike
+some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in
+1820, but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks
+soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our
+minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our
+expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely
+evil portent.
+
+I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the various
+nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary forms of even vaster
+hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence we began
+to look earthward again, and saw that our journey's end was not far off. The
+unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome rampart of giants,
+their curious regularities showing with startling clearness even without a field
+glass. We were over the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst the snow, ice,
+and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish spots which we took
+to be Lake's camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up between five and six
+miles away, forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than
+Himalayan peaks beyond them. At length Ropes - the student who had relieved
+McTighe at the controls - began to head downward toward the left-hand dark
+spot whose size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent out the last
+uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition.
+
+Everyone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of
+our antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of
+the tragedy we found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole
+Lake party by the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before that.
+Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing. People pardoned our hazy lack of
+details through realization of the shock the sad event must have caused us, and
+believed us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had
+rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter
+
+
+
+
+myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter bewilderment, and soul-
+clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth in any specific instance. The
+tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tell; what I would not tell now
+but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors.
+
+It is a fact that the wind had brought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have
+lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The
+storm, with its fury of madly driven ice particles, must have been beyond
+anything our expedition had encountered before. One aeroplane shelter-wall, it
+seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate state - was nearly
+pulverized - and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces.
+The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised
+into a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow
+banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the blaster were pitted and denuded of
+paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is also
+true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition to take
+outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a vast, tumbled pile,
+including several of the greenish soapstone fragments whose odd five-pointed
+rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful
+comparisons; and some fossil bones, among which were the most typical of the
+curiously injured specimens.
+
+None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow inclosure near the camp
+being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the
+greater breakage on the side next the camp, which was not the windward one,
+suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic beasts themselves. All three
+sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown
+them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring
+were too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so we used them to choke up that
+subtly disturbing gateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at
+the camp the two most shaken up of the planes; since our surviving party had
+only four real pilots - Sherman, Danforth, McTighe, and Ropes - in all, with
+Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We brought back all the books,
+scientific equipment, and other incidentals we could find, though much was
+rather unaccountably blown away. Spare tents and furs were either missing or
+badly out of condition.
+
+It was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced us to give
+Gedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for
+relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as calm and noncommittal as we
+succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs,
+whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from
+poor Lake's accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the same
+
+
+
+
+uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other
+objects in the disordered region-objects including scientific instruments,
+aeroplanes, and machinery, both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had
+been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have
+harbored singular curiosity and investigativeness.
+
+About the fourteen biological specimens, we were pardonably indefinite. We
+said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left of
+them to prove Lake's description wholly and impressively accurate. It was hard
+work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter - and we did not mention
+numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we did find. We had by
+that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness on the part of
+Lake's men, and it surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities
+carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds
+punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly those on the queer greenish
+soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens
+mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely blown away.
+
+We were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence Danforth
+and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day. It was
+the fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range of such
+height, which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the two of us. On our
+return at one A.M., Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff
+upper lip. It took no persuasion to make him promise not to show our sketches
+and the other things we brought away in our pockets, not to say anything more
+to the others than what we had agreed to relay outside, and to hide our camera
+films for private development later on; so that part of my present story will be as
+new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and the rest as it will be to the world
+in general. Indeed, Danforth is closer mouthed than I: for he saw, or thinks he
+saw, one thing he will not tell even me.
+
+As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent - a confirmation of Lake's
+opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal
+crumpled strata unchanged since at least middle Comanchian times; a
+conventional comment on the regularity of the clinging cube and rampart
+formations; a decision that the cave mouths indicate dissolved calcaerous veins; a
+conjecture that certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling and
+crossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers; and a remark that the
+mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense superplateau as ancient and
+unchanging as the mountains themselves - twenty thousand feet in elevation,
+with grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer and with
+low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer
+precipices of the highest peaks.
+
+
+
+
+This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely
+satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours - a longer
+time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitering, and rock-collecting
+program called for - to a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions, and told
+truly of our landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded
+realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our
+flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion
+to stop them - and I do not know what Danforth would have done. While we
+were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like
+beavers over Lake's two best planes, fitting them again for use despite the
+altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.
+
+We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old
+base as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way to work
+toward McMurdo Sound; for a straightline flight across the most utterly
+unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent would involve many additional
+hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation
+and the ruin of our drilling machinery. The doubts and horrors around us -
+which we did not reveal - made us wish only to escape from this austral world of
+desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.
+
+As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further
+disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day -
+January 27th - after a swift nonstop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo
+Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned by a faulty
+rudder in the furious wind over the ice shelf after we had cleared the great
+plateau. In five days more, the Arkham and Miskatonic, with all hands and
+equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and working
+up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward
+against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind's wails into a wide-ranged
+musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight later we
+left the last hint of polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear
+of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made
+black and blasphemous alliances, in the unknown epochs since matter first
+writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust.
+
+Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic
+exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with
+splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous
+breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his doctors - indeed, as I have said,
+there is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even me, though I
+think it would help his psychological state if he would consent to do so. It might
+explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more than the
+
+
+
+
+delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather after those
+rare, irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me - things
+which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself again.
+
+It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some of our
+efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We might have
+known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we
+announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit
+of the unknown. Lake's reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused
+naturalists and paleontologists to the highest pitch, though we were sensible
+enough not to show the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried
+specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also
+refrained from showing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish
+soapstones; while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or
+drew on the superplateau across the range, and the crumpled things we
+smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets.
+
+But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing, and with a thoroughness
+far beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the
+innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that
+which we know may end the world. So I must break through all reticences at last
+- even about that ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.
+
+
+It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to
+Lake's camp and what we really found there - and to that other thing beyond the
+mountains of madness. I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and to let
+hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable deductions. I hope I have said enough
+already to let me glide briefly over the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the
+camp. I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the
+disarranged machinery, the varied uneasiness of our dogs, the missing sledges
+and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the six
+insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in texture for all their
+structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I do not recall whether
+I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing.
+We did not think much about that till later - indeed, only Danforth and I have
+thought of it at all.
+
+The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to certain
+subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of
+rationale to the apparent chaos. At the time, I tried to keep the men's minds off
+those points; for it was so much simpler - so much more normal - to lay
+
+
+
+
+everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From
+the look of things, that demon mountain wind must have been enough to drive
+any man mad in the midst of this center of all earthly mystery and desolation.
+
+The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies - men and
+dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and
+mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could
+judge, had in each case come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had
+evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to
+its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from the camp
+because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms, but
+the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that
+monstrous wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient height, they must have
+stampeded - whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing odor
+emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.
+
+But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I had
+better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last - though with a
+categorical statement of opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most
+rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then missing Gedney was
+in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the
+bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were incised and
+subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was
+the same with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or
+bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a
+careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt - taken from
+the ravaged provision chests on the planes - which conjured up the most horrible
+associations. The thing had occurred in one of the crude aeroplane shelters from
+which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all
+tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing,
+roughly slashed from the human incision subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless to
+bring up the half impression of certain faint snow prints in one shielded corner of
+the ruined inclosure - because that impression did not concern human prints at
+all, but was clearly mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake
+had been giving throughout the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one's
+imagination in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness.
+
+As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in the end.
+When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two men;
+but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered after investigating the
+monstrous graves, had something to reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for the
+covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised
+table. Indeed, we had already realized that one of the six imperfect and insanely
+
+
+
+
+buried things we had found - the one with the trace of a pecuharly hateful odor -
+must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake had tried to
+analyze. On and around that laboratory table were strewn other things, and it
+did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully though
+oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the
+feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the man's identity. Lake's
+anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences of their careful
+cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found a
+curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men;
+and the canine parts with the other thirty-five dogs. Concerning the bizarre
+smudges on the laboratory table, and on the jumble of roughly handled
+illustrated books scattered near it, we were much too bewildered to speculate.
+
+This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally
+perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured
+biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated
+technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and batteries,
+food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly
+beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink blots on certain
+pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling and experimentation
+around the planes and all other mechanical devices both at the camp and at the
+boring.
+
+The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly disordered machinery. Then, too, there was
+the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance of certain staples, and the jarringly
+comical heap of tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most
+unlikely places. The profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent,
+formed another minor enigma - as did the two or three tent cloths and fur suits
+which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably
+due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations. The maltreatment of the
+human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial of the damaged Archaean
+specimens, were all of a piece with this apparent disintegrative madness. In view
+of just such an eventuality as the present one, we carefully photographed all the
+main evidences of insane disorder at the camp; and shall use the prints to
+buttress our pleas against the departure of the proposed Starkweather- Moore
+Expedition.
+
+Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open
+the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help
+noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters of
+grouped dots, to poor Lake's descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones;
+and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral
+pile, we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole general formation, it
+
+
+
+
+must be made clear, seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish head of the
+Archaean entities; and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked potently
+upon the sensitized minds of Lake's overwrought party.
+
+For madness - centering in Gedney as the only possible surviving agent - was the
+explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was
+concerned; though I will not be so naive as to deny that each of us may have
+harbored wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate completely.
+Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive aeroplane cruise over all
+the surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon with field
+glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various missing things; but nothing came
+to light. The party reported that the titan barrier range extended endlessly to
+right and left alike, without any diminution in height or essential structure. On
+some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder
+and plainer, having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill
+ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded
+summits seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced.
+
+In spite of all the prevailing horrors, we were left with enough sheer scientific
+zeal and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm beyond those
+mysterious mountains. As our guarded messages stated, we rested at midnight
+after our day of terror and bafflement - but not without a tentative plan for one
+or more range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with aerial camera
+and geologist's outfit, beginning the following morning. It was decided that
+Danforth and I try it first, and we awaked at 7 A.M. intending an early flight;
+however, heavy winds - mentioned in our brief, bulletin to the outside world -
+delayed our start till nearly nine o'clock.
+
+I have already repeated the noncommittal story we told the men at camp - and
+relayed outside - after our return sixteen hours later. It is now my terrible duty to
+amplify this account by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of what we really
+saw in the hidden transmontane world - hints of the revelations which have
+finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse. I wish he would add a really frank
+word about the thing which he thinks he alone saw - even though it was
+probably a nervous delusion - and which was perhaps the last straw that put him
+where he is; but he is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his later
+disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared back
+through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock
+which I shared. This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder
+horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the
+inner antarctic - or at least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that
+ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and inhuman, aeon-cursed desolation - the
+responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immeasurable evils will not be mine.
+
+
+
+
+Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and
+checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the
+range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about twenty-
+three thousand or twenty-four thousand feet above sea level. For this point, then,
+we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our flight of discovery.
+The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental plateau, was
+some twelve thousand feet in altitude; hence the actual height increase necessary
+was not so vast as it might seem. Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the
+rarefied air and intense cold as we rose; for, on account of visibility conditions,
+we had to leave the cabin windows open. We were dressed, of course, in our
+heaviest furs.
+
+As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of
+crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the
+curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the
+strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The ancient and wind-weathered
+rock strata fully verified all of Lake's bulletins, and proved that these pinnacles
+had been towering up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in
+earth's history - perhaps over fifty million years. How much higher they had
+once been, it was futile to guess; but everything about this strange region pointed
+to obscure atmospheric influences unfavorable to change, and calculated to
+retard the usual climatic processes of rock disintegration.
+
+But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave mouths
+which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field glass and
+took aerial photographs while Danforth drove; and at times I relieved him at the
+controls - though my aviation knowledge was purely an amateur's - in order to
+let him use the binoculars. We could easily see that much of the material of the
+things was a lightish Archaean quartzite, unlike any formation visible over broad
+areas of the general surface; and that their regularity was extreme and uncanny
+to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted.
+
+As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of
+savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved
+them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes, seemed
+identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement
+looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in the Andes, or the primal foundation
+walls of Kish as dug up by the Oxford Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and
+both Danforth and I obtained that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean
+blocks which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. How to
+account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly
+humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange regularities - like
+the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland - but this stupendous range, despite
+
+
+
+
+Lake's original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else nonvolcanic in
+evident structure.
+
+The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most
+abundant, presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of
+outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often approximately square or
+semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by
+some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable,
+and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved
+out of limestone strata. Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within
+the caverns, but we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and
+stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures
+seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight
+cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as
+he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp, he hinted that
+the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the
+primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived
+snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities.
+
+We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the
+relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked
+down at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have
+attempted the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days. Somewhat to our
+surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and that
+despite the crevasses and other bad spots it would not have been likely to deter
+the sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers
+appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and upon
+reaching our chosen pass we found that its case formed no exception.
+
+Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer
+out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we
+had no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially different from
+those already seen and traversed. The touch of evil mystery in these barrier
+mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their
+summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal
+words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic
+association - a thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic
+myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes. Even the wind's burden held
+a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a second it seemed that the
+composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a wide
+range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave
+mouths. There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as
+complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.
+
+
+
+
+We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand, five
+hundred and seventy feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of
+clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and
+the start of rough-ribbed glaciers - but with those provocative cubes, ramparts,
+and echoing cave mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the
+dreamlike. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one
+mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be half lost
+in a queer antarctic haze - such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible for
+Lake's early notion of volcanism. The pass loomed directly before us, smooth
+and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was
+a sky fretted with swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun - the sky of
+that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
+
+A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I,
+unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced
+through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged
+eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed
+stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an elder
+and utterly alien earth.
+
+
+I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror,
+and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay
+beyond. Of course, we must have had some natural theory in the back of our
+heads to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such things
+as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or
+the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps
+we even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before
+on first approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some such
+normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-
+scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular,
+and geometrically eurythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and
+pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its
+thickest, and in places obviously thinner.
+
+The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation
+of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient
+table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation
+since a prehuman age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there
+stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the
+desperation of mental self- defense could possibly attribute to any but conscious
+and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was
+
+
+
+
+concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were
+other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself
+could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this
+region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?
+
+Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze
+of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable
+refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective,
+and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis after all -
+there had been some horizontal stratum of ice dust in the upper air, and this
+shocking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according
+to the simple laws of reflection. Of course, the phantom had been twisted and
+exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not contain; yet
+now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing
+than its distant image.
+
+Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and
+ramparts had saved the frightful things from utter annihilation in the hundreds
+of thousands - perhaps millions - of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts
+of a bleak upland. "Corona Mundi - Roof of the World - " All sorts of fantastic
+phrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable
+spectacle. I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently
+haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic world - of the demoniac
+plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow Men of the Himalayas, of the
+Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of
+the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and
+the worse than formless star spawn associated with that semientity.
+
+For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little
+thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the
+low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim, we
+decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left
+of the pass through which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a
+limited part of something of incalculable extent. The foothills were more sparsely
+sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to the already
+familiar cubes and ramparts which evidently formed its mountain outposts.
+These latter, as well as the queer cave mouths, were as thick on the inner as on
+the outer sides of the mountains.
+
+The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from ten to
+one hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from
+five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial
+slate, schist, and sandstone - blocks in many cases as large as 4 x 6 x 8 feet -
+
+
+
+
+though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed rock of
+pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were far from equal in size, there being
+innumerable honeycomb arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller
+separate structures. The general shape of these things tended to be conical,
+pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes,
+clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of
+angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern
+fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle of
+the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city's heyday.
+
+The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from
+which the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial
+debris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of the
+gigantic piles, and we noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which connected
+the different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls
+we could detect the scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same
+sort had existed. Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of
+which were closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though
+most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the ruins, of
+course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-rounded upper edges;
+whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else protected by
+higher surrounding structures, preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent
+crumbling and pitting. With the field glass we could barely make out what
+seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal bands - decorations including
+those curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now
+assumed a vastly larger significance.
+
+In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice sheet deeply riven
+from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to
+the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau's
+interior, to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had
+traversed, was wholly free from buildings. It probably represented, we
+concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary times - millions of
+years ago - had poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean
+abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, this was above all a region of caves,
+gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.
+
+Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing this
+monstrous survival from aeons we had thought prehuman, I can only wonder
+that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium, which we did. Of course, we
+knew that something - chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness -
+was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe many
+things quite minutely, and take a careful series of photographs which may yet
+
+
+
+
+serve both us and the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit
+may have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace, there
+burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret - to know
+what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and
+what relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a
+concentration of life could have had.
+
+For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary
+nucleus and center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth's history
+whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and
+distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions
+long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom. Here
+sprawled a Palaeogaean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis
+and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoc in the land of Lomar,
+are recent things of today - not even of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with
+such whispered prehuman blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, lb in the land of
+Mnar, and the Nameless city of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that tangle of
+stark titan towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved
+aimlessly in realms of fantastic associations - even weaving links betwixt this lost
+world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the
+camp.
+
+The plane's fuel tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only partly
+filled; hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even so, however,
+we covered an enormous extent of ground - or, rather, air - after swooping down
+to a level where the wind became virtually negligible. There seemed to be no
+limit to the mountain range, or to the length of the frightful stone city which
+bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction showed no
+major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpselike
+through the eternal ice. There were, though, some highly absorbing
+diversifications; such as the carvings on the canyon where that broad river had
+once pierced the foothills and approached its sinking place in the great range.
+The headlands at the stream's entrance had been boldly carved into Cyclopean
+pylons; and something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly
+vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances in both Danforth and me.
+
+We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares,
+and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was
+generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling-stone edifice; but there were
+at least two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly weathered to disclose
+what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other still bore a fantastic
+conical monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling such
+things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.
+
+
+
+
+Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of infinite
+width, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After about
+thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and in ten more
+miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually without signs of sentient artifice.
+The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a broad, depressed
+line, while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to slope
+slightly upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west.
+
+So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at
+entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable.
+Accordingly, we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our
+navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some exploration
+on foot. Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of
+ruins, low flying soon disclosed an ampler number of possible landing places.
+Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our flight would be across the great range
+and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in effecting a landing on a
+smooth, hard snow field wholly devoid of obstacles and well adapted to a swift
+and favorable take- off later on.
+
+It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so brief a
+time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level; hence we
+merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the vital parts of
+the mechanism were guarded against the cold. For our foot journey we discarded
+the heaviest of our flying furs, and took with us a small outfit consisting of
+pocket compass, hand camera, light provisions, voluminous notebooks and
+paper, geologist's hammer and chisel, specimen bags, coil of climbing rope, and
+powerful electric torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been carried
+in the plane on the chance that we might be able to effect a landing, take ground
+pictures, make drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens
+from some bare slope, outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had a
+supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a spare specimen bag, and use on the
+ancient principle of hare and hounds for marking our course in any interior
+mazes we might be able to penetrate. This had been brought in case we found
+some cave system with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method
+in place of the usual rock-chipping method of trail blazing.
+
+Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous
+stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a
+sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed
+mountain pass four hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar
+with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of
+actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions
+of years ago - before any known race of men could have existed - was none the
+
+
+
+
+less awesome and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality.
+Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion
+somewhat more difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found ourselves
+bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our
+lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the
+snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge, roofless rampart still
+complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of
+ten or eleven feet. For this latter we headed; and when at last we were actually
+able to touch its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an
+unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally
+closed to our species.
+
+This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from point to
+point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6x8 feet
+in surface. There was a row of arched loopholes or windows about four feet wide
+and five feet high, spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star and at
+its inner angles, and with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface.
+Looking through these, we could see that the masonry was fully five feet thick,
+that there were no partitions remaining within, and that there were traces of
+banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls - facts we had indeed guessed
+before, when flying low over this rampart and others like it. Though lower parts
+must have originally existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured
+by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point.
+
+We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the nearly
+effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated floor. Our
+orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city proper were less
+ice-choked, and that we might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading down
+to the true ground level if we entered those structures still roofed at the top.
+Before we left the rampart we photographed it carefully, and studied its mortar-
+less Cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabodie
+were present, for his engineering knowledge might have helped us guess how
+such titanic blocks could have been handled in that unbelievably remote age
+when the city and its outskirts were built up.
+
+The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking
+vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background, was
+something of which the smallest details will always remain engraved on my
+mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings but Danforth and
+me conceive such optical effects. Between us and the churning vapors of the west
+lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers, its outre and incredible forms
+impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone,
+and were it not for the photographs, I would still doubt that such a thing could
+
+
+
+
+be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had
+examined; but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban
+manifestations were past all description.
+
+Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety,
+preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical
+forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name - cones of all degrees of
+irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion,
+shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and
+five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. As we drew
+nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the ice sheet, and detect
+some of the tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily sprinkled structures
+at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be none, the only broad
+open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient river had doubtless flowed
+through the town into the mountains.
+
+Our field glasses showed the external, horizontal bands of nearly effaced
+sculptures and dot groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine what
+the city must once have looked like - even though most of the roofs and tower
+tops had necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of
+twisted lanes and alleys, all of them deep canyons, and some little better than
+tunnels because of the overhanging masonry or overarching bridges. Now,
+outspread below us, it loomed like a dream fantasy against a westward mist
+through whose northern end the low, reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon
+was struggling to shine; and when, for a moment, that sun encountered a denser
+obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow, the effect was subtly
+menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the faint howling and piping
+of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note
+of purposeful malignity. The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually
+steep and abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed
+led us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the
+glaciation, we believed, there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent.
+
+When at last we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen masonry
+and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent
+crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at
+the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began
+making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp -
+which I resented all the more because I could not help sharing certain
+conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from
+nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination, too; for in one
+place - where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner - he insisted that he
+saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he
+
+
+
+
+stopped to listen to a subtle, imaginary sound from some undefined point - a
+muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain
+caves, yet somehow disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the
+surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a
+dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of
+terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared
+and dwelt in this unhallowed place.
+
+Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead, and
+we mechanically carried out our program of chipping specimens from all the
+different rock types represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full set in
+order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place. Nothing in the
+great outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian
+periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a greater recency than
+the Pliocene Age. In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which
+had reigned at least five hundred thousand years, and in all probability even
+longer.
+
+As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped at
+all available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities.
+Some were above our reach, whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins as
+unroofed and barren as the rampart on the hill. One, though spacious and
+inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible means of
+descent. Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood of a
+surviving shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the
+still discernible grain. These things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and
+conifers - especially Cretaceous cycads - and from fan palms and early
+angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene
+could be discovered. In the placing of these shutters - whose edges showed the
+former presence of queer and long-vanished hinges - usage seemed to be varied -
+some being on the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures.
+They seemed to have become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their
+former and probably metallic fixtures and fastenings.
+
+After a time we came across a row of windows - in the bulges of a colossal five-
+edged cone of undamaged apex - which led into a vast, well-preserved room
+with stone flooring; but these were too high in the room to permit descent
+without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to bother with this
+twenty-foot drop unless obliged to-especially in this thin plateau air where great
+demands were made upon the heart action. This enormous room was probably a
+hall or concourse of some sort, and our electric torches showed bold, distinct,
+and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls in broad,
+horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques.
+
+
+
+
+We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a more easily
+gained interior were encountered.
+
+Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an archway
+about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an aerial bridge
+which had spanned an alley about five feet above the present level of glaciation.
+These archways, of course, were flush with upper-story floors, and in this case
+one of the floors still existed. The building thus accessible was a series of
+rectangular terraces on our left facing westward. That across the alley, where the
+other archway yawned, was a decrepit cylinder with no windows and with a
+curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It was totally dark inside, and
+the archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable emptiness.
+
+Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy, yet
+for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance.
+For though we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it required
+fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete and surviving building of a
+fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming more and more hideously
+plain to us. In the end, however, we made the plunge, and scrambled up over the
+rubble into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, and
+seemed to form the outlet of a long, high corridor with sculptured walls.
+
+Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realizing the
+probable complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must
+begin our system of hare-and-hound trail blazing. Hitherto our compasses,
+together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain range between the towers
+in our rear, had been enough to prevent our losing our way; but from now on,
+the artificial substitute would be necessary. Accordingly we reduced our extra
+paper to shreds of suitable size, placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth,
+and prepared to use them as economically as safety would allow. This method
+would probably gain us immunity from straying, since there did not appear to be
+any strong air currents inside the primordial masonry. If such should develop, or
+if our paper supply should give out, we could of course fall back on the more
+secure though more tedious and retarding method of rock chipping.
+
+Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess
+without a trial. The close and frequent connection of the different buildings made
+it likely that we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the ice,
+except where impeded by local collapses and geologic rifts, for very little
+glaciation seemed to have entered the massive constructions. Almost all the areas
+of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as
+if the town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial sheet came to
+crystallize the lower part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a curious
+
+
+
+
+impression that this place had been dehberately closed and deserted in some
+dim, bygone aeon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or even
+gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been foreseen, and had a nameless
+population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode? The precise physiographic
+conditions attending the formation of the ice sheet at this point would have to
+wait for later solution. It had not, very plainly, been a grinding drive. Perhaps
+the pressure of accumulated snows had been responsible, and perhaps some
+flood from the river, or from the bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the
+great range, had helped to create the special state now observable. Imagination
+could conceive almost anything in connection with this place.
+
+
+It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings
+inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry - that
+monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after
+uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is especially true because so
+much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the
+omnipresent mural carvings. Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will
+do much toward proving the truth of what we are now disclosing, and it is
+lamentable that we had not a larger film supply with us. As it was, we made
+crude notebook sketches of certain salient features after all our films were used
+up.
+
+The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, and
+gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past.
+The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower
+levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously
+irregular difference in floor levels, characterized the entire arrangement; and we
+should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper
+left behind us. We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all,
+hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some one hundred feet, to
+where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the
+polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or
+inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we
+encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-
+pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say that their
+general average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height, though
+many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the upper regions
+and the glacial level, we descended, story by story, into the submerged part,
+where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected
+chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside this
+particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and gigantism of everything
+
+
+
+
+about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but
+deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and
+constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon
+realized, from what the carvings revealed, that this monstrous city was many
+million years old.
+
+We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous
+balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of the
+arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all
+portable contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city's
+deliberate desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal
+system of mural sculpture, which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands
+three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of
+equal width given over to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this
+rule of arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however,
+a series of smooth car-touches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would
+be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.
+
+The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically
+evolved to the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly alien in every
+detail to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no
+sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate
+vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite
+the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of
+skillful intricacy. The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical
+principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based
+on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly formalized
+tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic
+force that moved us profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast
+geologic periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of
+the cross section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an
+analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to
+try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our
+photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque
+conceptions of the most daring futurists.
+
+The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose depth on
+unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot
+groups appeared - evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial
+language and alphabet - the depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an
+inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half inch more. The pictorial bands
+were in countersunk low relief, their background being depressed about two
+inches from the original wall surface. In some specimens marks of a former
+
+
+
+
+coloration could be detected, though for the most part the untold aeons had
+disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have been applied. The
+more one studied the marvelous technique, the more one admired the things.
+Beneath their strict conventionalization one could grasp the minute and accurate
+observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions
+themselves served to symbolize and accentuate the real essence or vital
+differentiation of every object delineated. We felt, too, that besides these
+recognizable excellences there were others lurking beyond the reach of our
+perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols
+and stimuli which another mental and emotional background, and a fuller or
+different sensory equipment, might have made of profound and poignant
+significance to us.
+
+The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the vanished
+epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident history. It is
+this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race - a chance circumstance
+operating, through coincidence, miraculously in our favor - which made the
+carvings so awesomely informative to us, and which caused us to place their
+photography and transcription above all other considerations. In certain rooms
+the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical
+charts, and other scientific designs of an enlarged scale - these things giving a
+naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes
+and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope that my
+account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those
+who believe me at all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of
+death and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them.
+
+Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-foot
+doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks -
+elaborately carved and polished-of the actual shutters and doors. All metal
+fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place and had
+to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room. Window frames with
+odd transparent panes - mostly elliptical - survived here and there, though in no
+considerable quantity. There were also frequent niches of great magnitude,
+generally empty, but once in a while containing some bizarre object carved from
+green soapstone which was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant
+removal. Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical
+facilities - heating, lighting, and the like-of a sort suggested in many of the
+carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with green
+soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved with such
+tiles, though plain stonework predominated.
+
+
+
+
+As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent; but the sculptures
+gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomblike,
+echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the floors were generally thick with
+detritus, litter, and debris, but farther down this condition decreased. In some of
+the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or
+ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept
+immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had occurred, the lower
+levels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court - as in other structures
+we had seen from the air - saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that we
+seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying
+sculptured details. Below the ice cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in
+many parts of the tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute
+blackness.
+
+To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated
+this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry, one must correlate a hopelessly
+bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer
+appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm
+almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were the recent
+unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon effected by the
+terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section
+of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief
+study to give us the hideous truth - a truth which it would be naive to claim
+Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had carefully
+refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no further
+merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this
+monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man's ancestors were primitive
+archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and
+Asia.
+
+We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted - each to himself
+- that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motifs meant only some cultural or
+religious exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so patently
+embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of Minoan
+Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome the
+wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some chosen totem animal.
+But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced to face
+definitely the reason-shaking realization which the reader of these pages has
+doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black and
+white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
+
+The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of
+dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new
+
+
+
+
+and almost brainless objects - but the builders of the city were wise and old, and
+had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well nigh a thousand million
+years - rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic
+groups of cells - rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all.
+They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals
+of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the
+Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the great "Old Ones" that had
+filtered down from the stars when earth was young - the beings whose substance
+an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had
+never bred. And to think that only the day before Danforth and I had actually
+looked upon fragments of their millennially fossilized substance - and that poor
+Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines - It is of course impossible
+for me to relate in proper order the stages by which we picked up what we know
+of that monstrous chapter of prehuman life. After the first shock of the certain
+revelation, we had to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o'clock
+before we got started on our actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in
+the building we entered were of relatively late date - perhaps two million years
+ago-as checked up by geological, biological, and astronomical features - and
+embodied an art which would be called decadent in comparison with that of
+specimens we found in older buildings after crossing bridges under the glacial
+sheet. One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly
+even fifty million years - to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous - and
+contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one
+tremendous exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, the
+oldest domestic structure we traversed.
+
+Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public, I would
+refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman. Of
+course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale - representing the
+preterrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, in other galaxies,
+and in other universes - can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of
+those beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and
+diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and
+astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when they see
+the photographs I shall publish.
+
+Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction
+of any connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages
+of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent
+units so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous
+chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of
+the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the
+ancient ground level - a cavern perhaps two hundred feet square and sixty feet
+
+
+
+
+high, which had almost undoubtedly been an educational center of some sort.
+There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different rooms
+and buildings, since certain chapters of experience, and certain summaries or
+phases of racial history, had evidently been favorites with different decorators or
+dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved useful
+in settling debatable points and filling up gaps.
+
+I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Of
+course, we even now have only the barest outline - and much of that was
+obtained later on from a study of the photographs and sketches we made. It may
+be the effect of this later study - the revived memories and vague impressions
+acting in conjunction with his general sensitiveness and with that final supposed
+horror-glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to me - which has been the
+immediate source of Danforth's present breakdown. But it had to be; for we
+could not issue our warning intelligently without the fullest possible
+information, and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain
+lingering influences in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and
+alien natural law make it imperative that further exploration be discouraged.
+
+
+The full story, so far as deciphered, will eventually appear in an official bulletin
+of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient highlights in a
+formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures told of the coming of
+those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space - their
+coming, and the coming of many other alien entities such as at certain times
+embark upon spatial pioneering. They seemed able to traverse the interstellar
+ether on their vast membranous wings - thus oddly confirming some curious hill
+folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the
+sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with
+nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown
+principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far
+surpassed man's today, though they made use of its more widespread and
+elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they
+had passed through a stage of mechanized life on other planets, but had receded
+upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness
+of organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live
+on a high plane without the more specialized fruits of artificial manufacture, and
+even without garments, except for occasional protection against the elements.
+
+It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they first
+created earth life - using available substances according to long-known methods.
+The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic
+
+
+
+
+enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets, having manufactured
+not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable
+of molding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic
+influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the
+community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred
+whispered about as the "Shoggoths" in his frightful Necronomicon, though even
+that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of
+those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb. When the star-headed Old Ones
+on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply
+of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of
+animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence
+became troublesome.
+
+With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift
+prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and
+imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land. Indeed,
+the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts of the
+universe, and probably retained many traditions of land construction. As we
+studied the architecture of all these sculptured palaeogean cities, including that
+whose aeon-dead corridors we were even then traversing, we were impressed by
+a curious coincidence which we have not yet tried to explain, even to ourselves.
+The tops of the buildings, which in the actual city around us had, of course, been
+weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in the bas-
+reliefs, and showed vast clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials on certain
+cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped disks capping
+cylindrical shafts. This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and
+portentous mirage, cast by a dead city whence such skyline features had been
+absent for thousands and tens of thousands of years, which loomed on our
+ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first
+approached poor Lake's ill-fated camp.
+
+Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated to
+land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the fullest
+use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles, and had practiced
+the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual way - the writing
+accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in
+the ocean depths, though they used a curious phosphorescent organism to
+furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure special senses operating
+through the prismatic cilia on their heads - senses which rendered all the Old
+Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and
+writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain
+apparently chemical coating processes - probably to secure phosphorescence -
+which the basreliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea
+
+
+
+
+partly by swimming - using the lateral crinoid arms - and partly by wriggling
+with the lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudofeet. Occasionally they
+accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their
+fanlike folding wings. On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but now and
+then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many
+slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate,
+flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coordination - ensuring the
+utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.
+
+The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressure of
+the deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to
+die at all except by violence, and their burial places were very limited. The fact
+that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed
+mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and
+recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied by
+means of spores - like vegetable pteridophytes, as Lake had suspected - but,
+owing to their prodigious toughness and longevity, and consequent lack of
+replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-scale development of new
+prothallia except when they had new regions to colonize. The young matured
+swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standard we can
+imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and
+produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I shall
+describe more fully in my coming monograph. These varied slightly according to
+sea or land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.
+
+Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances,
+they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked
+marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game
+and raised meat herds - slaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on
+certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary
+temperatures marvelously, and in their natural state could live in water down to
+freezing. When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however - nearly a
+million years ago-the land dwellers had to resort to special measures, including
+artificial heating - until at last the deadly cold appears to have driven them back
+into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend said, they
+absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing,
+or heat conditions - but by the time of the great cold they had lost track of the
+method. In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial state indefinitely
+without harm.
+
+Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological
+basis for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize large
+households on the principles of comfortable space- utility and - as we deduced
+
+
+
+bl
+
+
+
+from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellers - congenial mental
+association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center of the
+huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in
+the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably electro-
+chemical in nature. Both on land and under water they used curious tables,
+chairs and couches like cylindrical frames - for they rested and slept upright with
+folded- down tentacles - and racks for hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming
+their books.
+
+Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no
+certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There
+was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities - certain small,
+flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller
+of the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such
+currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much
+stock raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also
+practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed relatively
+rare except for the vast colonizing movements by which the race expanded. For
+personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in land, air, and water
+movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for
+speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden - Shoggoths under the
+sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land
+existence.
+
+These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms - animal and
+vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aerial - were the products of unguided
+evolution acting on life cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping beyond their
+radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they
+had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course,
+were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last
+and most decadent sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes
+for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose
+vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building
+of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by
+vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to paleontology.
+
+The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and
+convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or
+none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean Age, there
+was no interruption in their civilization or in the transmission of their records.
+Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean, and it is
+likely that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched
+from the neighboring South Pacific. According to one of the sculptured maps the
+
+
+
+
+whole globe was then under water, with stone cities scattered farther and farther
+from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map shows a vast bulk of dry land
+around the south pole, where it is evident that some of the beings made
+experimental settlements, though their main centers were transferred to the
+nearest sea bottom. Later maps, which display the land mass as cracking and
+drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way
+the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.
+
+With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began.
+Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not the worst
+misfortune. Another race - a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably
+corresponding to fabulous prehuman spawn of Cthulhu - soon began filtering
+down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a -monstrous war which for a time
+drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea - a colossal blow in view of the
+increasing land settlements. Later peace was made, and the new lands were
+given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older
+lands. New land cities were founded - the greatest of them in the antarctic, for
+this region of first arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the antarctic
+remained the center of the Old Ones' civilization, and all the cities built there by
+the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank
+again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic
+octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one
+shadowy fear about which they did not like to speak. At a rather later age their
+cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globe - hence the
+recommendation in my coming monograph that some archaeologist make
+systematic borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus in certain widely separated
+regions.
+
+The steady trend down the ages was from water to land - a movement
+encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly
+deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in
+breeding and managing the Shoggoths upon which successful sea life depended.
+With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new
+life from inorganic matter had been lost, so that the Old Ones had to depend on
+the molding of forms already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved
+highly tractable; but the Shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and
+acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a
+formidable problem.
+
+They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the Old
+Ones, and had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary
+limbs and organs; but now their self-modeling powers were sometimes exercised
+independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion.
+
+
+
+
+They had, it seems, developed a semistable brain whose separate and
+occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always
+obeying it. Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with
+horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a
+viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and each averaged
+about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly
+shifting shape and volume - throwing out temporary developments or forming
+apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either
+spontaneously or according to suggestion.
+
+They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the
+Permian Age, perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when a veritable
+war of resubjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones. Pictures of
+this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the Shoggoths
+typically left their slain victims, held a marvelously fearsome quality despite the
+intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of
+molecular and atomic disturbances against the rebel entities, and in the end had
+achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the sculptures showed a period in which
+Shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the
+American west were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion the
+Shoggoths had shown an ability to live out of water, this transition was not
+encouraged - since their usefulness on land would hardly have been
+commensurate with the trouble of their management.
+
+During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new
+invasion from outer space - this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures -
+creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain whispered hill
+legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or
+abominable Snow Men. To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the
+first time since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether;
+but, despite all traditional preparations, found it no longer possible to leave the
+earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been, it was
+now definitely lost to the race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all
+the northern lands, though they were powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little
+by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic habitat was
+beginning.
+
+It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and
+the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from
+that which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones. They were able to
+undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries, and
+seem therefore to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of the cosmic
+space. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital
+
+
+
+
+properties, were strictly material, and must have had their absolute origin within
+the known space-time continuum - whereas the first sources of the other beings
+can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course, assuming that the
+non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not
+pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic
+framework to account for their occasional defeats, since historical interest and
+pride obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is significant that
+their annals failed to mention many advanced and potent races of beings whose
+mighty cultures and towering cities figure persistently in certain obscure
+legends.
+
+The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with
+startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain cases
+existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold deductions are
+magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and
+Joly that all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which
+cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower
+surface - an hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary outlines
+of Africa and South America, and the way the great mountain chains are rolled
+and shoved up - receives striking support from this uncanny source.
+
+Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or more
+years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate Africa
+from the once continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia of primal legend),
+Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent. Other charts - and most
+significantly one in connection with the founding fifty million years ago of the
+vast dead city around us - showed all the present continents well differentiated.
+And in the latest discoverable specimen - dating perhaps from the Pliocene Age -
+the approximate world of today appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of
+Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through Greenland, and of
+South America with the antarctic continent through Graham Land. In the
+Carboniferous map the whole globe-ocean floor and rifted land mass alike - bore
+symbols of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the later charts the gradual
+recession toward the antarctic became very plain. The final Pliocene specimen
+showed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip of South
+America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude.
+Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast lines
+probably made during long exploration flights on those fanlike membranous
+wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.
+
+Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rending
+of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and other natural
+causes, was a matter of common record; and it was curious to observe how fewer
+
+
+
+
+and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on. The vast dead
+megalopoHs that yawned around us seemed to be the last general center of the
+race - built early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic earth buckling had
+obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant. It appeared that this general
+region was the most sacred spot of all, where reputedly the first Old Ones had
+settled on a primal sea bottom. In the new city - many of whose features we
+could recognize in the sculptures, but which stretched fully a hundred miles
+along the mountain range in each direction beyond the farthest limits of our
+aerial survey - there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming
+part of the first sea-bottom city, which thrust up to light after long epochs in the
+course of the general crumbling of strata.
+
+
+Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly
+personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which
+we were. Of this local material there was naturally a vast abundance; and on the
+tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a house of very
+late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighboring rift,
+contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region
+much beyond the period of the Pliocene map whence we derived our last general
+glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the last place we examined in detail,
+since what we found there gave us a fresh immediate objective.
+
+Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the
+corners of earth's globe. Of all existing lands, it was infinitely the most ancient.
+The conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled
+nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was
+reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain was tremendously long - starting
+as a low range at Luitpold Land on the east coast of Weddell Sea and virtually
+crossing the entire continent. That really high part stretched in a mighty arc from
+about Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 115°, with its
+concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the region of that long, ice-
+locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at the antarctic
+circle.
+
+Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close at
+hand. I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the
+sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth's highest. That grim honor is
+beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to
+record at all, whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and
+trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land - the first part
+that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the Old
+
+
+
+
+Ones had seeped down, from the stars - which had come to be shunned as
+vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their time,
+and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth buckling
+had convulsed the region in the Comanchian Age, a frightful line of peaks had
+shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos - and earth had
+received her loftiest and most terrible mountains.
+
+If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have been
+much over forty thousand feet high - radically vaster than even the shocking
+mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from about
+Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70° to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100° - less than three
+hundred miles away from the dead city, so that we would have spied their
+dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not been for that vague,
+opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be visible from the long
+antarctic circle coast line at Queen Mary Land.
+
+Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to those
+mountains - but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond.
+No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed in
+the carvings, I prayed that none ever might. There are protecting hills along the
+coast beyond them - Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands - and I thank
+Heaven no one has been able to land and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical
+about old tales and fears as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the prehuman
+sculptor's notion that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the
+brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible
+pinnacles all through the long polar night. There may be a very real and very
+monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold
+Waste.
+
+But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelessly
+accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great mountain range became
+the seat of the principal temples, and many carvings showed what grotesque and
+fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only the curiously
+clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had appeared, and
+had been shaped into adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later
+epochs, all the limestone veins of the region were hollowed out by ground
+waters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the plains below them were a
+veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic sculptures
+told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the Stygian
+sunless sea that lurked at earth's bowels.
+
+This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which
+flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and which
+
+
+
+
+had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones' range and flowed beside that
+chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on Wilkes's coast
+line. Little by little it had eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning, till at
+last its sapping currents reached the caverns of the ground waters and joined
+with them in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into the
+hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as
+we now found it had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones,
+understanding what had happened, and exercising their always keen artistic
+sense, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the
+great stream began its descent into eternal darkness.
+
+This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the one
+whose extinct course we had seen in our aeroplane survey. Its position in
+different carvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it had
+been at various stages of the region's age-long, aeon-dead history, so that we
+were able to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient features - squares,
+important buildings, and the like - for guidance in further explorations. We could
+soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a million or ten
+million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures told us exactly what the
+buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and landscape setting and
+luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like. It must have had a marvelous and
+mystic beauty, and as I thought of it, I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister
+oppression with which the city's inhuman age and massiveness and deadness
+and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet
+according to certain carvings, the denizens of that city had themselves known the
+clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a somber and recurrent type of scene in
+which the Old Ones were shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some
+object - never allowed to appear in the design - found in the great river and
+indicated as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad
+forests from those horrible westward mountains.
+
+It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we
+obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city's desertion.
+Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of the same age elsewhere,
+even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations of a stressful and
+uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence of the existence of others came to
+us shortly afterward. But this was the first and only set we directly encountered.
+We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate conditions
+dictated another present objective. There would, though, have been a limit - for
+after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had perished among the
+Old Ones, there could not but have been a complete cessation of mural
+decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of the great cold which
+once held most of the earth in thrall, and which has never departed from the ill-
+
+
+
+
+fated poles - the great cold that, at the world's other extremity, put an end to the
+fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.
+
+Just when this tendency began in the antarctic, it would be hard to say in terms
+of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a
+distance of about five hundred thousand years from the present, but at the poles
+the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier. All quantitative
+estimates are partly guesswork, but it is quite likely that the decadent sculptures
+were made considerably less than a million years ago, and that the actual
+desertion of the city was complete long before the conventional opening of the
+Pleistocene - five hundred thousand years ago - as reckoned in terms of the
+earth's whole surface.
+
+In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation everywhere,
+and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones. Heating devices were
+shown in the houses, and winter travelers were represented as muffled in
+protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of cartouches - the continuous band
+arrangement being frequently interrupted in these late carvings - depicting a
+constantly growing migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth - some
+fleeing to cities under the sea off the far-away coast, and some clambering down
+through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighboring
+black abyss of subterrene waters.
+
+In the end it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received the
+greatest colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional sacredness
+of this special region, but may have been more conclusively determined by the
+opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great temples on the
+honeycombed mountains, and for retaining the vast land city as a place of
+summer residence and base of communication with various mines. The linkage
+of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of several gradings
+and improvements along the connecting routes, including the chiseling of
+numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss - sharply
+down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our most
+thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were compiling. It was obvious that
+at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable exploring distance of where
+we were - both being on the mountainward edge of the city, one less than a
+quarter of a mile toward the ancient river course, and the other perhaps twice
+that distance in the opposite direction.
+
+The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places, but the Old
+Ones built their new city under water - no doubt because of its greater certainty
+of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been very great,
+so that the earth's internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite
+
+
+
+
+period. The beings seemed to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to
+part-time - and eventually, of course, whole-time - residence under water, since
+they had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy. There were many
+sculptures which showed how they had always frequently visited their
+submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually bathed on the deep
+bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner earth could likewise have been
+no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights.
+
+Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a truly
+epic quality where they told of the building of the new city in the cavern sea. The
+Old Ones had gone about it scientifically - quarrying insoluble rocks from the
+heart of the honeycombed mountains, and employing expert workers from the
+nearest submarine city to perform the construction according to the best
+methods. These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish
+the new venture - Shoggoth tissue from which to breed stone lifters and
+subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city, and other protoplasmic matter to
+mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.
+
+At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea, its
+architecture much like that of the city above, and its workmanship displaying
+relatively little decadence because of the precise mathematical element inherent
+in building operations. The newly bred Shoggoths grew to enormous size and
+singular intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing orders with
+marvelous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking
+their voices - a sort of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lake's dissection
+had indicated aright - and to work more from spoken commands than from
+hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They were, however, kept in admirable
+control. The phosphorescent organisms supplied light With vast effectiveness,
+and doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world
+night.
+
+Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence.
+The Old Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves, and in many cases
+anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine
+blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age
+of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine
+capital greater splendors than its own people could create. That the transfer of
+sculptured blocks had not been more extensive was doubtless owing to the fact
+that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned. By the time total
+abandonment did occur - and it surely must have occurred before the polar
+Pleistocene was far advanced - the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with
+their decadent art - or had ceased to recognize the superior merit of the older
+carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no
+
+
+
+
+wholesale sculptural denudation, though all the best separate statues, like other
+movables, had been taken away.
+
+The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I have said, the
+latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of the Old
+Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land city in summer and the sea-
+cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading with the sea-bottom cities off the
+antarctic coast. By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been
+recognized, for the sculptures showed many signs of the cold's malign
+encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter
+no longer melted completely even in midsummer. The saunan livestock were
+nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well. To keep on
+with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of the
+amorphous and curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life - a thing the Old
+Ones had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the
+upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds
+had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.
+
+What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new sea-
+cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness?
+Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the ocean-bottom
+cities of the outer world been delivered? Had any of the Old Ones shifted north
+ahead of the creeping ice cap? Existing geology shows no trace of their presence.
+Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north?
+Could one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the
+lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's deepest waters? Those things had
+seemingly been able to withstand any amount of pressure - and men of the sea
+have fished up curious objects at times. And has the killer-whale theory really
+explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation
+ago by Borchgrevingk?
+
+The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their
+geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early
+date in the land city's history. They were, according to their location, certainly
+not less than thirty million years old, and we reflected that in their day the sea-
+cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself, had had no existence. They would have
+remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a
+younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweeping
+northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a far-away tropic
+ocean.
+
+And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens - especially about the
+eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously ravaged camp. There
+
+
+
+
+was something abnormal about that whole business - the strange things we had
+tried so hard to lay to somebody's madness - those frightful graves - the amount
+and nature of the missing material - Gedney - the unearthly toughness of those
+archaic monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed the
+race to have - Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours, and
+were prepared to believe and keep silent about many appalling and incredible
+secrets of primal nature.
+
+
+I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a change in
+our immediate objective. This, of course, had to do with the chiseled avenues to
+the black inner world, of whose existence we had not known before, but which
+we were now eager to find and traverse. From the evident scale of the carvings
+we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through either of the
+neighboring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about
+the great abyss; down whose sides paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the
+rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in
+stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of resistance once we knew of
+the thing - yet we realized we must begin the quest at once if we expected to
+include it in our present trip.
+
+It was now 8 P.M., and we did not have enough battery replacements to let our
+torches burn on forever. We had done so much studying and copying below the
+glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours of nearly
+continuous use, and despite the special dry cell formula, would obviously be
+good for only about four more - though by keeping one torch unused, except for
+especially interesting or difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe
+margin beyond that. It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean
+catacombs, hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further
+mural deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit the place for days and
+perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography - curiosity having long ago
+got the better of horror - but just now we must hasten.
+
+Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant
+to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it, but we did let one
+large notebook go. If worse came to worst we could resort to rock chipping - and
+of course it would be possible, even in case of really lost direction, to work up to
+full daylight by one channel or another if granted sufficient time for plentiful
+trial and error. So at last we set off eagerly in the indicated direction of the
+nearest tunnel.
+
+
+
+
+According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired tunnel
+mouth could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where we stood;
+the intervening space showing solid-looking buildings quite likely to be
+penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The opening itself would be in the basement
+- on the angle nearest the foothills - of a vast five-pointed structure of evidently
+public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify from our aerial
+survey of the ruins.
+
+No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we
+concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had been
+totally shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In the latter case the tunnel would
+probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the next nearest
+one - the one less than a mile to the north. The intervening river course
+prevented our trying any of the more southern tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if
+both of the neighboring ones were choked it was doubtful whether our batteries
+would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one - about a mile beyond our
+second choice.
+
+As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and
+compass - traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation,
+clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down
+again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and
+then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false
+leads and retracing our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had
+left), and once in a while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which
+daylight poured or trickled down - we were repeatedly tantalized by the
+sculptured walls along our route. Many must have told tales of immense
+historical importance, and only the prospect of later visits reconciled us to the
+need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed down once in a while and turned
+on our second torch. If we had had more films, we would certainly have paused
+briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming hand-copying was
+clearly out of the question.
+
+I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint
+rather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in
+order to justify my course in discouraging further exploration. We had wormed
+our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's mouth - having crossed a
+second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and
+descended to a ruinous corridor especially rich in decadently elaborate and
+apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanship - when, shortly before 8:30
+P.M., Danforth's keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual.
+If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned before. At
+first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure
+
+
+
+
+air, but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Let me try
+to state the thing without flinching. There was an odor - and that odor was
+vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had nauseated us upon opening
+the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.
+
+Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now. There
+were several conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of indecisive
+whispering. Most important of all, we did not retreat without further
+investigation; for having come this far, we were loath to be balked by anything
+short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether
+too wild to believe. Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was
+probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch - tempted
+no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from
+the oppressive walls - and which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing
+and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.
+
+Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he
+who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-
+choked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level. It did not
+look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of desertion, and when
+we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have
+been lately tracked through it. The irregular nature of the litter precluded any
+definite marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the
+dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel tracks as
+if of runners. This was what made us pause again.
+
+It was during that pause that we caught - simultaneously this time - the other
+odor ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and more frightful odor -
+less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place under the known
+circumstances - unless, of course, Gedney - for the odor was the plain and
+familiar one of common petrol - every-day gasoline.
+
+Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knew
+now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this
+nighted burial place of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer the existence
+of nameless conditions - present or at least recent just ahead. Yet in the end we
+did let sheer burning curiosity-or anxiety-or autohypnotism - or vague thoughts
+of responsibility toward Gedney - or what not - drive us on. Danforth whispered
+again of the print he thought he had seen at the alley turning in the ruins above;
+and of the faint musical piping - potentially of tremendous significance in the
+light of Lake's dissection report, despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth
+echoes of the windy peaks - which he thought he had shortly afterward half
+heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp
+
+
+
+
+was left - of what had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor
+might have conceived the inconceivable - a wild trip across the monstrous
+mountains and a descent into the unknown, primal masonry - But we could not
+convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned off
+all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered
+upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun
+to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The
+disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of
+gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our
+feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had
+been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air.
+Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going to be able to
+reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened.
+
+The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked corridor in
+which we stood, showed several doorways in various states of obstruction; and
+from one of them the gasoline odor-quite submerging that other hint of odor -
+came with especial distinctness. As we looked more steadily, we saw that
+beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away of debris from
+that particular opening. Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the
+direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone will
+wonder that we waited an appreciable time before making any further motion.
+
+And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression was
+one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured Crypt - a
+perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet - there remained no recent object of
+instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a
+farther doorway. In another moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had
+descried a place where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on
+both torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple
+and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied. It
+was a rough leveling of the debris, upon which several small objects lay
+carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of
+gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor even at this
+extreme superplateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a sort of
+camp - a camp made by questing beings who, like us, had been turned back by
+the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.
+
+Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned,
+all from Lake's camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we
+had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated books more
+or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and
+instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur
+
+
+
+
+and tent cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that
+came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all
+bad enough but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on
+them, we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain inexplicably
+blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the
+sight down there in the prehuman vaults of a nightmare city was almost too
+much to bear.
+
+A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found
+on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave
+mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough,
+hasty sketches - varying in their accuracy or lack of it - which outlined the
+neighboring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented
+place outside our previous route - a place we identified as a great cylindrical
+tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aerial survey - to
+the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel mouth therein.
+
+He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite
+obviously compiled, as our own had been, from late sculptures somewhere in the
+glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and used. But
+what the art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches
+in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite haste and
+carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which they were taken - the
+characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the
+dead city's heyday.
+
+There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our
+lives after that; since our conclusions were now - notwithstanding their wildness
+
+- completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to those who have
+read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad - for have I not said those
+horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of
+the same spirit - albeit in a less extreme form - in the men who stalk deadly
+beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half
+paralyzed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a
+blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.
+
+Of course we did not mean to face that - or those - which we knew had been
+there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have
+found the other neighboring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within, to
+whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf
+
+- the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they
+would have gone on to the north seeking another. They were, we remembered,
+partly independent of light.
+
+
+
+
+Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our
+new emotions took - just what change of immediate objective it was that so
+sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we
+feared - yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to
+spy certain things from some hidden vantage point. Probably we had not given
+up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal
+in the form of that great circular place shown on the crumpled sketches we had
+found. We had at once recognized it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in
+the very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture
+from above. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these
+hasty diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must still form a feature
+of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet
+unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the
+sculptures in which it figured - being indeed among the first things built in the
+city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it
+might form a good present link with the upper world - a shorter route than the
+one we were so carefully blazing, and probably that by which those others had
+descended.
+
+At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches - which quite
+perfectly confirmed our own - and start back over the indicated course to the
+circular place; the course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed
+twice before us. The other neighboring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that. I
+need not speak of our journey - during which we continued to leave an
+economical trail of paper - for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which
+we had reached the cul-de-sac; except that it tended to adhere more closely to the
+ground level and even descend to basement corridors. Every now and then we
+could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter underfoot; and after
+we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we were again faintly
+conscious - spasmodically - of that more hideous and more persistent scent. After
+the way had branched from our former course, we sometimes gave the rays of
+our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls; noting in almost every case the
+well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed a main
+aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones.
+
+About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a long, vaulted corridor whose increasingly
+glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew
+lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were able to
+turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the vast circular place,
+and that our distance from the upper air could not be very great. The corridor
+ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see
+much through it even before we emerged. Beyond there stretched a prodigious
+round space - fully two hundred feet in diameter - strewn with debris and
+
+
+
+
+containing many choked archways corresponding to the one we were about to
+cross. The walls were - in available spaces - boldly sculptured into a spiral band
+of heroic proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused
+by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendor far beyond anything we had
+encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we
+fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.
+
+But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding the
+archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the
+stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those once climbing
+outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats of antique Babylon. Only the rapidity
+of our flight, and the perspective which confounded the descent with the tower's
+inner wall, had prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused
+us to seek another avenue to the subglacial level. Pabodie might have been able
+to tell what sort of engineering held it in place, but Danforth and I could merely
+admire and marvel. We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and
+there, but what we saw seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing
+was excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower - a highly
+remarkable circumstance in view of its exposure - and its shelter had done much
+to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
+
+As we stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous cylinder
+bottom - fifty million years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient
+structure ever to meet our eyes - we saw that the ramp- traversed sides stretched
+dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet. This, we recalled from our aerial survey,
+meant an outside glaciation of some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had
+seen from the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound
+of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its circumference
+by the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the
+sculptures, the original tower had stood in the center of an immense circular
+plaza, and had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred feet high, with tiers of
+horizontal disks near the top, and a row of needlelike spires along the upper rim.
+Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward - a
+fortunate happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and
+the whole interior choked. As it was, the ramp showed sad battering; whilst the
+choking was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been
+recently cleared.
+
+It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which
+those others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own
+ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower's mouth
+was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than was the great
+terraced building we had entered, and any further subglacial exploration we
+
+
+
+
+might make on this trip would He in this general region. Oddly, we were still
+thinking about possible later trips - even after all we had seen and guessed. Then,
+as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor, there came a
+sight which for the time excluded all other matters.
+
+It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the
+ramp's lower and outward- projecting course which had hitherto been screened
+from our view. There they were - the three sledges missing from Lake's camp -
+shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging along great
+reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand portage over
+utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and
+strapped, and contained things memorably familiar enough: the gasoline stove,
+fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with
+books, and some bulging with less obvious contents - everything derived from
+Lake's equipment.
+
+Alter what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for
+this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid
+one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others as
+well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens; for there were
+two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster
+where some wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with care to
+prevent further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing
+dog.
+
+
+Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about
+the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our somber discovery, and I am
+not prepared to say that we would have immediately revived such thoughts but
+for a specific circumstance which broke in upon us and set up a whole new train
+of speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were
+standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our
+consciousness - the first sounds we had heard since descending out of the open
+where the mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights. Well-
+known and mundane though they were, their presence in this remote world of
+death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones
+could possibly have been - since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of
+cosmic harmony.
+
+Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which
+Lake's dissection report had led us to expect in those others - and which, indeed,
+our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind howl we had heard
+
+
+
+7b
+
+
+
+since coining on the camp horror - it would have had a kind of helHsh congruity
+with the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a
+graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, the noise shattered all our
+profoundly seated adjustments - all our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a
+waste utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life. What we heard
+was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose
+supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.
+Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarized by
+our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we
+shuddered to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief - it
+was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
+
+The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the
+corridor whence we had come - regions manifestly in the direction of that other
+tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water bird in such a direction -
+in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform lifelessness - could
+lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was to verify the objective
+reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated, and seemed at times to come from
+more than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which
+much debris had been cleared; resuming our trail blazing - with an added paper
+supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the
+sledges - when we left daylight behind.
+
+As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned some
+curious, dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort
+whose description would be only too superfluous. The course indicated by the
+penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass prescribed as an
+approach to the more northerly tunnel mouth, and we were glad to find that a
+bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The
+tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basement of a large
+pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to recall from our aerial survey as
+remarkably well-preserved. Along our path the single torch showed a customary
+profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine any of these.
+
+Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the
+second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from
+earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies
+in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip
+toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them
+as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully
+six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those others.
+They were larger and dark, and, according to the sculptures, their motion over
+land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born
+
+
+
+
+tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten
+us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by primitive dread
+almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then
+came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our
+left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it
+was only a penguin - albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest
+of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual
+eyelessness.
+
+When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches
+on the indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they were all
+eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded
+us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones' sculptures, and it
+did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock-
+undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose
+perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes
+to mere useless slits. That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought, was
+not for a moment to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf's continued
+warmth and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing
+fancies.
+
+We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their
+usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it
+had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest
+indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party
+of those others should have startled them. Was it possible that those others had
+taken some aggressive action or t- ried to increase their meat supply? We
+doubted whether that pungent odor which the dogs had hated could cause an
+equal antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors had obviously lived on
+excellent terms with the Old Ones - an amicable relationship which must have
+survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting
+- in a flare-up of the old spirit of pure science - that we could not photograph
+these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed
+on toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and
+whose exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.
+
+Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly
+sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel
+mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately
+ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp
+involuntarily - a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully
+a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening
+around all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously
+
+
+
+n
+
+
+
+with a black, arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vauh to a height
+of nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.
+
+In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though
+decadently carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino
+penguins waddled - aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel
+yawned indefinitely off at a steep, descending grade, its aperture adorned with
+grotesquely chiseled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a
+current of slightly warmer air, and perhaps even a suspicion of vapor proceeded;
+and we wondered what living entities other than penguins the limitless void
+below, and the contiguous honeycombings of the land and the titan mountains,
+might conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of mountaintop smoke at
+first suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived
+around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-
+channeled rising of some such vapor from the unfathomed regions of earth's
+core.
+
+Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was - at least at the start - about
+fifteen feet each way - sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual
+megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of
+conventional designs in a late, decadent style; and all the construction and
+carving were marvelously well-preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a
+slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of these
+others. The farther one advanced, the warmer it became; so that we were soon
+unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there were any actually
+igneous manifestations below, and whether the waters of that sunless sea were
+hot. Alter a short distance the masonry gave place to solid rock, though the
+tunnel kept the same proportions and presented the same aspect of carved
+regularity. Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut
+in the floor. Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not
+recorded in our diagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of our
+return, and all of them welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome
+entities on their way back from the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was
+very distinct. Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under
+the known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain
+persons than most suspect - indeed, it was just such a lure which had brought us
+to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw several penguins as we
+passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have to traverse. The
+carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the abyss,
+but our previous wanderings had shown us that matters of scale were not wholly
+to be depended on.
+
+
+
+
+Alter about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly accentuated,
+and we kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed. There
+was no visible vapor as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of
+contrasting cooler air. The temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not
+surprised to come upon a careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us. It
+was composed of furs and tent cloth taken from Lake's camp, and we did not
+pause to study the bizarre forms into which the fabrics had been slashed. Slightly
+beyond this point we noticed a decided increase in the size and number of the
+side galleries, and concluded that the densely honeycombed region beneath the
+higher foothills must now have been reached. The nameless scent was now
+curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odor - of what nature
+we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps
+unknown subterranean fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for
+which the carvings had not prepared us - a broadening and rising into a lofty,
+natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five feet long
+and fifty broad, and with many immense side passages leading away into
+cryptical darkness.
+
+Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches
+suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls
+between adjacent honey combings. The walls were rough, and the high, vaulted
+roof was thick with stalactites; but the solid rock floor had been smoothed off,
+and was free from all debris, detritus, or even dust to a positively abnormal
+extent. Except for the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the
+floors of all the great galleries opening off from it; and the singularity of the
+condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling. The curious new fetor which had
+supplemented the nameless scent was excessively pungent here; so much so that
+it destroyed all trace of the other. Something about this whole place, with its
+polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and
+horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previously encountered.
+
+The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger proportion
+of penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right course amidst
+this plethora of equally great cave mouths. Nevertheless we resolved to resume
+our paper trailblazing if any further complexity should develop; for dust tracks,
+of course, could no longer be expected. Upon resuming our direct progress we
+cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel walls - and stopped short in amazement
+at the supremely radical change which had come over the carvings in this part of
+the passage. We realized, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones'
+sculpture at the time of the tunneling, and had indeed noticed the inferior
+workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this
+deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly
+transcending explanation - a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality.
+
+
+
+
+and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in
+the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.
+
+This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy
+of detail. It was countersunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the
+same general line as the sparse car-touches of the earlier sections, but the height
+of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea
+that it was a second carving - a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of
+a previous design. In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional, and
+consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile
+mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seemingly more like a parody than a
+perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some
+subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling
+behind the technique - an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible
+for the laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had
+come to recognize as the Old Ones' art; and I was persistently reminded of such
+hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman
+manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the
+presence of a used flashlight battery on the floor in front of one of the most
+characteristic cartouches.
+
+Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed
+our advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls
+to see if any further decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was
+perceived, though the carvings were in places rather sparse because of the
+numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer
+penguins, but thought we caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely distant
+chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth. The new and inexplicable odor
+was abominably strong, and we could detect scarcely a sign of that other
+nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapor ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in
+temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless sea cliffs of the great abyss.
+Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor
+ahead - obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins - and turned on
+our second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary.
+
+
+Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I
+ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and
+intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an
+added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror. We saw, as I
+have said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead; and I may add that
+our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification
+
+
+
+
+of the strange prevailing fetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench
+of those others which had gone before. The light of the second torch left no doubt
+of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach them only because we
+could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as past all harming power
+as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-
+mounded graves at poor Lake's camp.
+
+They were, indeed, as lacking - in completeness as most of those we had
+unearthed - though it grew plain from the thick, dark green pool gathering
+around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency. There
+seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would have suggested
+no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us. To find them in
+this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous
+struggle had occurred down here in the dark.
+
+Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks, and our ears
+now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others
+disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not
+suggest it, for penguins' beaks against the tough tissues Lake had dissected could
+hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance was beginning to
+make out. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appeared to be singularly
+peaceful.
+
+Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent four
+responsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely to form
+an immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the smooth-
+floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and frankly reluctant
+approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been that which had
+frightened the penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have
+arisen near that faintly heard rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there
+were no signs that any birds had normally dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected,
+there had been a hideous running fight, with the weaker party seeking to get
+back to the cached sledges when their pursuers finished them. One could picture
+the demoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out of the
+black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and scurrying
+ahead.
+
+I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly
+and reluctantly. Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had
+run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth
+floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had
+superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds
+were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!
+
+
+
+
+Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon reaHzed
+the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed, twisted, and
+ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total decapitation. From
+each one the tentacled starfish head had been removed; and as we drew near we
+saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or suction
+than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome dark-green ichor formed
+a large, spreading pOOl; but its stench was half overshadowed by the newer and
+stranger stench, here more pungent than at any other point along our route. Only
+when we had come very close to the sprawling obstructions could we trace that
+second, unexplainable fetor to any immediate source - and the instant we did so
+Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the Old Ones' history in
+the Permian Age one hundred and fifty million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-
+tortured cry which echoed hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage
+with the evil, palimpsest carvings.
+
+I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primal
+sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had
+suggested that hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate
+Old Ones - those whom the frightful Shoggoths had characteristically slain and
+sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great war of resubjugation. They were
+infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for
+Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by
+any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear
+that none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had
+even conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms
+and organs and processes - viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells - rubbery
+fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile - slaves of suggestion, builders
+of cities - more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more
+amphibious, more and more imitative! Great God! What madness made even
+those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and carve such things?
+
+And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively
+iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank
+obscenely with that new, unknown odor whose cause only a diseased fancy
+could envisage - clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a
+smooth part of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots - we
+understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of
+those four missing others - for all too well did we suspect they would do no
+harm again. Poor devils! Alter all, they were not evil things of their kind. They
+were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a
+hellish jest on them - as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or
+cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste - and
+this was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages-for what
+
+
+
+
+indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch -
+perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed
+defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer
+wrappings and paraphernalia ... poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones!
+Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would not have done in their
+place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible,
+just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less
+incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had
+been, they were men!
+
+They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once
+worshipped and roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city
+brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done.
+They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they
+had never seen - and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through
+the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated
+shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of
+fresh slime on the wall beside them - looked and understood what must have
+triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that nighted,
+penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to
+belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical scream.
+
+The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us
+into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that we
+have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment. It seemed
+aeons that we stood there, but actually it could not have been more than ten or
+fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if veritably driven by
+some remoter advancing bulk-and then came a sound which upset much of what
+we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run like
+mad past squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to the city,
+along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle, and up that
+archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer air and
+light of day.
+
+The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided; because it
+was what poor Lake's dissection had led us to attribute to those we had judged
+dead. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely
+muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley corner above the glacial level;
+and it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind pipings we had both
+heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of seeming puerile I will add
+another thing, too, if only because of the surprising way Danforth's impressions
+chimed with mine. Of course common reading is what prepared us both to make
+the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about
+
+
+
+
+unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when
+writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that
+fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance
+connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic spectrally
+snowy birds of that malign region's core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" That, I may admit,
+is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the
+advancing white mist-that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide
+range.
+
+We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though we
+knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and
+pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished
+to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that nonaggressive conduct and a
+display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of capture,
+if only from scientific curiosity. Alter all, if such an one had nothing to fear for
+itself, it would have no motive in harming us. Concealment being futile at this
+juncture, we used our torch for a running glance behind, and perceived that the
+mist was thinning. Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of
+those others? Again came that insidious musical piping- "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
+Then, noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer, it occurred to us that
+the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however, since it was
+very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth's scream, rather than in flight
+from any other entity. The timing was too close to admit of doubt. Of the
+whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare - that fetid,
+unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered
+the abyss and sent land pioneers to recarve and squirm through the burrows of
+the hills - we could form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this
+probably crippled Old One-perhaps a lone survivor - to the peril of recapture
+and a nameless fate.
+
+Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened again,
+and was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying penguins in our
+rear were squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a panic really
+surprising in view of their relatively minor confusion when we had passed them.
+Once more came that sinister, wide-ranged piping - "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" We had
+been wrong. The thing was not wounded, but had merely paused on
+encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription
+above them. We could never know what that demon message was - but those
+burials at Lake's camp had shown how much importance the beings attached to
+their dead. Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the large open
+cavern where various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving those
+morbid palimpsest sculptures - almost felt even when scarcely seen-behind.
+Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of
+
+
+
+
+losing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several
+of the blind albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear
+of the oncoming entity was extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at that
+point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of traveling need, keeping it
+strictly in front of us, the frightened squawking motions of the huge birds in the
+mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true course, and somehow set up a
+false lead. Amidst the churning, spiraling fog, the littered and unglistening floor
+of the main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the other morbidly
+polished burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing feature; even, so far
+as we could conjecture, for those indicated special senses which made the Old
+Ones partly, though imperfectly, independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we
+were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For we
+had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since the
+consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be
+unthinkable.
+
+The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take
+a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins
+alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to
+have done so. Only a benign fate kept the curling vapors thick enough at the
+right moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening to vanish.
+Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the nauseously
+resculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually caught one first and only
+half glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final, desperately fearful glance
+backward before dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of
+dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that which gave us
+the half glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash of semivision can be
+traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted us.
+
+Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the
+immemorial instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its
+pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious
+question raised by one of our senses. In the midst of our flight, with all our
+faculties centered on the problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe
+and analyze details; yet even so, our latent brain cells must have wondered at the
+message brought them by our nostrils. Alterward we realized what it was-that
+our retreat from the fetid slime coating on those headless obstructions, and the
+coincident approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of
+stenches which logic called for. In the neighborhood of the prostrate things that
+new and lately unexplainable fetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it
+ought to have largely given place to the nameless stench associated with those
+others. This it had not done - for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was
+
+
+
+
+now virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each
+second.
+
+So we glanced back simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the
+incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we
+flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from
+sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally
+unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged
+among the penguins of the labyrinth center ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus
+himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again
+came that shocking, wide-ranged piping - "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
+
+I might as well be frank - even if I cannot bear to be quite direct - in stating what
+we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each
+other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of
+the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had
+the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel
+toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through - perhaps
+better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a
+high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left.
+
+Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the
+journey was hearing him lightheadedly chant an hysterical formula in which I
+alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It
+reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated
+through the vaultings ahead, and-thank God-through the now empty vaultings
+behind. He could not have begun it at once - else we would not have been alive
+and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his
+nervous reactions might have brought.
+
+"South Station Under - Washington Under - Park Street Under-Kendall - Central
+- Harvard - " The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-
+Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of
+miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor
+home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous,
+nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back,
+to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but
+of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see - for the mists were
+indeed all too malignly thinned - was something altogether different, and
+immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective
+embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be"; and its nearest
+comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a
+station platform - the great black front looming colossally out of infinite
+
+
+
+
+subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the
+prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.
+
+But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the
+nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward
+through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a
+spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible,
+indescribable thing vaster than any subway train - a shapeless congeries of
+protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes
+forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling
+front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over
+the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still
+came that eldritch, mocking cry- "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" and at last we remembered
+that the demoniac Shoggoths - given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns
+solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups
+expressed - had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone
+masters.
+
+
+Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured
+hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and
+corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream fragments involving no
+memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if we floated in a
+nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The gray
+half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go
+near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have a
+strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will find them
+still undisturbed.
+
+It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt the terrible
+fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin plateau air had
+produced; but not even fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching the
+normal outer realm of sun and sky. There was something vaguely appropriate
+about our departure from those buried epochs; for as we wound our panting
+way up the sixty-foot cylinder of primal masonry, we glimpsed beside us a
+continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race's early and
+undecayed technique - a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years
+ago.
+
+Finally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of
+tumbled blocks, with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and
+the brooding peaks of the great mountains showing beyond the more crumbled
+
+
+
+
+structures toward the east. The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from
+the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and
+deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with such
+relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape.
+The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapors, and
+the cold clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had
+instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our heavy
+garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the
+aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aeroplane waited. Of what had
+set us fleeing from that darkness of earth's secret and archaic gulfs we said
+nothing at all.
+
+In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills-the
+probable ancient terrace - by which we had descended, and could see the dark
+bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead.
+Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing spell, and
+turned to look again at the fantastic tangle of incredible stone shapes below us-
+once more outlined mystically against an unknown west. As we did so we saw
+that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-vapors having
+moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point of
+settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite definite or
+conclusive.
+
+There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city
+a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed
+dreamlike against the beckoning rose color of the western sky. Up toward this
+shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed course of the
+bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we
+gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague
+horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else
+than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land - highest of earth's peaks and
+focus of earth's evil; harborers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets;
+shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden
+by any living thing on earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending
+strange beams across the plains in the polar night - beyond doubt the unknown
+archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng,
+whereof primal legends hint evasively.
+
+If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told truly, these
+cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than three hundred miles away;
+yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence appear above that remote
+and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise
+into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous
+
+
+
+
+beyond all comparison - carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata
+peopled only by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper
+of after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain
+sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city
+from their accursed slopes - and wondered how much sense and how much folly
+had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled
+how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Mary Land, where
+even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition was doubtless working
+less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir
+Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal
+range. Such thoughts formed a measure of my overwrought condition at the time
+- and Danforth seemed to be even worse.
+
+Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane,
+our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast-enough range whose
+recrossing lay ahead of us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes
+reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those
+strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the
+frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming way
+even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the
+prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave mouths where the
+wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To make
+matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the
+summits-as poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about
+volcanism - and thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just
+escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abyss whence all such
+vapors came.
+
+All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs.
+Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very smooth
+take-off over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread
+out as it had done when first we saw it, and we began rising and turning to test
+the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very high level there must have
+been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all
+sorts of fantastic things; but at twenty-four thousand feet, the height we needed
+for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable. As we drew close to the
+jutting peaks the wind's strange piping again became manifest, and I could see
+Danforth's hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur that I was, I thought at
+that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous
+crossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take
+over his duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession
+about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the
+pass-resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapor, and
+
+
+
+
+wishing that I had wax-stopped ears hke Ulysses' men off the Siren's coast to
+keep that disturbing windpiping from my consciousness.
+
+But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous
+pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked
+back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave- riddled, cube-barnacled
+peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strewn foothills, and upward
+at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer
+safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by
+shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the
+controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we
+made the crossing safely - yet I am afraid that Danforth will never be -the same
+again.
+
+I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream
+out so insanely-a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his
+present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind's
+piping and the engine's buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and
+swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the
+pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city.
+Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly-
+and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that
+Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely
+necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead
+corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to
+resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out
+of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
+
+All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not,
+he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those echoing,
+vaporous, wormily-honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but
+a single fantastic, demoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith clouds, of what
+lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had
+shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born
+of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though
+unrecognized mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake's
+camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.
+
+He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about
+"The black pit," "the carven rim," "the protoShoggoths," "the windowless solids
+with five dimensions," "the nameless cylinder," "the elder Pharos," "Yog-
+Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out of space," "the wings," "the
+eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the original, the eternal, the undying,"
+
+
+
+
+and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this
+and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth,
+indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely
+through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key
+in the college library.
+
+The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed
+enough; and although I did not see the zenith, I can well imagine that its swirls
+of ice dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly
+distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such
+layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest - and, of course,
+Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had
+a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in
+one instantaneous glance.
+
+At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of
+all too obvious source: "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
+
+
+
+
+Azathoth
+
+
+
+Written June 1922
+
+Published 1938 in Leaves, Vol. 2: p. 107.
+
+When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when
+grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow
+none might dream of the sun or of Spring's flowering meads; when learning
+stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more of twisted
+phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had
+come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who
+traveled out of life on a quest into spaces whither the world's dreams had fled.
+
+Of the name and abode of this man little is written, for they were of the waking
+world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to say that he dwelt
+in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among
+shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window
+opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows
+stared in dull despair. From that casement one might see only walls and
+windows, except sometimes when one leaned so far out and peered at the small
+stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive a man
+to madness who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that roOm used night
+after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond
+the waking world and the tall cities. After years he began to call the slow sailing
+stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of
+sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existance no
+common eye suspected. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the
+dream haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge
+with the close air of his room and to make him a part of their fabulous wonder.
+
+There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of
+gold, vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy
+perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns
+that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins
+and sea-nymphs of unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around
+the dreamer and wafted him away without touching the body that leaned stiffly
+from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men's calandars the tides
+of far spheres that bore him gently to join the course of other cycles that tenderly
+left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a green shore fragrant with lotus
+blossums and starred by red camalotes...
+
+
+
+
+Beyond the Wall of Sleep
+
+Written 1919
+
+Published October 1919 in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 2-10
+
+I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the
+occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which
+they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no
+more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences - Freud to the
+contrary with his puerile symbolism - there are still a certain remainder whose
+immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and
+whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses
+into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet
+separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I
+cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed
+sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we
+know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after
+waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet
+prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth
+knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not
+exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less
+material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe
+is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
+
+It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one
+afternoon in the winter of 1900-01, when to the state psychopathic institution in
+which I served as an intern was brought the man whose case has ever since
+haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or
+Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill
+Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial
+peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of
+a little-traveled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric
+degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of
+the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the
+decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-existent;
+and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of
+native American people.
+
+Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state
+policemen, and who was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly
+presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when I first beheld him.
+
+
+
+
+Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was
+given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of
+his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth
+of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was
+unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties
+exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the decayed condition
+of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.
+
+From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of
+his case: this man, a vagabond, hunter and trapper, had always been strange in
+the eyes of his primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the
+ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a
+manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative
+populace. Not that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke
+save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his
+utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without
+apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors,
+and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at least
+all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, half-amiable
+normality like that of the other hilldwellers.
+
+As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually
+increased in frequency and violence; till about a month before his arrival at the
+institution had occurred the shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the
+authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey
+debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself
+most suddenly, with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought
+several neighbors to his cabin - a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as
+indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his arms aloft
+and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air; the while shouting
+his determination to reach some "big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and
+walls and floor and the loud queer music far away". As two men of moderate
+size sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury,
+screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain "thing that shines and
+shakes and laughs". At length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with
+a sudden blow, he had flung himself upon the other in a demoniac ecstasy of
+blood-thirstiness, shrieking fiendishly that he would "jump high in the air and
+burn his way through anything that stopped him".
+
+Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of
+them returned. Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognizable pulp-like
+thing that had been a living man but an hour before. None of the mountaineers
+had dared to pursue him, and it is likely that they would have welcomed his
+
+
+
+
+death from the cold; but when several mornings later they heard his screams
+from a distant ravine they realized that he had somehow managed to survive,
+and that his removal in one way or another would be necessary. Then had
+followed an armed searching-party, whose purpose (whatever it may have been
+originally) became that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom popular state
+troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined the
+seekers.
+
+On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken
+to the nearest jail, where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his
+senses returned. To them he told a simple story. He had, he said, gone to sleep
+one afternoon about sundown after drinking much liquor. He had awakened to
+find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin, the mangled
+corpse of his neighbor Peter Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the
+woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his
+crime. Beyond these things he seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert
+questioning of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact.
+
+That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened with no
+singular feature save a certain alteration of expression. Doctor Barnard, who had
+been watching the patient, thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain
+gleam of peculiar quality, and in the flaccid lips an all but imperceptible
+tightening, as if of intelligent determination. But when questioned. Slater
+relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer, and only reiterated what
+he had said on the preceding day.
+
+On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After some
+show of uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the
+combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him in a straightjacket. The
+alienists listened with keen attention to his words, since their curiosity had been
+aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly conflicting and incoherent
+stories of his family and neighbors. Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes,
+babbling in his backwoods dialect of green edifices of light, oceans of space,
+strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell
+upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at
+him. This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible wrong, and
+to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order to reach it, he
+said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle that
+stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest suddenness he
+ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder he looked at
+his questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the leather
+harness and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in persuading Slater
+
+
+
+
+to don it of his own volition, for his own good. The man had now admitted that
+he sometimes talked queerly, though he knew not why.
+
+Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned
+little. On the source of Slater's visions they speculated at length, for since he
+could neither read nor write, and had apparently never heard a legend or fairy-
+tale, his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That it could not come from
+any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the
+unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner. He raved
+of things he did not understand and could not interpret; things which he claimed
+to have experienced, but which he could not have learned through any normal or
+connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the
+foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for a time completely
+dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due formality
+Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and committed
+to the institution wherein I held so humble a post.
+
+I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream-life, and from this
+you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the
+new patient as soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed to
+sense a certain friendliness in me, born no doubt of the interest I could not
+conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questioned him. Not that he ever
+recognized me during his attacks, when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but
+cosmic word-pictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours, when he would sit by
+his barred window weaving baskets of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for
+the mountain freedom he could never again enjoy. His family never called to see
+him; probably it had found another temporary head, after the manner of
+decadent mountain folk.
+
+By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and
+fantastic conceptions of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in
+mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described
+in a barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or
+even exceptional brain could conceive How, I often asked myself, could the
+stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very
+possession argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard
+have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance
+and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and more I
+inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the
+disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something
+infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less
+imaginative medical and scientific colleagues.
+
+
+
+
+And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my
+investigation was, that in a kind of semi-corporeal dream-life Slater wandered or
+floated through resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities,
+and palaces of light, in a region unbounded and unknown to man; that there he
+was no peasant or degenerate, but a creature of importance and vivid life,
+moving proudly and dominantly, and checked only by a certain deadly enemy,
+who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure, and who did not
+appear to be of human shape, since Slater never referred to it as a man, or as
+aught save a thing. This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed
+wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge.
+
+From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and
+the luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man
+was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression
+was sustained by his frequent references to flying through space and burning all
+that impeded his progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic
+words wholly inadequate to convey them, a circumstance which drove me to the
+conclusion that if a dream world indeed existed, oral language was not its
+medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be that the dream soul
+inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which
+the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not utter? Could it be that I was
+face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I
+could but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians of
+these things, for middle age is skeptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new
+ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately warned me in his
+paternal way that I was overworking; that my mind needed a rest.
+
+It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or
+molecular motion, convertible into ether waves or radiant energy like heat, light
+and electricity. This belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of
+telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apparatus, and I had in
+my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments
+somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphy at
+that crude, pre-radio period. These I had tested with a fellow-student, but
+achieving no result, had soon packed them away with other scientific odds and
+ends for possible future use.
+
+Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream-life of Joe Slater, I sought
+these instruments again, and spent several days in repairing them for action.
+When they were complete once more I missed no opportunity for their trial. At
+each outburst of Slater's violence, I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and
+the receiver to my own, constantly making delicate adjustments for various
+hypothetical wave- lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how
+
+
+
+
+the thought-impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent
+response in my brain, but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them.
+Accordingly I continued my experiments, though informing no one of their
+nature.
+
+It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing occurred. As I look
+back across the years I realize how unreal it seems, and sometimes wonder if old
+Doctor Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my excited imagination. I
+recall that he listened with great kindness and patience when I told him, but
+afterward gave me a nerve-powder and arranged for the half-year's vacation on
+which I departed the next week.
+
+That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent
+care he had received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his
+mountain freedom that he missed, or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had grown
+too acute for his rather sluggish physique; but at all events the flame of vitality
+flickered low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the end, and as
+darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep.
+
+I did not strap on the straightjacket as was customary when he slept, since I saw
+that he was too feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder once
+more before passing away. But I did place upon his head and mine the two ends
+of my cosmic "radio", hoping against hope for a first and last message from the
+dream world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse, a
+mediocre fellow who did not understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think
+to inquire into my course. As the hours wore on I saw his head droop
+awkwardly in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I myself, lulled by the rhythmical
+breathing of the healthy and the dying man, must have nodded a little later.
+
+The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and
+harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand, while on my ravished
+sight burst the stupendous spectacle ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and
+architraves of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to
+float in air, extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable
+splendor. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather,
+supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains
+and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes, covered with every
+lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eyes could conceive of, yet
+formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal plastic entity, which in consistency
+partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain
+held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared
+to me was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this
+elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to
+
+
+
+
+me; just as it had been for uncounted eons of eternity before, and would be for
+like eternities to come.
+
+Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy
+with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour
+was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last
+from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow
+the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might
+be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We
+floated thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the
+objects around us, as though some force were recalling me to earth - where I least
+wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change also, for it gradually
+brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself prepared to quit the scene,
+fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the other objects.
+A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous one and I
+were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it would be the
+last time. The sorry planet shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour my
+fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the
+hither stars to the very confines of infinity.
+
+A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light
+from my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in
+my chair as I saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was
+indeed awaking, though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely, I
+saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of color which had never before been
+present. The lips, too, seemed unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the
+force of a stronger character than had been Slater's. The whole face finally began
+to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes.
+
+I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged
+headband of my telepathic "radio", intent to catch any parting message the
+dreamer might have to deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in my
+direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazement at what
+I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was gazing at
+me with a pair of luminous, expanding eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have
+deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was visible in that gaze, and I felt
+beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of
+high order.
+
+At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating
+upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly and was
+rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had
+come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no
+
+
+
+
+actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and
+expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary
+English.
+
+"Joe Slater is dead/' came the soul-petrifying voice of an agency from beyond the
+wall of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the
+blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently
+animated. "He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of
+cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments
+between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much an animal, too little a
+man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover me, for the
+cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been in my torment
+and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years.
+
+"I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless
+sleep. I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent
+valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but
+we are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages. Next year I may be
+dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan
+which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the
+worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-
+philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does
+the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its
+own tranquility!
+
+"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant
+presence - you who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of
+Algol, the Demon-Star. It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly
+striven for eons, held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis
+bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky close by
+the Demon-Star.
+
+"I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the
+coarse brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my only friend on
+this planet - the only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form
+which lies on this couch. We shall meet again - perhaps in the shining mists of
+Orion's Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia, perhaps in
+unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some other form an eon hence, when
+the solar system shall have been swept away."
+
+At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, the pale eyes of the dreamer -
+or can I say dead man? - commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed
+over to the couch and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The
+
+
+
+
+sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell open, disclosing the repulsively
+rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over the
+hideous face, and awakened the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to
+my room. I had an instant and unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I
+should not remember.
+
+The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have
+merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to
+construe them as you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old Doctor
+Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have related. He vows that I was
+broken down with nervous strain, and badly in need of a long vacation on full
+pay which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professional honor
+that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have
+come from the crude hereditary folk-tales which circulated in even the most
+decadent of communities. All this he tells me - yet I cannot forget what I saw in
+the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biased witness, another
+pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you
+expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from
+the pages of that eminent astronomical authority. Professor Garrett P. Serviss:
+
+"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor
+Anderson of Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that
+point before. Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it
+outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a
+few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye
+
+
+
+
+Celephais
+
+
+
+Written early Nov 1920
+
+Published May 1922 in The Rainbow, No. 2, p. 10-12.
+
+In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the
+snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the
+harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was
+also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by
+another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was
+the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so
+there were not many to speak to him and to remind him who he had been. His
+money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of the people
+about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was
+laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his
+writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the
+world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have
+been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and
+did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its
+embroidered robes of myth and to show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is
+reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to
+reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep,
+amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.
+
+There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the
+stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we
+think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are
+dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with
+strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the
+sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to
+sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that
+ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know
+that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder
+which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
+
+Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been
+dreaming of the house where he had been born; the great stone house covered
+with ivy, where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he
+had hoped to die. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant
+summer night, through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of the
+park, and along the long white road to the village. The village seemed very old.
+
+
+
+
+eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and
+Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or
+death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either
+side broken or filmily staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had plodded on as
+though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for
+fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life,
+which do not lead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off
+from the village street toward the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of
+things to the precipice and the abyss where all the village and all the world fell
+abruptly into the unechoing emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead
+was empty and unlit by the crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had
+urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had floated down,
+down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres
+that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and laughing winged things that
+seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the
+darkness before him, and he saw the city of the valley, glistening radiantly far,
+far below, with a background of sea and sky, and a snowcapped mountain near
+the shore.
+
+Kuranes had awakened the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from
+his brief glance that it was none other than Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-
+Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an
+hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his
+nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds
+from the cliff near the village. He had protested then, when they had found him,
+waked him, and carried him home, for just as he was aroused he had been about
+to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky.
+And now he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found his fabulous city
+after forty weary years.
+
+But three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celephais. As before, he
+dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down
+which one must float silently; then the rift appeared again, and he beheld the
+glittering minarets of the city, and saw the graceful galleys riding at anchor in
+the blue harbour, and watched the gingko trees of Mount Aran swaying in the
+sea-breeze. But this time he was not snatched away, and like a winged being
+settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently on the
+turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of Ooth-Nargai and the splendid
+city of Celephais.
+
+Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, over
+the bubbling Naraxa on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name
+so many years ago, and through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge
+
+
+
+
+by the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the marble walls discoloured, nor the
+polished bronze statues upon them tarnished. And Kuranes saw that he need not
+tremble lest the things he knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the
+ramparts were the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he
+entered the city, past the bronze gates and over the onyx pavements, the
+merchants and camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never been away; and it
+was the same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the orchid-
+wreathed priests told him that there is no time in Ooth-Nargai, but only
+perpetual youth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the
+seaward wall, where gathered the traders and sailors, and strange men from the
+regions where the sea meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the
+bright harbour where the ripples sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where
+rode lightly the galleys from far places over the water. And he gazed also upon
+Mount Aran rising regally from the shore, its lower slopes green with swaying
+trees and its white summit touching the sky.
+
+More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he
+had heard so many strange tales, and he sought again the captain who had
+agreed to carry him so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same
+chest of spice he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not to realize that any
+time had passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving
+orders to the oarmen, commenced to sail out into the billowy Cerenarian Sea that
+leads to the sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the water, till
+finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley
+paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds
+tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes could see strange lands and
+rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which
+seemed never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey
+was near its end, and that they would soon enter the harbour of Serannian, the
+pink marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the
+west wind flows into the sky; but as the highest of the city's carven towers came
+into sight there was a sound somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his
+London garret.
+
+For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celephais and
+its sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many
+gorgeous and unheard-of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find
+Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. One night he went flying over dark
+mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and
+strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders, and in the wildest part
+of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a
+hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and
+valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of such a length
+
+
+
+
+that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn he came
+to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose he beheld
+such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths,
+diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carven bridges, and red-roofed pagodas, that he
+for a moment forgot Celephais in sheer delight. But he remembered it again
+when he walked down a white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would
+have questioned the people of this land about it, had he not found that there
+were no people there, but only birds and bees and butterflies. On another night
+Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a tower
+window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the
+silent city that spread away from the river bank he thought he beheld some
+feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have descended
+and asked the way to Ooth-Nargai had not a fearsome aurora sputtered up from
+some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of the
+city, and the stagnation of the reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as
+it had lain since King Kynaratholis came home from his conquests to find the
+vengeance of the gods.
+
+So Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celephais and its galleys
+that sail to Serannian in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and once
+barely escaping from the high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow
+silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery in
+the cold desert plateau of Leng. In time he grew so impatient of the bleak
+intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of
+sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where
+form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And
+a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had
+called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but
+identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and
+gravitation exist. Kuranes was now very anxious to return to minaret-studded
+Celephais, and increased his doses of drugs; but eventually he had no more
+money left, and could buy no drugs. Then one summer day he was turned out of
+his garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a
+place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was there that
+fulfillment came, and he met the cortege of knights come from Celephais to bear
+him thither forever.
+
+Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armour
+with tabards of cloth-of- gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they,
+that Kuranes almost mistook them for an army, but they were sent in his honour;
+since it was he who had created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams, on which account he
+was now to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kuranes a
+horse and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically
+
+
+
+
+through the downs of Surrey and onward toward the region where Kuranes and
+his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but as the riders went on they
+seemed to gallop back through Time; for whenever they passed through a village
+in the twilight they saw only such houses and villagers as Chaucer or men before
+him might have seen, and sometimes they saw knights on horseback with small
+companies of retainers. When it grew dark they travelled more swiftly, till soon
+they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the
+village which Kuranes had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in his
+dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers curtsied as the horsemen clattered
+down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dreams.
+Kuranes had previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it
+would look like by day; so he watched anxiously as the column approached its
+brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare
+came somewhere out of the west and hid all the landscape in effulgent draperies.
+The abyss was a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendour, and invisible
+voices sang exultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over the edge and
+floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscations. Endlessly
+down the horsemen floated, their chargers pawing the aether as if galloping over
+golden sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apart to reveal a greater
+brightness, the brightness of the city Celephais, and the sea coast beyond, and the
+snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the
+harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.
+
+And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighboring
+regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephais and in the cloud-
+fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though
+below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body
+of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played
+mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a
+notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased
+atmosphere of extinct nobility.
+
+
+
+
+Cool Air
+
+
+
+Written March 1926
+
+Published March 1928 in Tales of Magic and Mystery, Vol. 1, No. 4, 29-34.
+
+You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver
+more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled
+when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day. There
+are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a bad odour, and I am the last
+to deny the impression. What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance
+I ever encountered, and leave it to you to judge whether or not this forms a
+suitable explanation of my peculiarity.
+
+It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness,
+silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a
+metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-
+house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side. In the spring of
+1923 I had secured some dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of
+New York; and being unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one
+cheap boarding establishment to another in search of a room which might
+combine the qualities of decent cleanliness, endurable furnishings, and very
+reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a choice between different
+evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West Fourteenth Street which
+disgusted me much less than the others I had sampled.
+
+The place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, dating apparently from the
+late forties, and fitted with woodwork and marble whose stained and sullied
+splendour argued a descent from high levels of tasteful opulence. In the rooms,
+large and lofty, and decorated with impossible paper and ridiculously ornate
+stucco cornices, there lingered a depressing mustiness and hint of obscure
+cookery; but the floors were clean, the linen tolerably regular, and the hot water
+not too often cold or turned off, so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable
+place to hibernate till one might really live again. The landlady, a slatternly,
+almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero, did not annoy me with gossip
+or with criticisms of the late-burning electric light in my third-floor front hall
+room; and my fellow-lodgers were as quiet and uncommunicative as one might
+desire, being mostly Spaniards a little above the coarsest and crudest grade. Only
+the din of street cars in the thoroughfare below proved a serious annoyance.
+
+I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident occurred. One
+evening at about eight I heard a spattering on the floor and became suddenly
+
+
+
+
+aware that I had been smeUing the pungent odour of ammonia for some time.
+Looking about, I saw that the ceihng was wet and dripping; the soaking
+apparently proceeding from a corner on the side toward the street. Anxious to
+stop the matter at its source, I hastened to the basement to tell the landlady; and
+was assured by her that the trouble would quickly be set right.
+
+"Doctair Munoz," she cried as she rushed upstairs ahead of me, "he have speel
+hees chemicals. He ees too seeck for doctair heemself-seecker and seecker all the
+time-but he weel not have no othair for help. He ees vairy queer in hees
+seeckness-all day he take funnee-smelling baths, and he cannot get excite or
+warm. All hees own housework he do-hees leetle room are full of bottles and
+machines, and he do not work as doctair. But he was great once-my fathair in
+Barcelona have hear of heem-and only joost now he feex a arm of the plumber
+that get hurt of sudden. He nevair go out, only on roof, and my boy Esteban he
+breeng heem hees food and laundry and mediceens and chemicals. My Gawd,
+the sal-ammoniac that man use for keep heem cool!"
+
+Mrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I returned to
+my room. The ammonia ceased to drip, and as I cleaned up what had spilled and
+opened the window for air, I heard the landlady's heavy footsteps above me. Dr.
+Munoz I had never heard, save for certain sounds as of some gasoline- driven
+mechanism; since his step was soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what
+the strange affliction of this man might be, and whether his obstinate refusal of
+outside aid were not the result of a rather baseless eccentricity. There is, I
+reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person who
+has come down in the world.
+
+I might never have known Dr. Munoz had it not been for the heart attack that
+suddenly seized me one forenoon as I sat writing in my room. Physicians had
+told me of the danger of those spells, and I knew there was no time to be lost; so
+remembering what the landlady had said about the invalid's help of the injured
+workman, I dragged myself upstairs and knocked feebly at the door above mine.
+My knock was answered in good English by a curious voice some distance to the
+right, asking my name and business; and these things being stated, there came an
+opening of the door next to the one I had sought.
+
+A rush of cool air greeted me; and though the day was one of the hottest of late
+June, I shivered as I crossed the threshold into a large apartment whose rich and
+tasteful decoration surprised me in this nest of squalor and seediness. A folding
+couch now filled its diurnal role of sofa, and the mahogany furniture, sumptuous
+hangings, old paintings, and mellow bookshelves all bespoke a gentleman's
+study rather than a boarding-house bedroom. I now saw that the hall room
+above mine-the "leetle room" of bottles and machines which Mrs. Herrero had
+
+
+
+
+mentioned-was merely the laboratory of the doctor; and that his main living
+quarters lay in the spacious adjoining room whose convenient alcoves and large
+contiguous bathroom permitted him to hide all dressers and obtrusively
+utilitarian devices. Dr. Munoz, most certainly, was a man of birth, cultivation,
+and discrimination.
+
+The figure before me was short but exquisitely proportioned, and clad in
+somewhat formal dress of perfect cut and fit. A high-bred face of masterful
+though not arrogant expression was adorned by a short iron-grey full beard, and
+an old-fashioned pince-nez shielded the full, dark eyes and surmounted an
+aquiline nose which gave a Moorish touch to a physiognomy otherwise
+dominantly Celtiberian. Thick, well-trimmed hair that argued the punctual calls
+of a barber was parted gracefully above a high forehead; and the whole picture
+was one of striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding.
+
+Nevertheless, as I saw Dr. Munoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance
+which nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his lividly inclined complexion
+and coldness of touch could have afforded a physical basis for this feeling, and
+even these things should have been excusable considering the man's known
+invalidism. It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such
+chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites
+aversion, distrust, and fear.
+
+But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange physician's
+extreme skill at once became manifest despite the ice-coldness and shakiness of
+his bloodless-looking hands. He clearly understood my needs at a glance, and
+ministered to them with a master's deftness; the while reassuring me in a finely
+modulated though oddly hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of
+sworn enemies to death, and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a
+lifetime of bizarre experiment devoted to its bafflement and extirpation.
+Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed to reside in him, and he rambled on
+almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and mixed a suitable draught of
+drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory room. Evidently he found the society
+of a well-born man a rare novelty in this dingy environment, and was moved to
+unaccustomed speech as memories of better days surged over him.
+
+His voice, if queer, was at least soothing; and I could not even perceive that he
+breathed as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely out. He sought to distract my
+mind from my own seizure by speaking of his theories and experiments; and I
+remember his tactfully consoling me about my weak heart by insisting that will
+and consciousness are stronger than organic life itself, so that if a bodily frame be
+but originally healthy and carefully preserved, it may through a scientific
+enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of nervous animation despite the
+
+
+
+
+most serious impairments, defects, or even absences in the battery of specific
+organs. He might, he half jestingly said, some day teach me to live-or at least to
+possess some kind of conscious existence-without any heart at all! For his part,
+he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact regimen
+which included constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature might, if
+prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity of his habitation-some 55 or 56
+degrees Fahrenheit- was maintained by an absorption system of ammonia
+cooling, the gasoline engine of whose pumps I had often heard in my own room
+below.
+
+Relieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery place a
+disciple and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid him frequent
+overcoated calls; listening while he told of secret researches and almost ghastly
+results, and trembling a bit when I examined the unconventional and
+astonishingly ancient volumes on his shelves. I was eventually, I may add,
+almost cured of my disease for all time by his skillful ministrations. It seems that
+he did not scorn the incantations of the mediaevalists, since he believed these
+cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which might conceivably
+have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from which organic
+pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the aged Dr. Torres of
+Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him through the
+great illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders proceeded.
+No sooner had the venerable practitioner saved his colleague than he himself
+succumbed to the grim enemy he had fought. Perhaps the strain had been too
+great; for Dr. Munoz made it whisperingly clear- though not in detail-that the
+methods of healing had been most extraordinary, involving scenes and processes
+not welcomed by elderly and conservative Galens.
+
+As the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend was indeed
+slowly but unmistakably losing ground physically, as Mrs. Herrero had
+suggested. The livid aspect of his countenance was intensified, his voice became
+more hollow and indistinct, his muscular motions were less perfectly
+coordinated, and his mind and will displayed less resilience and initiative. Of
+this sad change he seemed by no means unaware, and little by little his
+expression and conversation both took on a gruesome irony which restored in
+me something of the subtle repulsion I had originally felt.
+
+He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices and
+Egyptian incense till his room smelled like a vault of a sepulchred Pharaoh in the
+Valley of Kings. At the same time his demands for cold air increased, and with
+my aid he amplified the ammonia piping of his room and modified the pumps
+and feed of his refrigerating machine till he could keep the temperature as low as
+34 degrees or 40 degrees, and finally even 28 degrees; the bathroom and
+
+
+
+
+laboratory, of course, being less chilled, in order that water might not freeze, and
+that chemical processes might not be impeded. The tenant adjoining him
+complained of the icy air from around the connecting door, so I helped him fit
+heavy hangings to obviate the difficulty. A kind of growing horror, of outre and
+morbid cast, seemed to possess him. He talked of death incessantly, but laughed
+hollowly when such things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently
+suggested.
+
+All in all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet in my
+gratitude for his healing I could not well abandon him to the strangers around
+him, and was careful to dust his room and attend to his needs each day, muffled
+in a heavy ulster which I bought especially for the purpose. I likewise did much
+of his shopping, and gasped in bafflement at some of the chemicals he ordered
+from druggists and laboratory supply houses.
+
+An increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise around his
+apartment. The whole house, as I have said, had a musty odour; but the smell in
+his room was worse-and in spite of all the spices and incense, and the pungent
+chemicals of the now incessant baths which he insisted on taking unaided. I
+perceived that it must be connected with his ailment, and shuddered when I
+reflected on what that ailment might be. Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she
+looked at him, and gave him up unreservedly to me; not even letting her son
+Esteban continue to run errands for him. When I suggested other physicians, the
+sufferer would fly into as much of a rage as he seemed to dare to entertain. He
+evidently feared the physical effect of violent emotion, yet his will and driving
+force waxed rather than waned, and he refused to be confined to his bed. The
+lassitude of his earlier ill days gave place to a return of his fiery purpose, so that
+he seemed about to hurl defiance at the death-daemon even as that ancient
+enemy seized him. The pretence of eating, always curiously like a formality with
+him, he virtually abandoned; and mental power alone appeared to keep him
+from total collapse.
+
+He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he carefully
+sealed and filled with injunctions that I transmit them after his death to certain
+persons whom he named-for the most part lettered East Indians, but including a
+once celebrated French physician now generally thought dead, and about whom
+the most inconceivable things had been whispered. As it happened, I burned all
+these papers undelivered and unopened. His aspect and voice became utterly
+frightful, and his presence almost unbearable. One September day an unexpected
+glimpse of him induced an epileptic fit in a man who had come to repair his
+electric desk lamp; a fit for which he prescribed effectively whilst keeping
+himself well out of sight. That man, oddly enough, had been through the terrors
+of the Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough.
+
+
+
+
+Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with stupefying
+suddenness. One night about eleven the pump of the refrigerating machine
+broke down, so that within three hours the process of ammonia cooling became
+impossible. Dr. Munoz summoned me by thumping on the floor, and I worked
+desperately to repair the injury while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless,
+rattling hollowness surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved
+of no use; and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighbouring all-night
+garage, we learned that nothing could be done till morning, when a new piston
+would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage and fear, swelling to
+grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what remained of his failing
+physique, and once a spasm caused him to clap his hands to his eyes and rush
+into the bathroom. He groped his way out with face tightly bandaged, and I
+never saw his eyes again.
+
+The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and at about 5 a.m.
+the doctor retired to the bathroom, commanding me to keep him supplied with
+all the ice I could obtain at all-night drug stores and cafeterias. As I would return
+from my sometimes discouraging trips and lay my spoils before the closed
+bathroom door, I could hear a restless splashing within, and a thick voice
+croaking out the order for "More-more!" At length a warm day broke, and the
+shops opened one by one. I asked Esteban either to help with the ice-fetching
+whilst I obtained the pump piston, or to order the piston while I continued with
+the ice; but instructed by his mother, he absolutely refused.
+
+Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on the corner of
+Eighth Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a little shop where I
+introduced him, and applied myself diligently to the task of finding a pump
+piston and engaging workmen competent to install it. The task seemed
+interminable, and I raged almost as violently as the hermit when I saw the hours
+slipping by in a breathless, foodless round of vain telephoning, and a hectic quest
+from place to place, hither and thither by subway and surface car. About noon I
+encountered a suitable supply house far downtown, and at approximately 1:30
+p.m. arrived at my boarding-place with the necessary paraphernalia and two
+sturdy and intelligent mechanics. I had done all I could, and hoped I was in time.
+
+Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil, and
+above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep basso. Fiendish
+things were in the air, and lodgers told over the beads of their rosaries as they
+caught the odour from beneath the doctor's closed door. The lounger I had hired,
+it seems, had fled screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of
+ice; perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course, have
+locked the door behind him; yet it was now fastened, presumably from the
+inside. There was no sound within save a nameless sort of slow, thick dripping.
+
+
+
+
+Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite a fear that
+gnawed my inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door; but the
+landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside with some wire device.
+We had previously opened the doors of all the other rooms on that hall, and
+flung all the windows to the very top. Now, noses protected by handkerchiefs,
+we tremblingly invaded the accursed south room which blazed with the warm
+sun of early afternoon.
+
+A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall door, and
+thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had accumulated. Something was
+scrawled there in pencil in an awful, blind hand on a piece of paper hideously
+smeared as though by the very claws that traced the hurried last words. Then the
+trail led to the couch and ended unutterably.
+
+What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But this is
+what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper before I drew a
+match and burned it to a crisp; what I puzzled out in terror as the landlady and
+two mechanics rushed frantically from that hellish place to babble their
+incoherent stories at the nearest police station. The nauseous words seemed well-
+nigh incredible in that yellow sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor trucks
+ascending clamorously from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess that I
+believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do not know. There
+are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all that I can say is that I
+hate the smell of ammonia, and grow faint at a draught of unusually cool air.
+
+"The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice-the man looked and
+ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I fancy you know-
+what I said about the will and the nerves and the preserved body after the organs
+ceased to work. It was good theory, but couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was
+a gradual deterioration I had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the shock killed
+him. He couldn't stand what he had to do-he had to get me in a strange, dark
+place when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs never
+would work again. It had to be done my way-preservation-for you see I died
+that time eighteen years ago."
+
+
+
+
+Dagon
+
+Written July 1917
+
+Published November 1919 in The Vagrant, No. 11, 23-29.
+
+I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be
+no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone, makes
+life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this
+garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to
+morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these
+hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I
+must have forgetfulness or death.
+
+It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that
+the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The
+great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not
+completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a
+legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and
+consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of
+our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a
+small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.
+
+When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my
+surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the
+sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew
+nothing, and no island or coastline was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for
+uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for
+some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But neither
+ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving
+vastness of unbroken blue.
+
+The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my
+slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I
+awakened, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish
+black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I
+could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.
+
+Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so
+prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more
+horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister
+quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the
+
+
+
+
+carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw
+protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope
+to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute
+silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in
+sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness
+and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.
+
+The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its
+cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I
+crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my
+position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean
+floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for
+innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery
+depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that
+I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I
+might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.
+
+For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side
+and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day
+progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry
+sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little,
+and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water,
+preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible
+rescue.
+
+On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The
+odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver
+things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day
+I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher
+than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the
+following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed
+scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attained
+the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared
+from a distance, an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the
+general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.
+
+I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and
+fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in
+a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had
+experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon
+I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching
+sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to
+
+
+
+
+perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I
+started for the crest of the eminence.
+
+I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolHng plain was a source of
+vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit
+of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or
+canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to
+illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world, peering over the rim into a
+fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences
+of Paradise Lost, and Satan's hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of
+darkness.
+
+As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley
+were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of
+rock afforded fairly easy footholds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few
+hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which
+I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood
+on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had
+yet penetrated.
+
+All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the
+opposite slope, which rose steeply about a hundred yards ahead of me; an object
+that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it
+was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious
+of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the
+work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for
+despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned
+at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt
+that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had
+known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking
+creatures.
+
+Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist's or
+archaeologist's delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon,
+now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that
+hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water
+flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping
+my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base
+of the Cyclopean monolith, on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions
+and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to
+me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books, consisting for the most part of
+conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans,
+molluscs, whales and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine
+
+
+
+
+things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms
+I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.
+
+It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound.
+Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size
+was an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Dore.
+I think that these things were supposed to depict men — at least, a certain sort of
+men; though the creatures were shown disporting like fishes in the waters of
+some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which
+appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak
+in detail, for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the
+imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline
+despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging
+eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to
+have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for
+one of the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale represented as but
+little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange
+size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some
+primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had
+perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was
+born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of
+the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer
+reflections on the silent channel before me.
+
+Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the
+surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like,
+and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the
+monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its
+hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad
+then.
+
+Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to
+the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed
+oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm
+some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I knew that I heard peals of
+thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.
+
+When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought
+thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-
+ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given
+scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing;
+nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not
+believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with
+
+
+
+
+peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-
+God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my
+inquiries.
+
+It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the
+thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has
+drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having
+written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my
+fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm — a
+mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my
+escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come
+before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea
+without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be
+crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols
+and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-
+soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag
+down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind —
+of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst
+universal pandemonium.
+
+The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body
+lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The
+window!
+
+
+
+
+Dreams in the Witch-House
+
+Written Jan-28 Feb 1932
+
+Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, Vol. 22, No. 1, 86-111.
+
+Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams
+Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding,
+festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable
+where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he
+was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a
+preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap
+mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night
+the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the
+wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house,
+were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always
+teemed with unexplained sound - and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the
+noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises
+which he suspected were lurking behind them.
+
+He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering
+gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King's
+men in the dark, olden years of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more
+steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him - for it
+was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason,
+whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That
+was in 1692 - the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small white-fanged furry
+thing which scuttled out of Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could
+explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red,
+sticky fluid.
+
+Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and
+quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them
+with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional
+reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the
+chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
+Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in
+Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of
+elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his
+imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had
+voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped
+him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept
+
+
+
+
+under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions
+came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded
+Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the
+suppressed Unaussprechlicken Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract
+formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and
+unknown.
+
+He knew his room was in the old Witch-House - that, indeed, was why he had
+taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason's
+trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and
+Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne
+of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through
+the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and
+curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of
+the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river.
+She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of
+Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
+
+Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on
+learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than two hundred and
+thirty-five years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah's
+persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular
+human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the
+childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often
+noted in the old house's attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the
+small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and
+the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he
+resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the house
+was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman
+could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be
+in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a
+mediocre old woman of the Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical
+depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg,
+Einstein, and de Sitter.
+
+He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every
+accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get
+the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practised her spells. It had
+been vacant from the first - for no one had ever been willing to stay there long -
+but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever
+happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted
+through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his
+dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch's incantations rewarded
+
+
+
+
+his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of
+unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age
+leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned
+windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a
+faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might
+not - at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys - have
+utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river,
+and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of
+grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
+
+Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall
+slating perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling
+slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole
+and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access - nor any appearance
+of a former avenue of access - to the space which must have existed between the
+slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house's north side, though a view
+from the exterior showed where a window had heen boarded up at a very
+remote date. The loft above the ceiling - which must have had a slanting floor -
+was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cob-webbed
+level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly
+and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden
+pegs common in Colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could
+induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
+
+As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room
+increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance
+which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he
+reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar
+angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone
+outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually
+veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it
+now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was on.
+
+The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time,
+apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been having a strange,
+almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found
+himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down- slanting
+ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to
+concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions
+about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of
+bearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost
+unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of
+other sounds - perhaps from regions beyond life - trembling on the very brink of
+
+
+
+
+audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were
+the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate.
+When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of
+dry rattling; and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting
+ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only
+bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
+
+The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman fell that they
+must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had
+been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him
+must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that
+old Keziah Mason - guided by some influence past all conjecture - had actually
+found the gate to those regions. The yellowed country records containing her
+testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things
+beyond human experience - and the descriptions of the darting little furry object
+which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible
+details.
+
+That object - no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the
+townspeople "Brown Jenkins - seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable
+case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had
+testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and
+disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the
+shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its
+paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the
+devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its
+voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the
+bizarre monstrosities in Oilman's dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic
+and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted
+across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking
+mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
+
+Oilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of
+inexplicably coloured twilight and baffingly disordered sound; abysses whose
+material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he
+could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or
+wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly
+involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms,
+legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of
+perspective; but he felt that his physical organization and faculties were
+somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected - though not without
+a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
+
+
+
+
+The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled
+masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while
+others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague
+memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of
+what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to
+distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be
+divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of
+conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to
+include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the
+members of the other categories.
+
+All the objects - organic and inorganic alike - were totally beyond description or
+even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic matter to
+prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and
+the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes,
+living Hindoo idols, and intricate arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian
+animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and
+whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him,
+he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the
+organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In
+time he observed a further mystery - the tendency of certain entities to appear
+suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The
+shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all
+analysis as to pitch, timbre or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague
+visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman
+had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of
+intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
+
+But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin.
+That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams
+which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He
+would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow
+would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, showing in a violet mist the
+convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The
+horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward
+him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny,
+bearded human face; but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the
+object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth;
+Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of
+the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he
+had the landlord nail a tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole,
+in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little
+fragment of bone.
+
+
+
+
+Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the
+examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was
+needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General
+Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end
+of the term.
+
+It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary
+dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned
+by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman.
+This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he
+decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually
+encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those
+occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame
+had set him almost shivering - especially the first time when an overgrown rat
+darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think
+irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being
+mirrored in his disordered dreams. That the influence of the old house was
+unwholesome he could not deny, but traces of his early morbid interest still held
+him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly
+fantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous
+visions. Those visions, however, were of absorbing vividness and
+convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having
+undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in
+unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman,
+and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a
+third being of greater potency.
+
+Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though the
+other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for
+solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his
+comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all
+the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish
+curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact
+between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the
+farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs themselves - or even as fabulously remote
+as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-
+time continuum. Oilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with
+admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an
+increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary
+eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that
+a man might - given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood
+of human acquirement - step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial
+body which might lie at one of an infinity of specifc points in the cosmic pattern.
+
+
+
+
+Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the
+three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-
+dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That
+this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable.
+Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in
+the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon
+what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry.
+Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others - even planets
+belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional phases of other space-time
+continua - though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually
+uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
+
+It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could
+survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or
+indefinitely multiplied dimensions - be they within or outside the given space-
+time continuum - and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a
+matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of
+mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next
+higher one would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it.
+Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his
+haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex
+points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of
+higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages
+from an ineffable antiquity - human or pre-human - whose knowledge of the
+cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
+
+Around 1 April Gilman worried cosiderably because his slow fever did not
+abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow lodgers said about his
+sleep-walking. It seened that he was often absent from his bed and that the
+creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the
+room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night;
+but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as
+other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop
+all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house - for did not Gilman himself,
+even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratching came from
+the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His
+pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the
+immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things
+was agonizingly realistic.
+
+However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at
+night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of
+this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose
+
+
+
+
+poverty forced him to room in this squahd and unpopular house. Elwood had
+been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential
+equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to
+open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had
+needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle
+prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there; and when
+told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot
+and with only his night clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if
+reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the
+floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only
+conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow
+window.
+
+As April advanced. Oilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the
+whining prayers of a superstitious loom-fixer named Joe Mazurewicz who had a
+room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the
+ghost of old Keziah and the furry sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he
+was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix - given him for the
+purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus' Church - could bring him relief.
+Now he was praying because the Witches' Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve
+was Walpurgis Night, when hell's blackest evil roamed the earth and all the
+slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad
+lime in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High
+and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad
+doings, and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such
+things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her
+grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one's beads at this season. For three
+months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor near Paul
+Choynski's room, nor anywhere else - and it meant no good when they held off
+like that. They must be up to something.
+
+Oilman dropped in at the doctor's office on the sixteenth of the month, and was
+surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician
+questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection,
+he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old
+Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a
+rest - an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his
+equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and
+the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
+
+But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange
+confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of immininence come from the formulae
+on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in
+
+
+
+
+the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling
+that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he
+could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the
+night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while
+seemed to trickle through the confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad
+daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on
+earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants,
+and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague
+shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
+
+The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary
+phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew
+she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose,
+and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were
+like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous
+malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking
+voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man and go with
+them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate chaos. That was what
+she said. He must sign the book of Azathoth in his own blood and take a new
+secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him
+from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos
+where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name
+"Azathoth" in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible
+for description.
+
+The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the
+downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize at a point closer
+to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more
+distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too was always a little nearer at
+the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly
+violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering struck more and more into
+Gilman's head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced
+the words "Azathoth" and "Nyarlathotep".
+
+In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that
+the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those
+organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and
+unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet,
+including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere
+or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things -
+a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very
+much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface
+angles - seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he
+
+
+
+
+changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters
+and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed
+louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly
+unendurable intensity.
+
+During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred. Gilman was half
+involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the
+small polyhedron floating ahead when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles
+formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another
+second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside
+bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his
+nightclothes. and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his
+feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from
+sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds, that might surge out of that
+vapour.
+
+Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him - the old woman
+and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to
+cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain
+direction with a horribly anthropoid forepaw which it raised with evident
+difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself
+forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman's arms and
+the direction of the small monstrosity's paw, and before he had shuffled three
+steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around
+him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the
+crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.
+
+He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes.
+Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant
+direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As
+the day advanced, the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon
+he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o'clock he went out
+for lunch and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself
+turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in
+Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
+
+He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all - perhaps there was a
+connection with his somnambulism - but meanwhile he might at least try to
+break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away
+from the pull, so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself
+deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge
+over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron
+
+
+
+
+railing as he gazed upstream at the ill- regarded island whose regular lines of
+ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
+
+Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate
+island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman
+whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall
+grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close
+to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled
+precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town's labyrinthine
+waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and
+invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in
+brown.
+
+The southeastwards pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could
+Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat
+silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o'clock
+his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors
+below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-
+golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might.
+An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman's Brook,
+with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually
+changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realized just
+where the source of the pull lay.
+
+It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was
+calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo
+Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked
+soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot, and now it was roughly
+south but stealing toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing?
+Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution,
+Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.
+
+Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and
+reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch-light.
+Joe had been out celebrating the night before - and it was Patriots' Day in
+Massachusetts - and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house
+from outside, he had thought at first that Oilman's window was dark, but then
+he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about
+that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah's witch-light which
+played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not
+mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah
+and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes
+he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light
+
+
+
+
+seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman's room, but
+they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the
+gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like
+Father Iwanicki.
+
+As the man rambled on, Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He
+knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before;
+yet the mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It
+was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and
+the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge
+into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see
+the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harborage. Yet where had the
+fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around
+the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not - but he must check up on this.
+Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
+
+Fever - wild dreams - somnambulism - illusions of sounds - a pull toward a point
+in the sky - and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying,
+see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second
+storey he paused at Elwood's door but saw that the other youth was out.
+Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His
+gaze was still pulled to the southward, but he also found himself listening
+intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil
+violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting
+ceiling.
+
+That night as Gilman slept, the violet light broke upon him with heightened
+intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing, getting closer than ever before,
+mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink
+into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent
+bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and
+irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking
+substance loomed above and below him - a shift which ended in a flash of
+delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and
+indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
+
+He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless
+jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets,
+horizontal disks poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater
+wildness - some of stone and some of metal - which glittered gorgeously in the
+mixed, almost blistering glare from a poly-chromatic sky. Looking upward he
+saw three stupendous disks of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different
+height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him
+
+
+
+
+tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below
+stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up
+from it.
+
+The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a veined polished stone
+beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes
+which struck himm as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly
+symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high,
+delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short
+intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like
+the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose
+colour could not be guessed in the chaos of mixed effulgences, and their nature
+utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged barrel-shaped objects
+with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring and with
+vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of
+these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms
+arranged around it like the arms of a starfish - nearly horizontal, but curving
+slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to
+the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been
+broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in
+height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a
+half inches.
+
+When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone,
+and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the
+endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he
+thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal
+range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might
+discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so
+that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at
+the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the
+touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic
+delicacy of the metal- work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp.
+Still half dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space
+on the smooth railing.
+
+But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked
+back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent
+furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the
+fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious; for
+they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky
+images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling
+of their lower set of starfish-arms.
+
+
+
+
+Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting
+sensation in his face, hands and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and
+dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as
+quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once
+more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the
+sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength
+had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north - infinitely north. He
+dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the
+Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled,
+for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue
+sky.
+
+After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far
+from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes,
+while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth - that ancient, half-deserted town
+which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the
+northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other
+pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other.
+Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged
+himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter
+magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he
+looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o'clock he took some lunch
+at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided
+itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane
+performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.
+
+About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into the ancient house.
+Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to
+his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he
+turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was
+something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no
+room for doubt. Lying on its side - for it could not stand up alone - was the exotic
+spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic
+balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped center, the thin
+radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving
+starfish-arms spreading from those knobs - all were there. In the electric light the
+colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green; and Gilman
+could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a
+jagged break, corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-
+railing.
+
+Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
+This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at
+
+
+
+
+the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski's quarters.
+The whining prayers of the superstitious loom-fixer were still sounding through
+the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and
+greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know
+anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the
+beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski
+called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the
+young gentleman's bed - on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to
+her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room -
+books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew
+nothing about it.
+
+So Gilman climbed upstairs again in mental turmoil, convinced that he was
+either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes
+and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outre
+thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been
+somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have
+caused the odd dream- picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would
+make some very guarded inquiries - and perhaps see the nerve specialist.
+
+Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went
+upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had
+borrowed - with a frank admission as to its purpose - from the landlord. He had
+stopped at Elwood's door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering
+his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete
+mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft
+above the slating ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but
+he was too disorganized even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was
+getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in
+the sky.
+
+In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing
+came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This
+time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone's withered claws clutching
+at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he
+heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague
+abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he
+was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a
+peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped
+level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and
+disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently
+fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on
+the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a
+
+
+
+
+counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left
+the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a
+second's dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with
+the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
+
+The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a
+figure he had never seen before - a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but
+without the slightest sign of negroid features: wholly devoid of either hair or
+beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black
+fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he
+must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position.
+The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular
+features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the
+table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman's right hand. Over
+everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached
+when the furry thing ran up the dreamer's clothing to his shoulders and then
+down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As
+the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
+
+He awaked on the morning of the twenty-second with a pain in his left wrist, and
+saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very
+confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out
+vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that
+frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor
+was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at
+the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But
+something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the
+landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting
+wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears
+were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard
+in dreams.
+
+As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after
+the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallize in his
+mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead,
+which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions
+were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and
+of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them - abysses in which all fixed
+suggestions were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble- congeries and
+the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had
+changed to wisps of mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something
+else had gone on ahead - a larger wisp which now and then condensed into
+nameless approximations of form - and he thought that their progress had not
+
+
+
+
+been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some
+ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of
+any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping
+shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous
+piping of an unseen flute - but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up
+that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the
+mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a black throne at
+the centre of Chaos.
+
+When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and
+Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him
+that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain - which was very
+curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking
+within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in
+some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or
+stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, spinkle flour within the
+room as well as outside the door - though after all no further proof of his sleep-
+walking was needed. He knew he did walk and the thing to do now was to stop
+it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from
+space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even
+more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present
+situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly.
+As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older
+northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by
+the newer and more bewildering urge.
+
+He took the spiky image down to Elwood's room, steeling himself against the
+whines of the loom-fixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in,
+thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little
+conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly
+poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very
+sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by
+his guest's drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking
+sunburn which others had remarked during the past week.
+
+There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any
+sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He
+had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking
+to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they
+dreaded the coming of Walpurgis Night, now only a few days off; and were
+exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman.
+Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman's room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps
+shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen
+
+
+
+
+fearfully up to peer through Gilman's keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told
+Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the
+door. There had been soft talking, too - and as he began to describe it his voice
+had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
+
+Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping,
+but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman's late hours and
+somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of
+traditionally-feared May Eve on the other hand. That Oilman talked in his sleep
+was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers' keyhole listenings that the
+delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people
+were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for
+a plan of action - Gilman had better move down to Elwood's room and avoid
+sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or
+rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they
+would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain
+professors; seeking identification and slating that it had been found in a public
+rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the
+walls.
+
+Braced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that day.
+Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable
+success. During a free period he showed the queer image to several professors,
+all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light
+upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had
+the landlord bring to the second-storey room, and for the first time in weeks was
+wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the
+whines of the loom-fixer were an unnerving influence.
+
+During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from
+morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, showed no tendency to talk or rise
+in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere.
+The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners,
+whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying
+to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had
+been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say;
+in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room
+above him on the first and second nights of Gilinan's absence from it. Paul
+Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and
+claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she
+had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive
+reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly
+from a knob on his host's dresser.
+
+
+
+
+For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to
+identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter,
+however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a
+tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was
+broken off and subjected to chemical analysis. Professor Ellery found platinum,
+iron and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three
+other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely
+powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known
+element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable
+elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day,
+though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
+
+On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-bole appeared in the room
+where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The
+poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls
+were virtually undiminished.
+
+Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish
+to go to sleep in a room alone - especially since he thought he had glimpsed in
+the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so
+horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had
+been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid
+courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him - though
+perhaps this was merely his imagination.
+
+The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs
+when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical
+studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and
+speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so
+darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that
+Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on
+strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches
+belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder,
+forgotten eons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually
+mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes the
+uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch's notions, and who can say
+what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
+
+Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical
+research alone, was still to be seen. Suceess, Gilman added, might lead to
+dangerous and unthinkable situations, for who could foretell the conditions
+pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand,
+the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts
+
+
+
+
+of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one's
+hfe and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration
+except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one's own or similar planes.
+One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some
+remote period of the earth's history as young as before.
+
+Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with
+any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic
+times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and
+terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the
+immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers -
+the "Black Man" of the witch-cult, and the "Nyarlathotep" of the Necronomicon.
+There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries -
+the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches' familiars.
+As Oilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe
+Mazurewicz reel into the house half drunk, and shuddered at the desperate
+wildness of his whining prayers.
+
+That night Oilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a
+scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled
+clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing
+advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame's face was alight
+with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered
+mockingly as it pointed at the heavily- sleeping form of Elwood on the other
+couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once
+before, the hideous crone seized Oilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of
+bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking abysses flashed
+past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown
+alley of foetid odors with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on
+every hand.
+
+Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other
+dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and
+grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of
+affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud
+largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the
+black man silently pointed. Into this the grinning crone started, dragging Oilman
+after her by his pajama sleeves. There were evil-smelling staircases which
+creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet
+light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch
+and pushed the door open, motioning to Oilman to wait, and disappearing inside
+the black aperture.
+
+
+
+
+The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the
+beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust
+at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the
+expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged
+recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside, halting only
+when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed
+he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
+
+On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror.
+The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he
+was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on
+the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to
+a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama bottoms
+were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly
+hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had
+been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused
+muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The
+more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to
+those he could recognize as his there were some smaller, almost round markings
+- such as the legs of a large chair or a table might make, except that most of them
+tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks
+leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the
+fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there
+were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream
+the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz
+chanting mournfully two floors below.
+
+Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling
+of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might
+really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his
+room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like
+prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond
+conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had
+tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did
+not even approximately fit. While they were talking, Desrochers dropped in to
+say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No,
+there had been no one on the stairs after midnight, though just before midnight
+he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did
+not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young
+gentleman had better be sure to wear the circifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him.
+Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in
+the house - especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
+
+
+
+
+Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix
+his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had
+seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At
+noon he lunched at the University spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as
+he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper's
+first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger
+back to Elwood's room.
+
+There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne's Gangway, and
+the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko
+had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the
+event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque
+that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the
+place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and
+titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on
+Walpurgis Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the
+room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the
+police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way
+every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would
+not help because he wanted the child out of the way.
+
+But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of
+revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after
+midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a
+crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said,
+been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in
+his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the
+feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
+
+Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood - who had meanwhile seen
+the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them - found him thus when he
+came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious
+was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the
+realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was
+crystallizing, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful
+developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now,
+when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.
+
+Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment
+both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had
+Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and
+its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed
+and unimaginable? Where - if anywhere - had he been on those nights of
+
+
+
+
+demoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses - the green hillside - the
+blistering terrace - the pulls from the stars - the ultimate black vortex - the black
+man - the muddy alley and the stairs - the old witch and the fanged, furry horror
+
+- the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron - the strange sunburn - the wrist-
+wound - the unexplained image - the muddy feet - the throat marks - the tales
+and fears of the superstitious foreigners - what did all this mean? To what extent
+could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
+
+There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut
+classes and drowsed. This was April thirtieth, and with the dusk would come the
+hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared.
+Mazurewicz came home at six o'clock and said people at the mill were
+whispering that the Walpurgis revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond
+Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly devoid of all
+plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there
+for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done.
+Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and
+Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
+
+Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the praying of
+the loom-fixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his
+preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded
+murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of
+things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself
+swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the
+Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
+
+Presently he realized what he was listening for - the hellish chant of the
+celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what
+they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were
+due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black
+goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken
+him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he
+signed the black man's book after all?
+
+Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over
+miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognized them none the less.
+The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep
+himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics - folklore
+
+- the house - old Keziah - Brown Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh
+rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer
+praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound - a stealthy, determined
+scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then
+
+
+
+
+he saw the fanged, bearded Httle face in the rat-hole - the accursed httle face
+which he at last realized bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old
+Keziah's - and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
+
+The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless
+in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small,
+kaleidoscopic polyhedron and all through the churning void there was a
+heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to
+foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know
+what was coming - the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic
+timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings
+which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in
+measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give
+hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
+
+But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten
+peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench
+and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a
+small white figure - an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious - while on the
+other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-
+hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl
+covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her
+left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could
+not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the
+Necronomicon.
+
+As the scene grew clearer he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the
+empty bowl across the table - and unable to control his own emotions, he
+reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its
+comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin
+scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone
+now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the
+huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand
+could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the
+unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a
+gnawing poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis,
+and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward
+motion of the knife broke the spell conpletely, and he dropped the bowl with a
+resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the
+monstrous deed.
+
+In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and
+wrenched the knife from the old woman's claws; sending it clattering over the
+
+
+
+
+brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were
+reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his
+own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the
+chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how
+the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was
+altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in
+his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
+
+At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed
+long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like
+claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the
+gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again.
+This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the
+creature's throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the
+crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough
+to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle,
+and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the
+morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far
+below.
+
+Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on
+the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a
+sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of
+sinew and with four tiny hands of demoniac dexterity, had been busy while the
+witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had
+prevented the knife from doing to the victim's chest, the yellow fangs of the furry
+blasphemy had done to a wrist - and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full
+beside the small lifeless body.
+
+In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish alien-rhythmed chant of the
+Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there.
+Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his
+subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the
+normal world alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the
+immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape
+through the slanting floor or the long-stooped egress he doubted greatly.
+Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-
+house - an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly
+bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.
+
+The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-
+rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto-
+veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a
+
+
+
+
+low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it
+always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to
+nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly
+overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial
+fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instincts to take him
+back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that
+green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of
+tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the spiral black vortices
+of that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the mindless demon-sultan
+Azathoth?
+
+Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter
+blackness. The witch - old Keziah - Nahab - that must have meant her death. And
+mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in
+the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown
+depths. Joe Mazurewicz - the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to
+an inexplicably triumphant shriek - worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on
+vortices of febrile dream - la! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand
+Young...
+
+They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly-angled old garret room long
+before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and
+Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly
+sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but
+seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands,
+and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled
+and Joe's crucifix was missing, Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate what
+new form his friend's sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half dazed
+because of a "sign" he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed
+himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from
+beyond the slanting partition.
+
+When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood's room they sent for
+Doctor Malkowski - a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they
+might prove embarrassing - and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections
+which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day
+the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream
+disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out
+a fresh and disconcerting fact.
+
+Gilman - whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness - was
+now stone-deaf. Doctor Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that
+both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound
+
+
+
+
+intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could
+have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley
+was more than the honest physician could say.
+
+Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy
+communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole
+chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as
+possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and
+accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police
+raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn,
+and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age- long superstitious
+regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been
+glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the
+missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
+
+The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was
+forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous
+breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partition all the evening, but
+paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the
+atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights and rushed
+over to his guest's couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably
+inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was
+writhing under the bedclothes, and a great stain was beginning to appear on the
+blankets.
+
+Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing
+subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the
+top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent
+his wife back to telephone for Doctor Malkowaki. Everybody shrieked when a
+large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined
+bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the
+doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was
+dead.
+
+It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There
+had been virtually a tunnel through his body - something had eaten his heart out.
+Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his rat- poisoning efforts, cast aside all
+thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a
+dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was
+keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loom-fixer would never stay
+sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible
+things.
+
+
+
+
+It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson
+rat-tracks which led from Gilman's couch to the near-by hole. On the carpet they
+were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet's
+edge and the baseboard. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous - or
+thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the
+undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly
+vastly unlike the average prints of a rat but even Choynski and Desrochers
+would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.
+
+The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its
+final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its
+old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord's
+rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became
+a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces
+above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead
+rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while
+to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be
+over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards.
+Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in
+the Witch-House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours
+acquiesced in the inertia - but the foetor none the less formed an additional count
+against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as a habitation by
+the building inspector.
+
+Gilman's dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained.
+Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening,
+came back to college the next autumn and was graduated in the following June.
+He found the spectral gossip of the town much disminished, and it is indeed a
+fact that - notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted
+house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself - no fresh appearances
+either of Old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman's
+death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year
+when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of
+course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of
+black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual
+nearness and several possible sights would have been.
+
+In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch-
+House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and
+rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the
+floor beneath. The whole attic storey was choked with debris from above, but no
+one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit
+structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when
+
+
+
+
+Gilman's old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the
+gossip began.
+
+Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were
+several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the
+police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university.
+There were bones - badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognizable as
+human - whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote
+period at which their only possible lurking place, the low, slant-floored loft
+overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner's
+physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others -
+found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth - belonged to a rather
+undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also
+disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-
+bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of
+controversy and reflection.
+
+Other objects found included the mangled fragments of many books and papers,
+together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older
+books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in
+its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain
+items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even
+greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing
+found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age
+differences of at least one hundred and fifty to two hundred years. To some,
+though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects -
+objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all
+conjecture - found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of
+injury. One of these things - which excited several Miskatonie professors
+profoundly is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange
+image which Oilman gave to the college museum, save that it is large, wrought
+of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly
+angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
+
+Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs
+chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous
+brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are
+equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in
+the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Maturewicz as that which he had
+given poor Oilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up
+to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in
+some corner of Oilman's old room at the time. Still others, including Joe himself,
+have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
+
+
+
+
+When the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the once-sealed
+triangular space between that partition and the house's north wall was found to
+contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room
+itself, though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralyzed the
+wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of
+small children - some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite
+gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this
+deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque,
+ornate, and exotic design - above which the debris was piled.
+
+In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of
+cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more
+bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything
+else discovered in the haunted and accursed building.
+
+This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge diseased rat, whose
+abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence
+among the members of Miskatonic's department of comparative anatomy. Very
+little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it
+whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was
+associated.
+
+The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more
+typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat, while the small skull with its
+savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain
+angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The
+workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but
+later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus' Church because of the shrill,
+ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.
+
+
+
+
+Ex Oblivione
+
+
+
+Written 1920
+
+Published March 1921 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 4, p. 59-60.
+
+When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive
+me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly
+upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my
+dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered
+through old gardens and enchanted woods.
+
+Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed
+endlessly and languorously under strange stars.
+
+Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under
+the earth till I reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours, and
+undying roses.
+
+And once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and
+ruins, and ended in a mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a
+little gate of bronze.
+
+Many times I walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause
+in the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely,
+and the grey ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, some times
+disclosing the mould-stained stones of buried temples. And alway the goal of my
+fancies was the mighty vine-grown wall with the little gate of bronze therein.
+
+After a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their
+greyness and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley
+and the shadowy groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal
+dwelling-place, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of
+interest and new colours. And as I looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall,
+I felt that beyond it lay a dream-country from which, once it was entered, there
+would be no return.
+
+So each night in sleep I strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the ivied
+antique wall, though it was exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell myself
+that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and
+radiant as well.
+
+
+
+
+Then one night in the dream-city of Zakarion I found a yellowed papyrus filled
+with the thoughts of dream-sages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were
+too wise ever to be born in the waking world. Therein were written many things
+concerning the world of dream, and among them was lore of a golden valley and
+a sacred grove with temples, and a high wall pierced by a little bronze gate.
+When I saw this lore, I knew that it touched on the scenes I had haunted, and I
+therefore read long in the yellowed papyrus.
+
+Some of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the
+irrepassable gate, but others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not
+which to believe, yet longed more and more to cross for ever into the unknown
+land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more
+terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. So when I learned of the drug
+which would unlock the gate and drive me through, I resolved to take it when
+next I awaked.
+
+Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and
+the shadowy groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that
+the small gate of bronze was ajar. From beyond came a glow that weirdly lit the
+giant twisted trees and the tops of the buried temples, and I drifted on songfully,
+expectant of the glories of the land from whence I should never return.
+
+But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of the drug and the dream pushed
+me through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new
+realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and
+illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again
+into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had
+called me for one brief and desolate hour.
+
+
+
+
+Facts Concerning the Late Arthur
+Jermyn and His Family
+
+Written 1920
+
+Published March 1921 in The Wolverine, No. 9, p. 3-11.
+
+
+Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it
+peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more
+hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps
+be the ultimate exterminator of our human species-if separate species we be-for
+its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed
+upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did;
+and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. No
+one placed the charred fragments in an urn or set a memorial to him who had
+been; for certain papers and a certain boxed object were found which made men
+wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit that he ever existed.
+
+Arthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed
+object which had come from Africa. It was this object, and not his peculiar
+personal appearance, which made him end his life. Many would have disliked to
+live if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a
+poet and scholar and had not minded. Learning was in his blood, for his great-
+grandfather. Sir Robert Jermyn, Bt., had been an anthropologist of note, whilst
+his great-great-great-grandfather. Sir Wade Jermyn, was one of the earliest
+explorers of the Congo region, and had written eruditely of its tribes, animals,
+and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed an intellectual
+zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre conjectures on a prehistoric white
+Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his book. Observation on
+the Several Parts of Africa, was published. In 1765 this fearless explorer had been
+placed in a madhouse at Huntingdon.
+
+Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of
+them. The line put forth no branches, and Arthur was the last of it. If he had not
+been, one can not say what he would have done when the object came. The
+Jermyns never seemed to look quite right-something was amiss, though Arthur
+was the worst, and the old family portraits in Jermyn House showed fine faces
+enough before Sir Wade's time. Certainly, the madness began with Sir Wade,
+whose wild stories of Africa were at once the delight and terror of his few
+
+
+
+
+friends. It showed in his collection of trophies and specimens, which were not
+such as a normal man would accumulate and preserve, and appeared strikingly
+in the Oriental seclusion in which he kept his wife. The latter, he had said, was
+the daughter of a Portuguese trader whom he had met in Africa; and did not like
+English ways. She, with an infant son born in Africa, had accompanied him back
+from the second and longest of his trips, and had gone with him on the third and
+last, never returning. No one had ever seen her closely, not even the servants; for
+her disposition had been violent and singular. During her brief stay at Jermyn
+House she occupied a remote wing, and was waited on by her husband alone. Sir
+Wade was, indeed, most peculiar in his solicitude for his family; for when he
+returned to Africa he would permit no one to care for his young son save a
+loathsome black woman from Guinea. Upon coming back, after the death of
+Lady Jermyn, he himself assumed complete care of the boy.
+
+But it was the talk of Sir Wade, especially when in his cups, which chiefly led his
+friends to deem him mad. In a rational age like the eighteenth century it was
+unwise for a man of learning to talk about wild sights and strange scenes under a
+Congo moon; of the gigantic walls and pillars of a forgotten city, crumbling and
+vine-grown, and of damp, silent, stone steps leading interminably down into the
+darkness of abysmal treasure-vaults and inconceivable catacombs. Especially
+was it unwise to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place; of
+creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged city-fabulous
+creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism; things that might
+have sprung up after the great apes had overrun the dying city with the walls
+and the pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings. Yet after he came home for the
+last time Sir Wade would speak of such matters with a shudderingly uncanny
+zest, mostly after his third glass at the Knight's Head; boasting of what he had
+found in the jungle and of how he had dwelt among terrible ruins known only to
+him. And finally he had spoken of the living things in such a manner that he was
+taken to the madhouse. He had shown little regret when shut into the barred
+room at Huntingdon, for his mind moved curiously. Ever since his son had
+commenced to grow out of infancy, he had liked his home less and less, till at last
+he had seemed to dread it. The Knight's Head had been his headquarters, and
+when he was confined he expressed some vague gratitude as if for protection.
+Three years later he died.
+
+Wade Jermyn's son Philip was a highly peculiar person. Despite a strong
+physical resemblance to his father, his appearance and conduct were in many
+particulars so coarse that he was universally shunned. Though he did not inherit
+the madness which was feared by some, he was densely stupid and given to brief
+periods of uncontrollable violence. In frame he was small, but intensely
+powerful, and was of incredible agility. Twelve years after succeeding to his title
+he married the daughter of his gamekeeper, a person said to be of gypsy
+
+
+
+
+extraction, but before his son was born joined the navy as a common sailor,
+completing the general disgust which his habits and misalliance had begun.
+After the close of the American war he was heard of as sailor on a merchantman
+in the African trade, having a kind of reputation for feats of strength and
+climbing, but finally disappearing one night as his ship lay off the Congo coast.
+
+In the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity took a strange
+and fatal turn. Tall and fairly handsome, with a sort of weird Eastern grace
+despite certain slight oddities of proportion, Robert Jermyn began life as a
+scholar and investigator. It was he who first studied scientifically the vast
+collection of relics which his mad grandfather had brought from Africa, and who
+made the family name as celebrated in ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir
+Robert married a daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and was
+subsequently blessed with three children, the eldest and youngest of whom were
+never publicly seen on account of deformities in mind and body. Saddened by
+these family misfortunes, the scientist sought relief in work, and made two long
+expeditions in the interior of Africa. In 1849 his second son, Nevil, a singularly
+repellent person who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip Jermyn with the
+hauteur of the Brightholmes, ran away with a vulgar dancer, but was pardoned
+upon his return in the following year. He came back to Jermyn House a widower
+with an infant son, Alfred, who was one day to be the father of Arthur Jermyn.
+
+Friends said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind of Sir
+Robert Jermyn, yet it was probably merely a bit of African folklore which caused
+the disaster. The elderly scholar had been collecting legends of the Onga tribes
+near the field of his grandfather's and his own explorations, hoping in some way
+to account for Sir Wade's wild tales of a lost city peopled by strange hybrid
+creatures. A certain consistency in the strange papers of his ancestor suggested
+that the madman's imagination might have been stimulated by native myths. On
+October 19, 1852, the explorer Samuel Seaton called at Jermyn House with a
+manuscript of notes collected among the Ongas, believing that certain legends of
+a gray city of white apes ruled by a white god might prove valuable to the
+ethnologist. In his conversation he probably supplied many additional details;
+the nature of which will never be known, since a hideous series of tragedies
+suddenly burst into being. When Sir Robert Jermyn emerged from his library he
+left behind the strangled corpse of the explorer, and before he could be
+restrained, had put an end to all three of his children; the two who were never
+seen, and the son who had run away. Nevil Jermyn died in the successful
+defence of his own two-year-old son, who had apparently been included in the
+old man's madly murderous scheme. Sir Robert himself, after repeated attempts
+at suicide and a stubborn refusal to utter an articulate sound, died of apoplexy in
+the second year of his confinement.
+
+
+
+
+Sir Alfred Jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday, but his tastes never
+matched his title. At twenty he had joined a band of music-hall performers, and
+at thirty-six had deserted his wife and child to travel with an itinerant American
+circus. His end was very revolting. Among the animals in the exhibition with
+which he travelled was a huge bull gorilla of lighter colour than the average; a
+surprisingly tractable beast of much popularity with the performers. With this
+gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly fascinated, and on many occasions the two
+would eye each other for long periods through the intervening bars. Eventually
+Jermyn asked and obtained permission to train the animal, astonishing audiences
+and fellow performers alike with his success. One morning in Chicago, as the
+gorilla and Alfred Jermyn were rehearsing an exceedingly clever boxing match,
+the former delivered a blow of more than the usual force, hurting both the body
+and the dignity of the amateur trainer. Of what followed, members of "The
+Greatest Show On Earth" do not like to speak. They did not expect to hear Sir
+Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream, or to see him seize his clumsy
+antagonist with both hands, dash it to the floor of the cage, and bite fiendishly at
+its hairy throat. The gorilla was off its guard, but not for long, and before
+anything could be done by the regular trainer, the body which had belonged to a
+baronet was past recognition.
+
+
+Arthur Jermyn was the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and a music-hall singer of
+unknown origin. When the husband and father deserted his family, the mother
+took the child to Jermyn House; where there was none left to object to her
+presence. She was not without notions of what a nobleman's dignity should be,
+and saw to it that her son received the best education which limited money could
+provide. The family resources were now sadly slender, and Jermyn House had
+fallen into woeful disrepair, but young Arthur loved the old edifice and all its
+contents. He was not like any other Jermyn who had ever lived, for he was a poet
+and a dreamer. Some of the neighbouring families who had heard tales of old Sir
+Wade Jermyn's unseen Portuguese wife declared that her Latin blood must be
+showing itself; but most persons merely sneered at his sensitiveness to beauty,
+attributing it to his music-hall mother, who was socially unrecognised. The
+poetic delicacy of Arthur Jermyn was the more remarkable because of his
+uncouth personal appearance. Most of the Jermyns had possessed a subtly odd
+and repellent cast, but Arthur's case was very striking. It is hard to say just what
+he resembled, but his expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave
+a thrill of repulsion to those who met him for the first time.
+
+It was the mind and character of Arthur Jermyn which atoned for his aspect.
+Gifted and learned, he took highest honours at Oxford and seemed likely to
+redeem the intellectual fame of his family. Though of poetic rather than scientific
+
+
+
+
+temperament, he planned to continue the work of his forefathers in African
+ethnology and antiquities, utilising the truly wonderful though strange collection
+of Sir Wade. With his fanciful mind he thought often of the prehistoric
+civilisation in which the mad explorer had so implicitly believed, and would
+weave tale after tale about the silent jungle city mentioned in the latter's wilder
+notes and paragraphs. For the nebulous utterances concerning a nameless,
+unsuspected race of jungle hybrids he had a peculiar feeling of mingled terror
+and attraction, speculating on the possible basis of such a fancy, and seeking to
+obtain light among the more recent data gleaned by his great-grandfather and
+Samuel Seaton amongst the Ongas.
+
+In 1911, after the death of his mother. Sir Arthur Jermyn determined to pursue
+his investigations to the utmost extent. Selling a portion of his estate to obtain the
+requisite money, he outfitted an expedition and sailed for the Congo. Arranging
+with the Belgian authorities for a party of guides, he spent a year in the Onga
+and Kahn country, finding data beyond the highest of his expectations. Among
+the Kaliris was an aged chief called Mwanu, who possessed not only a highly
+retentive memory, but a singular degree of intelligence and interest in old
+legends. This ancient confirmed every tale which Jermyn had heard, adding his
+own account of the stone city and the white apes as it had been told to him.
+
+According to Mwanu, the gray city and the hybrid creatures were no more,
+having been annihilated by the warlike N'bangus many years ago. This tribe,
+after destroying most of the edifices and killing the live beings, had carried off
+the stuffed goddess which had been the object of their quest; the white ape-
+goddess which the strange beings worshipped, and which was held by Congo
+tradition to be the form of one who had reigned as a princess among these
+beings. Just what the white apelike creatures could have been, Mwanu had no
+idea, but he thought they were the builders of the ruined city. Jermyn could form
+no conjecture, but by close questioning obtained a very picturesque legend of the
+stuffed goddess.
+
+The ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had
+come out of the West. For a long time they had reigned over the city together, but
+when they had a son, all three went away. Later the god and princess had
+returned, and upon the death of the princess her divine husband had
+mummified the body and enshrined it in a vast house of stone, where it was
+worshipped. Then he departed alone. The legend here seemed to present three
+variants. According to one story, nothing further happened save that the stuffed
+goddess became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might possess it. It
+was for this reason that the N'bangus carried it off. A second story told of a god's
+return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third told of the return of the
+son, grown to manhood-or apehood or godhood, as the case might be-yet
+
+
+
+
+unconscious of his identity. Surely the imaginative blacks had made the most of
+whatever events might lie behind the extravagant legendry.
+
+Of the reality of the jungle city described by old Sir Wade, Arthur Jermyn had no
+further doubt; and was hardly astonished when early in 1912 he came upon what
+was left of it. Its size must have been exaggerated, yet the stones lying about
+proved that it was no mere Negro village. Unfortunately no carvings could be
+found, and the small size of the expedition prevented operations toward clearing
+the one visible passageway that seemed to lead down into the system of vaults
+which Sir Wade had mentioned. The white apes and the stuffed goddess were
+discussed with all the native chiefs of the region, but it remained for a European
+to improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. M. Verhaeren, Belgian agent at a
+trading-post on the Congo, believed that he could not only locate but obtain the
+stuffed goddess, of which he had vaguely heard; since the once mighty N'bangus
+were now the submissive servants of King Albert's government, and with but
+little persuasion could be induced to part with the gruesome deity they had
+carried off. When Jermyn sailed for England, therefore, it was with the exultant
+probability that he would within a few months receive a priceless ethnological
+relic confirming the wildest of his great-great-great-grandfather's narratives-that
+is, the wildest which he had ever heard. Countrymen near Jermyn House had
+perhaps heard wilder tales handed down from ancestors who had listened to Sir
+Wade around the tables of the Knight's Head.
+
+Arthur Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M. Verhaeren,
+meanwhile studying with increased diligence the manuscripts left by his mad
+ancestor. He began to feel closely akin to Sir Wade, and to seek relics of the
+latter's personal life in England as well as of his African exploits. Oral accounts
+of the mysterious and secluded wife had been numerous, but no tangible relic of
+her stay at Jermyn House remained. Jermyn wondered what circumstance had
+prompted or permitted such an effacement, and decided that the husband's
+insanity was the prime cause. His great-great-great-grandmother, he recalled,
+was said to have been the daughter of a Portuguese trader in Africa. No doubt
+her practical heritage and superficial knowledge of the Dark Continent had
+caused her to flout Sir Wade's tales of the interior, a thing which such a man
+would not be likely to forgive. She had died in Africa, perhaps dragged thither
+by a husband determined to prove what he had told. But as Jermyn indulged in
+these reflections he could not but smile at their futility, a century and a half after
+the death of both his strange progenitors.
+
+In June, 1913, a letter arrived from M. Verhaeren, telling of the finding of the
+stuffed goddess. It was, the Belgian averred, a most extraordinary object; an
+object quite beyond the power of a layman to classify. Whether it was human or
+simian only a scientist could determine, and the process of determination would
+
+
+
+
+be greatly hampered by its imperfect condition. Time and the Congo chmate are
+not kind to mummies; especially when their preparation is as amateurish as
+seemed to be the case here. Around the creature's neck had been found a golden
+chain bearing an empty locket on which were armorial designs; no doubt some
+hapless traveller's keepsake, taken by the N'bangus and hung upon the goddess
+as a charm. In commenting on the contour of the mummy's face, M. Verhaeren
+suggested a whimsical comparison; or rather, expressed a humorous wonder just
+how it would strike his corespondent, but was too much interested scientifically
+to waste many words in levity. The stuffed goddess, he wrote, would arrive duly
+packed about a month after receipt of the letter.
+
+The boxed object was delivered at Jermyn House on the afternoon of August 3,
+1913, being conveyed immediately to the large chamber which housed the
+collection of African specimens as arranged by Sir Robert and Arthur. What
+ensued can best be gathered from the tales of servants and from things and
+papers later examined. Of the various tales, that of aged Soames, the family
+butler, is most ample and coherent. According to this trustworthy man. Sir
+Arthur Jermyn dismissed everyone from the room before opening the box,
+though the instant sound of hammer and chisel showed that he did not delay the
+operation. Nothing was heard for some time; just how long Soames cannot
+exactly estimate, but it was certainly less than a quarter of an hour later that the
+horrible scream, undoubtedly in Jermyn's voice, was heard. Immediately
+afterward Jermyn emerged from the room, rushing frantically toward the front of
+the house as if pursued by some hideous enemy. The expression on his face, a
+face ghastly enough in repose, was beyond description. When near the front door
+he seemed to think of something, and turned back in his flight, finally
+disappearing down the stairs to the cellar. The servants were utterly
+dumbfounded, and watched at the head of the stairs, but their master did not
+return. A smell of oil was all that came up from the regions below. After dark a
+rattling was heard at the door leading from the cellar into the courtyard; and a
+stable-boy saw Arthur Jermyn, glistening from head to foot with oil and redolent
+of that fluid, steal furtively out and vanish on the black moor surrounding the
+house. Then, in an exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A spark
+appeared on the moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached to the
+heavens. The house of Jermyn no longer existed.
+
+The reason why Arthur Jermyn's charred fragments were not collected and
+buried lies in what was found afterward, principally the thing in the box. The
+stuffed goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was
+clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any
+recorded variety, and infinitely nearer mankind-quite shockingly so. Detailed
+description would be rather unpleasant, but two salient particulars must be told,
+for they fit in revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn's African
+
+
+
+
+expeditions and with the Congolese legends of the white god and the ape-
+princess. The two particulars in question are these: the arms on the golden locket
+about the creature's neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose suggestion of M.
+Verhaeren about certain resemblance as connected with the shrivelled face
+applied with vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other than the
+sensitive Arthur Jermyn, great-great-great-grandson of Sir Wade Jermyn and an
+unknown wife. Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute burned the thing
+and threw the locket into a well, and some of them do not admit that Arthur
+Jermyn ever existed.
+
+
+
+
+From Beyond
+
+
+
+Written 1920
+
+Published June 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, 1, No. 10, 147-51, 160.
+
+Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best
+friend, Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen him since that day, two months and
+a half before, when he told me toward what goal his physical and metaphysical
+researches were leading; when he had answered my awed and almost frightened
+remonstrances by driving me from his laboratory and his house in a burst of
+fanatical rage. I had known that he now remained mostly shut in the attic
+laboratory with that accursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding even
+the servants, but I had not thought that a brief period of ten weeks could so alter
+and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to see a stout man suddenly
+grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin becomes yellowed or
+grayed, the eyes sunken, circled, and uncannily glowing, the forehead veined
+and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this
+there be a repellent unkemptness, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark
+hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard on a face once
+clean-shaven, the cumulative effect is quite shocking. But such was the aspect of
+Crawford TilUinghast on the night his half coherent message brought me to his
+door after my weeks of exile; such was the specter that trembled as it admitted
+me, candle in hand, and glanced furtively over its shoulder as if fearful of unseen
+things in the ancient, lonely house set back from Benevolent Street.
+
+That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was
+a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator
+for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action;
+despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he
+succeed. Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy;
+but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my own, that he was the prey of
+success. I had indeed warned him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his
+tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He had been flushed and excited
+then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always pedantic, voice.
+
+"What do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about us? Our
+means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of
+surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed
+to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses
+we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings
+with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very
+
+
+
+
+differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter,
+energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses
+we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at
+our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break dawn the
+barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table
+will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as
+atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas
+unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We
+shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up
+their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no
+breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions,
+and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation."
+
+When Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough to
+be frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the
+house. Now he was no less a fanatic, but his desire to speak had conquered his
+resentment, and he had written me imperatively in a hand I could scarcely
+recognize. As I entered the abode of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a
+shivering gargoyle, I became infected with the terror which seemed stalking in
+all the shadows. The words and beliefs expressed ten weeks before seemed
+bodied forth in the darkness beyond the small circle of candle light, and I
+sickened at the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the servants were
+about, and did not like it when he said they had all left three days previously. It
+seemed strange that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without
+telling as tried a friend as I. It was he who had given me all the information I had
+of Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.
+
+Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination.
+Just what Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he
+had some stupendous secret or discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I
+had protested at his unnatural pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had
+evidently succeeded to some degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though the
+cost of victory appeared. Up through the dark emptiness of the house I followed
+the bobbing candle in the hand of this shaking parody on man. The electricity
+seemed to be turned off, and when I asked my guide he said it was for a definite
+reason.
+
+"It would he too much... I would not dare," he continued to mutter. I especially
+noted his new habit of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to himself. We
+entered the laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable electrical
+machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister violet luminosity. It was connected with
+a powerful chemical battery, but seemed to be receiving no current; for I recalled
+that in its experimental stage it had sputtered and purred when in action. In
+
+
+
+
+reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that this permanent glow was not
+electrical in any sense that I could understand.
+
+He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a
+switch somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual
+sputtering began, turned to a whine, and terminated in a drone so soft as to
+suggest a return to silence. Meanwhile the luminosity increased, waned again,
+then assumed a pale, outre colour or blend of colours which I could neither place
+nor describe. Tillinghast had been watching me, and noted my puzzled
+expression.
+
+"Do you know what that is?" he whispered, "That is ultra-violet." He chuckled
+oddly at my surprise. "You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is - but
+you can see that and many other invisible things now.
+
+"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses
+in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached
+electrons to the state of organic humanity. I have seen the truth, and I intend to
+show it to you. Do you wonder how it will seem? I will tell you." Here
+Trninghast seated himself directly opposite me, blowing out his candle and
+staring hideously into my eyes. "Your existing sense-organs - ears first, I think -
+will pick up many of the impressions, for they are closely connected with the
+dormant organs. Then there will be others. You have heard of the pineal gland? I
+laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and fellow-parvenu of the
+Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of organs - I have found out. It is
+like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain. If you are normal,
+that is the way you ought to get most of it. . . I mean get most of the evidence
+from beyond."
+
+I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by
+rays which the every day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows and
+the whole place took on a hazy unreality which obscured its nature and invited
+the imagination to symbolism and phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast
+was long silent I fancied myself in some vast incredible temple of long-dead
+gods; some vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from
+a floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision. The
+picture was very vivid for a while, but gradually gave way to a more horrible
+conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite, sightless, soundless space.
+There seemed to a void, and nothing more, and I felt a childish fear which
+prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I carried after dark since
+the night I was held up in East Providence. Then from the farthermost regions of
+remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was infinitely faint, subtly
+vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a quality of surpassing wildness
+
+
+
+
+which made its impact feel Hke a dehcate torture of my whole body. I felt
+sensations like those one feels when accidentally scratching ground glass.
+Simultaneously there developed something like a cold draught, which
+apparently swept past me from the direction of the distant sound. As I waited
+breathlessly I perceived that both sound and wind were increasing; the effect
+being to give me an odd notion of myself as tied to a pair of rails in the path of a
+gigantic approaching locomotive. I began to speak to Tillinghast, and as I did so
+all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished. I saw only the man, the glowing
+machines, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was grinning repulsively at the
+revolver which I had almost unconsciously drawn, but from his expression I was
+sure he had seen and heard as much as I, if not a great deal more. I whispered
+what I had experienced and he bade me to remain as quiet and receptive as
+possible.
+
+"Don't move," he cautioned, "for in these rays we are able to be seen as well as to
+see. I told you the servants left, but I didn't tell you how. It was that thick-witted
+house-keeper - she turned on the lights downstairs after I had warned her not to,
+and the wires picked up sympathetic vibrations. It must have been frightful - I
+could hear the screams up here in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from
+another direction, and later it was rather awful to find those empty heaps of
+clothes around the house. Mrs. Updike's clothes were close to the front hall
+switch - that's how I know she did it. It got them all. But so long as we don't
+move we're fairly safe. Remember we're dealing with a hideous world in which
+we are practically helpless... Keep still!"
+
+The combined shock of the revelation and of the abrupt command gave me a
+kind of paralysis, and in my terror my mind again opened to the impressions
+coming from what Tillinghast called "beyond." I was now in a vortex of sound
+and motion, with confused pictures before my eyes. I saw the blurred outlines of
+the room, but from some point in space there seemed to be pouring a seething
+column of unrecognizable shapes or clouds, penetrating the solid roof at a point
+ahead and to the right of me. Then I glimpsed the temple - like effect again, but
+this time the pillars reached up into an aerial ocean of light, which sent down one
+blinding beam along the path of the cloudy column I had seen before. After that
+the scene was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble of sights, sounds,
+and unidentified sense-impressions I felt that I was about to dissolve or in some
+way lose the solid form. One definite flash I shall always remember. I seemed for
+an instant to behold a patch of strange night sky filled with shining, revolving
+spheres, and as it receded I saw that the glowing suns formed a constellation or
+galaxy of settled shape; this shape being the distorted face of Crawford
+Tillinghast. At another time I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and
+occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body, and thought
+I saw Tillinghast look at them as though his better trained senses could catch
+
+
+
+
+them visually. I recalled what he had said of the pineal gland, and wondered
+what he saw with this preternatural eye.
+
+Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and
+above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague,
+held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat
+familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene
+much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theater. I
+saw the attic laboratory, the electrical machine, and the unsightly form of
+Tillinghast opposite me; but of all the space unoccupied by familiar objects not
+one particle was vacant. Indescribable shapes both alive and otherwise were
+mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds
+of alien, unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things entered
+into the composition of other unknown things and vice versa. Foremost among
+the living objects were inky, jellyfish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in
+harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome
+profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-
+fluid and capable of passing through one another and through what we know as
+solids. These things were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some
+malignant purpose. Sometimes they appeared to devour one another, the
+attacker launching itself at its victim and instantaneously obliterating the latter
+from sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated the unfortunate
+servants, and could not exclude the thing from my mind as I strove to observe
+other properties of the newly visible world that lies unseen around us. But
+Tillinghast had been watching me and was speaking.
+
+"You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you
+and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form
+what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking
+down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have
+seen?" I heard his scream through the horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face
+thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared
+at me with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred. The machine droned
+detestably.
+
+"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are
+harmless! But the servants are gone, aren't they? You tried to stop me; you
+discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you
+were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I've got you! What
+swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud?... Don't know, eh!
+You'll know soon enough. Look at me - listen to what I say - do you suppose
+there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are
+such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck depths that your little
+
+
+
+
+brain can't picture. I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down
+daemons from the stars... I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world
+to world to sow death and madness... Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things
+are hunting me now - the things that devour and dissolve - but I know how to
+elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants... Stirring, dear sir? I
+told you it was dangerous to move, I have saved you so far by telling you to keep
+still - saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they
+would have been at you long ago. Don't worry, they won't hurt you. They didn't
+hurt the servants - it was the seeing that made the poor devils scream so. My pets
+are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are - very
+different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you — but I want you to see
+them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are curious? I always
+knew you were no scientist. Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the
+ultimate things I have discovered. Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well, don't
+worry, my friend, for they are coming... Look, look, curse you, look... it's just
+over your left shoulder. . ."
+
+What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the
+newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and
+found us there - Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They arrested me because
+the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours, after they found it
+was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been
+directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the
+laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of what I had seen, for I feared the
+coroner would be skeptical; but from the evasive outline I did give, the doctor
+told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotized by the vindictive and homicidal
+madman.
+
+I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I could
+dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I
+never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes
+chillingly on me when I am weary. What prevents me from believing the doctor
+is one simple fact - that the police never found the bodies of those servants whom
+they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.
+
+
+
+
+He
+
+Written 11 Aug 1925
+
+Published September 1926 in Weird Tales, Vol. 8, No. 3, P. 373-80.
+
+I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul
+and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had
+looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient
+streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to
+courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean
+modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons,
+I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to
+master, paralyze, and annihilate me.
+
+The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had
+seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks
+and pyramids rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist to play
+with the flaming clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up
+window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and
+glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry
+firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of
+Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and half- fabulous
+cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so dear to my
+fancy-narrow, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick
+blinked with small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had looked on
+gilded sedans and paneled coaches - and in the first flush of realization of these
+long-wished things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would
+make me in time a poet.
+
+But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only squalor
+and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where
+the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people
+that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with
+hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without
+kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed
+man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England
+village steeples in his heart.
+
+So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness
+and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever
+dared to breathe before - the unwhisperable secret of secrets - the fact that this
+
+
+
+
+city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as
+London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead,
+its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate
+things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this
+discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned
+tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off the streets
+by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little
+of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the
+stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of relief I even
+wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem
+to crawl back ignobly in defeat.
+
+Then, on a sleepless night's walk, I met the man. It was in a grotesque hidden
+courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled,
+having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and artists. The archaic
+lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and court had indeed delighted
+me, and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose
+quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is
+poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I fancied them as
+they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed
+by the town; and in the hours before dawn, when all the revellers had slunk
+away, I used to wander alone among their cryptical windings and brood upon
+the curious arcana which generations must have deposited there. This kept my
+soul alive, and gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far
+within me cried out.
+
+The man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I was
+threading a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through the
+unlighted hallways of intervening buildings, but once forming parts of a
+continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of them by vague rumor,
+and realized that they could not be upon any map of today; but the fact that they
+were forgotten only endeared them to me, so that I had sought them with twice
+my usual eagerness. Now that I had found them, my eagerness was again
+redoubled; for something in their arrangement dimly hinted that they might be
+only a few of many such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely
+betwixt high blank walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly
+behind archways unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by
+furtive and uncommunicative artists whose practises do not invite publicity or
+the light of day.
+
+He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I studied
+certain knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid glow of traceried
+transoms feebly lighting my face. His own face was in shadow, and he wore a
+
+
+
+
+wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended perfectly with the out-of-date cloak
+he affected; but I was subtly disquieted even before he addressed me. His form
+was very slight; thin almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved
+phenomenally soft and hollow, though not particularly deep. He had, he said,
+noticed me several times at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in
+loving the vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of one long
+practised in these explorations, and possessed of local information profoundly
+deeper than any which an obvious newcomer could possibly have gained?
+
+As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a solitary
+attic window. It was a noble, even a handsome elderly countenance; and bore the
+marks of a lineage and refinement unusual for the age and place. Yet some
+quality about it disturbed me almost as much as its features pleased me - perhaps
+it was too white, or too expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the
+locality, to make me feel easy or comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in
+those dreary days my quest for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had to
+keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a rare favor of Fate to fall in with one
+whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so much farther than mine.
+
+Something in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence and for a long
+hour he led me forward without needless words; making only the briefest of
+comments concerning ancient names and dates and changes, and directing my
+progress very largely by gestures as we squeezed through interstices, tiptoed
+through corridors clambered over brick walls, and once crawled on hands and
+knees through a low, arched passage of stone whose immense length and
+tortuous twistings effaced at last every hint of geographical location I had
+managed to preserve. The things we saw were very old and marvelous, or at
+least they seemed so in the few straggling rays of light by which I viewed them,
+and I shall never forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters and urn-
+headed iron fenceposts and flaring-linteled windows and decorative fanlights
+that appeared to grow quainter and stranger the deeper we advanced into this
+inexhaustible maze of unknown antiquity.
+
+We met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became fewer and
+fewer. The streetlights we first encountered had been of oil, and of the ancient
+lozenge pattern. Later I noticed some with candles; and at last, after traversing a
+horrible unlighted court where my guide had to lead with his gloved hand
+through total blackness to a narrow wooded gate in a high wall, we came upon a
+fragment of alley lit only by lanterns in front of every seventh house -
+unbelievably Colonial tin lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in the
+sides. This alley led steeply uphill - more steeply than I thought possible in this
+part of New York - and the upper end was blocked squarely by the ivy-clad wall
+of a private estate, beyond which I could see a pale cupola, and the tops of trees
+
+
+
+
+waving against a vague lightness in the sky. In this wall was a small, low-arched
+gate of nail-studded black oak, which the man proceeded to unlock with a
+ponderous key. Leading me within, he steered a course in utter blackness over
+what seemed to be a gravel path, and finally up a flight of stone steps to the door
+of the house, which he unlocked and opened for me.
+
+We entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite mustiness which
+welled out to meet us, and which must have been the fruit of unwholesome
+centuries of decay. My host appeared not to notice this, and in courtesy I kept
+silent as he piloted me up a curving stairway, across a hall, and into a room
+whose door I heard him lock behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the
+three small-paned windows that barely showed themselves against the
+lightening sky; after which he crossed to the mantel, struck flint and steel, lighted
+two candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces, and made a gesture enjoining
+soft-toned speech.
+
+In this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious, well-furnished and
+paneled library dating from the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century, with
+splendid doorway pediments, a delightful Doric cornice, and a magnificently
+carved overmantel with scroU-and-urn top. Above the crowded bookshelves at
+intervals along the walls were well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to an
+enigmatical dimness, and bearing an unmistakable likeness to the man who now
+motioned me to a chair beside the graceful Chippendale table. Before seating
+himself across the table from me, my host paused for a moment as if in
+embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves, wide-brimmed hat, and cloak,
+stood theatrically revealed in full mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and
+neck ruffles to knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not
+previously noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to
+eye me intently.
+
+Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely visible
+before, and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular longevity were not
+one of the sources of my disquiet. When he spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and
+carefully muffled voice not infrequently quavered; and now and then I had great
+difficulty in following him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and half-
+disavowed alarm which grew each instant.
+
+"You behold. Sir," my host began, "a man of very eccentrical habits for whose
+costume no apology need be offered to one with your wit and inclinations.
+Reflecting upon better times, I have not scrupled to ascertain their ways, and
+adopt their dress and manners; an indulgence which offends none if practised
+without ostentation. It hath been my good fortune to retain the rural seat of my
+ancestors, swallowed though it was by two towns, first Greenwich, which built
+
+
+
+
+up hither after 1800, then New York, which joined on near 1830. There were
+many reasons for the close keeping of this place in my family, and I have not
+been remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who succeeded to it in
+1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all connected with
+influences residing in this particular plot of ground, and eminently desarving of
+the strongest guarding. Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now
+purpose to show you, under the strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my
+judgement of men enough to have no distrust of either your interest or your
+fidelity."
+
+He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was alarmed, yet to
+my soul nothing was more deadly than the material daylight world of New York,
+and whether this man were a harmless eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts, I
+had no choice save to follow him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he
+might have to offer. So I listened.
+
+"To - my ancestor," he softly continued, "there appeared to reside some very
+remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected
+dominance not only over the acts of one's self and of others, but over every
+variety of force and substance in Nature, and over many elements and
+dimensions deemed more universal than Nature herself. May I say that he
+flouted the sanctity of things as great as space and time and that he put to
+strange uses the rites of sartain half-breed red Indians once encamped upon this
+hill? These Indians showed choler when the place was built, and were plaguey
+pestilent in asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they
+stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth performed
+sartain acts. Then, in '68, the new squire catched them at their doings, and stood
+still at what he saw. Thereafter he bargained with them and exchanged the free
+access of his grounds for the exact inwardness of what they did, larning that their
+grandfathers got part of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old
+Dutchman in the time of the States-General. Arid pox on him, I'm afeared the
+squire must have sarved them monstrous bad rum - whether or not by intent -
+for a week after he larnt the secret he was the only man living that knew it. You,
+Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and split me if I'd have risked
+tampering that much with - the powers - had ye not been so hot after bygone
+things."
+
+I shuddered as the man grew colloquial - and with the familiar speech of another
+day. He went on.
+
+"But you must know. Sir, that what - the squire - got from those mongrel savages
+was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had not been at Oxford
+for nothing, nor talked to no account with an ancient chymist and astrologer in
+
+
+
+
+Paris. He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our
+intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and
+drawn in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make
+about us; and what we don't want, we may sweep away. I won't say that all this
+is wholly true in body, but 'tis sufficient true to furnish a very pretty spectacle
+now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled hy a better sight of sartain other
+years than your fancy affords you; so be pleased to hold back any fright at what I
+design to show. Come to the window and be quiet."
+
+My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the long
+side of the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his ungloved fingers I
+turned cold. His flesh, though dry and firm, was of the quality of ice; and I
+almost shrank away from his pulling. But again I thought of the emptiness and
+horror of reality, and boldly prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led.
+Once at the window, the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed
+my stare into the blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad
+of tiny dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in response to an insidious
+motion of my host's hand, a flash of heat-lightning played over the scene, and I
+looked out upon a sea of luxuriant foliage - foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of
+roofs to be expected by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered
+wickedly, and in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt
+marsh constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile
+illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer.
+
+"That was before my time - before the new squire's time. Pray let us try again."
+
+I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed city had
+made me.
+
+"Good God!" I whispered, "can you do that for any time?" And as he nodded,
+and bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs, I clutched at the
+curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he steadied me with that terrible, ice-
+cold claw, and once more made his insidious gesture.
+
+Again the lightning flashed - but this time upon a scene not wholly strange. It
+was Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here and there a roof or row
+of houses as we see it now, yet with lovely green lanes and fields and bits of
+grassy common. The marsh still glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I
+saw the steeples of what was then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul's and the
+Brick Church dominating their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke hovering
+over the whole. I breathed hard, hut not so much from the sight itself as from the
+possibilities my imagination terrifiedly conjured up.
+
+
+
+
+"Can you - dare you - go far?" I spoke with awe and I think he shared it for a
+second, but the evil grin returned.
+
+"Far? What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back, back -
+forward, forward - look ye puling lackwit!"
+
+And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew bringing to the
+sky a flash more blinding than either which had come before. For full three
+seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a
+vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens
+verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of
+giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and
+devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on
+aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in
+orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums,
+the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose
+ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the wave of an unhallowed ocean of
+bitumen.
+
+I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind's ear the blasphemous
+domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the shrieking fulfilment
+of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and
+forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and screamed as
+my nerves gave way and the walls quivered about me.
+
+Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a look of
+shocking fear half-blotting from his face the serpent distortion of rage which my
+screams had excited. He tottered, clutched at the curtains as I had done before,
+and wriggled his head wildly, like a hunted animal. God knows he had cause, for
+as the echoes of my screaming died away there came another sound so hellishly
+suggestive that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the
+steady, stealthy creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as with the ascent
+of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at last the cautious, purposeful rattling of
+the brass latch that glowed in the feeble candlelight. The old man clawed and
+spat at me through the moldy air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed
+with the yellow curtain he clutched.
+
+"The full moon - damn ye - ye... ye yelping dog - ye called 'em, and they've
+come for me! Moccasined feet - dead men - Gad sink ye, ye red devils, but I
+poisoned no rum o' yours - han't I kept your pox-rotted magic safe - ye swilled
+yourselves sick, curse ye, and yet must needs blame the squire - let go, you!
+Unhand that latch - I've naught for ye here - "
+
+
+
+
+At this point three slow and very dehberate raps shook the panels of the door,
+and a white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic magician. His fright,
+turning to steely despair, left room for a resurgence of his rage against me; and
+he staggered a step toward the table on whose edge I was steadying myself. The
+curtains, still clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut
+and finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the room a
+flood of that full moonlight which the brightening of the sky had presaged. In
+those greenish beams the candles paled, and a new semblance of decay spread
+over the musk-reeking room with its wormy paneling, sagging floor, battered
+mantel, rickety furniture, and ragged draperies. It spread over the old man, too,
+whether from the same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I saw
+him shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with vulturine
+talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a propulsive, dilated
+incandescence which grew as the face around them charred and dwindled.
+
+The rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time bore a hint
+of metal. The black thing facing me had become only a head with eyes,
+impotently trying to wriggle across the sinking floor in my direction, and
+occasionally emitting feeble little spits of immortal malice. Now swift and
+splintering blows assailed the sickly panels, and I saw the gleam of a tomahawk
+as it cleft the rending wood. I did not move, for I could not; but watched dazedly
+as the door fell in pieces to admit a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance
+starred with shining, malevolent eyes. It poured thickly, like a flood of oil
+bursting a rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and finally flowed
+under the table and across the room to where the blackened head with the eyes
+still glared at me. Around that head it closed, totally swallowing it up, and in
+another moment it had begun to recede; bearing away its invisible burden
+without touching me, and flowing again out that black doorway and down the
+unseen stairs, which creaked as before, though in reverse order.
+
+Then the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the nighted
+chamber below, choking with cobwebs and half-swooning with terror. The green
+moon, shining through broken windows, showed me the hall door half open;
+and as I rose from the plaster-strewn floor and twisted myself free from the
+sagged ceiling, I saw sweep past it an awful torrent of blackness, with scores of
+baleful eyes glowing in it. It was seeking the door to the cellar, and when it
+found it, vanished therein. I now felt the floor of this lower room giving as that of
+the upper chamber had done, and once a crashing above had been followed by
+the fall past the west window of some thing which must have been the cupola.
+Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I rushed through the hall to the
+front door and finding myself unable to open it, seized a chair and broke a
+window, climbing frenziedly out upon the unkempt lawn where moon light
+danced over yard-high grass and weeds. The wall was high and all the gates
+
+
+
+
+were locked but moving a pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain the top and
+cling to the great stone urn set there.
+
+About me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows and old
+gambrel roofs. The steep street of my approach was nowhere visible, and the
+little I did see succumbed rapidly to a mist that rolled in from the river despite
+the glaring moonlight. Suddenly the urn to which I clung began to tremble, as if
+sharing my own lethal dizziness; and in another instant my body was plunging
+downward to I knew not what fate.
+
+The man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite my
+broken bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared look. The
+gathering rain soon effaced this link with the scene of my ordeal, and reports
+could state no more than that I had appeared from a place unknown, at the
+entrance to a little black court off Perry Street.
+
+I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I direct any
+sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no
+idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and full of unsuspected horrors. Whither
+he has gone, I do not know; but I have gone home to the pure New England
+lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening.
+
+
+
+
+Herbert West: Reanitnator
+
+Written Sep 1921-mid 1922
+
+Published in six parts, February-July 1922 in Home Brew, Vol. 1, Nos. 1-6.
+
+I. From The Dark
+
+Published Februrary 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 19-25.
+
+Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only
+with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his
+recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work,
+and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in
+the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in
+Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments
+fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and
+the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever
+more hideous than realities.
+
+The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever
+experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it
+happened when we were in the medical school where West had already made
+himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the
+possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed
+by the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic
+nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of
+mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In
+his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed and treated
+immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had
+become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained
+signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs but he soon
+saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily
+involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same
+solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require
+human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he
+first came into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future
+experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself —
+the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the
+stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.
+
+
+
+
+I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West's pursuits, and we frequently
+discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite.
+Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the
+so-called "soul" is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the
+dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual
+decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable
+measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the
+psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of
+sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would be apt to cause.
+West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which would
+restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on
+animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial life-motions were
+incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his
+solutions into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this
+circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that
+true death had not occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter
+closely and reasoningly.
+
+It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to
+me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in
+secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him
+discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never
+procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved
+inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom
+questioned. West was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate
+features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear
+him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter's
+field. We finally decided on the potter's field, because practically every body in
+Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West's researches.
+
+I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all
+his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable
+place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted Chapman
+farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an
+operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our
+midnight doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other
+house, yet precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange
+lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our
+enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if
+discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science
+with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college
+— materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes — and provided
+spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At
+
+
+
+
+the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our
+unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance — even the small
+guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West's room at the
+boarding-house.
+
+We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded
+particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and
+without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and
+certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for
+many weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with morgue
+and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college's interest, as often as we could
+without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every
+case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer,
+when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end, though, luck
+favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter's field; a
+brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Summer's Pond,
+and buried at the town's expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon
+we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight. It
+was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we
+lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences
+brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although electric
+torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten
+contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid — it might
+have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists — and
+we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully
+uncovered. West scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and
+propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the
+grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The
+affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our
+first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had
+patted down the last shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack
+and set out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill.
+
+On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a
+powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had
+been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type
+— large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired — a sound animal without
+psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest and
+healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead;
+though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at
+last what West had always longed for — a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready
+for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and
+theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew
+
+
+
+
+that there was scarcely a chance for anything hke complete success, and could
+not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation.
+Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the
+creature, since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral
+cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious
+notions about the traditional "soul" of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that
+might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid
+youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully
+restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I
+shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large
+quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body's arm, immediately binding the
+incision securely.
+
+The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he
+applied his stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results
+philosophically. After about three-quarters of an hour without the least sign of
+life he disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate, but determined to
+make the most of his opportunity and try one change in the formula before
+disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar,
+and would have to fill it by dawn — for although we had fixed a lock on the
+house, we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery.
+Besides, the body would not be even approximately fresh the next night. So
+taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent
+guest on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new
+solution; the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost
+fanatical care.
+
+The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring
+something from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol
+blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when
+from the pitch-black room we had left there burst the most appalling and
+daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more
+unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had
+opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony
+was centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature.
+Human it could not have been — it is not in man to make such sounds — and
+without a thought of our late employment or its possible discovery, both West
+and I leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes,
+lamp, and retorts, and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I
+think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled frantically toward the town,
+though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint — just
+enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home from a debauch.
+
+
+
+
+We did not separate, but managed to get to West's room, where we whispered
+with the gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with
+rational theories and plans for investigation, so that we could sleep through the
+day — classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper,
+wholly unrelated, made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted
+Chapman house had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that
+we could understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made
+to disturb a new grave in the potter's field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing
+at the earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould
+very carefully.
+
+And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder,
+and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.
+
+II. The Plague-Daemon
+
+Pubhshed March 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 45-50.
+
+I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious
+afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by
+that Satanic scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-
+wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me
+there is a greater horror in that time — a horror known to me alone now that
+Herbert West has disappeared.
+
+West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical
+school of Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety
+because of his experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After
+the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work had
+ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical dean. Dr. Allan Halsey; though West
+had continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room,
+and had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its
+grave in the potter's field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.
+
+I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the
+elixir which he thought would to some extent restore life's chemical and physical
+processes. It had ended horribly — in a delirium of fear which we gradually
+came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves — and West had never
+afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and
+hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore
+normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and the burning of
+the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been
+better if we could have known it was underground.
+
+
+
+
+After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the
+zeal of the born scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the
+college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of fresh human
+specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas,
+however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and
+the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory
+of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful
+enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice
+gave no hint of the supernormal — almost diabolical — power of the cold brain
+within. I can see him now as he was then — and I shiver. He grew sterner of face,
+but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has
+vanished.
+
+West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last
+undergraduate term in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the
+kindiy dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally
+retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he could of course conduct to
+suit himself in later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed of
+the exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound elders should
+ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the
+possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost
+incomprehensible to a youth of West's logical temperament. Only greater
+maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the
+"professor-doctor" type — the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism;
+kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow,
+intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for
+these incomplete yet high-souled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity,
+and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins —
+sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every
+sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite his
+marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and
+his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a
+desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and
+dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of
+revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.
+
+And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns
+of Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had
+remained for additional work at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham
+when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet
+licenced physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed frantically into
+public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past
+management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to
+
+
+
+
+handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession, and even the
+Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the
+unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who
+thought often of the irony of the situation — so many fresh specimens, yet none
+for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific
+mental and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly.
+
+But West's gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College
+had all but closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight
+the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in
+sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases
+which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before
+a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he
+seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with
+physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration
+for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to
+prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the
+disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he
+managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university
+dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his
+solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a
+look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which
+nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough — the hot summer air
+does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught before we incinerated
+the thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring misuse of
+the college laboratory.
+
+The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead,
+and Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral
+on the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite
+overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the
+municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been a
+public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and
+spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though
+shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with references to
+his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to various duties, as
+the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in "making a night of
+it." West's landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning, with a
+third man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and
+wined rather well.
+
+Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house
+was aroused by cries coming from West's room, where when they broke down
+
+
+
+
+the door, they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet,
+beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants of West's bottles
+and instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our
+assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap
+from the second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some
+strange garments in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they
+did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for bacteriological
+analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases. He
+ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace. To the police
+we both declared ignorance of our late companion's identity. He was. West
+nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar
+of uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish
+to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.
+
+That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror — the horror
+that to me eclipsed the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a
+terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only
+too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the
+deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight — the dawn
+revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town
+of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped
+from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the
+receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the
+gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.
+
+The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness
+howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some
+said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied
+daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing
+which strewed red death in its wake — in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless
+remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept
+abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like
+a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it
+had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had killed was
+fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not been alive.
+
+On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a
+house on Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest
+with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and when
+someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered
+window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and
+precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected
+without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a
+
+
+
+
+fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement and
+loathing.
+
+For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the
+voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and
+carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a
+padded cell for sixteen years — until the recent mishap, when it escaped under
+circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers
+of Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster's face was cleaned —
+the mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr
+who had been entombed but three days before — the late Dr. Allan Halsey,
+public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.
+
+To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I
+shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning
+when West muttered through his bandages, "Damn it, it wasn't quite fresh
+enough!"
+
+III. Six Shots by MoonHght
+
+Pubhshed April 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 21-26.
+
+It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one
+would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were
+uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a young physician leaving college is
+obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home and office,
+yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at
+the medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve our poverty
+by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose
+our house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as possible to the
+potter's field.
+
+Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our
+requirements were those resulting from a life-work distinctly unpopular.
+Outwardly we were doctors only, but beneath the surface were aims of far
+greater and more terrible moment — for the essence of Herbert West's existence
+was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he
+hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the
+graveyard's cold clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among them
+fresh human bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these indispensable
+things one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment.
+
+
+
+
+West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with
+his hideous experiments. Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant,
+and now that we were out of college we had to keep together. It was not easy to
+find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the
+university secured us a practice in Bolton — a factory town near Arkham, the
+seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic
+Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local
+physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather
+run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the closest
+neighbour, and separated from the local potter's field by only a stretch of
+meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to
+the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no nearer
+house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory
+district. We were not much displeased, however, since there were no people
+between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we
+could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.
+
+Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first — large enough to please
+most young doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students
+whose real interest lay elsewhere. The mill-hands were of somewhat turbulent
+inclinations; and besides their many natural needs, their frequent clashes and
+stabbing affrays gave us plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was
+the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar — the laboratory with the long
+table under the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often
+injected West's various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from
+the potter's field. West was experimenting madly to find something which
+would start man's vital motions anew after they had been stopped by the thing
+we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution had
+to be differently compounded for different types — what would serve for
+guinea-pigs would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens
+required large modifications.
+
+The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain
+tissue would render perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest
+problem was to get them fresh enough — West had had horrible experiences
+during his secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results
+of partial or imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the total
+failures, and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our
+first daemoniac session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham,
+we had felt a brooding menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed
+scientific automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation
+of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed — a psychological delusion
+of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least one of
+
+
+
+
+our reanimated specimens was still alive — a frightful carnivorous thing in a
+padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another — our first — whose exact fate we
+had never learned.
+
+We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton — much better than in Arkham. We
+had not been settled a week before we got an accident victim on the very night of
+burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly rational expression before
+the solution failed. It had lost an arm — if it had been a perfect body we might
+have succeeded better. Between then and the next January we secured three
+more; one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion, and one rather
+shivery thing — it rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when
+luck was poor; interments fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens
+either too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and
+their circumstances with systematic care.
+
+One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not
+come from the potter's field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had
+outlawed the sport of boxing — with the usual result. Surreptitious and ill-
+conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common, and occasionally
+professional talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night there had
+been such a match; evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles
+had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret
+and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn, where the
+remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent black form
+on the floor.
+
+The match had been between Kid O'Brien — a lubberly and now quaking youth
+with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose — and Buck Robinson, "The Harlem
+Smoke." The negro had been knocked out, and a moment's examination shewed
+us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing,
+with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face
+that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings
+under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life — but the
+world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they
+did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up;
+and they were grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered
+to get rid of the thing quietly — for a purpose I knew too well.
+
+There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the
+thing and carried it home between us through the deserted streets and meadows,
+as we had carried a similar thing one horrible night in Arkham. We approached
+the house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back door and
+down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment. Our fear of the
+
+
+
+
+police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary
+patrolman of that section.
+
+The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was
+wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions
+prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as the hour grew
+dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the others — dragged
+the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter's field,
+and buried it there in the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The
+grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen —
+the thing which had risen of itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark
+lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain that the
+police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.
+
+The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient
+brought rumours of a suspected fight and death. West had still another source of
+worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a case which ended very
+threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child —
+a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for
+dinner — and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always
+weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before;
+but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as
+much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o'clock in the evening she had
+died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill
+West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him
+when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses
+and oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have
+forgotten his child, who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some
+talk of searching the woods, but most of the family's friends were busy with the
+dead woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West
+must have been tremendous. Thoughts of the police and of the mad Italian both
+weighed heavily.
+
+We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good
+police force for so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess which
+would ensue if the affair of the night before were ever tracked down. It might
+mean the end of all our local work — and perhaps prison for both West and me. I
+did not like those rumours of a fight which were floating about. After the clock
+had struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to
+pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door.
+
+I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West's rap on my door. He
+was clad in dressing- gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an
+
+
+
+
+electric flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he was thinking more of the
+crazed Italian than of the police.
+
+"We'd better both go/' he whispered. "It wouldn't do not to answer it anyway,
+and it may be a patient — it would be like one of those fools to try the back
+door."
+
+So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly
+that which comes only from the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling
+continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached the door I cautiously
+unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly down on
+the form silhouetted there. West did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger
+of attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded police
+investigation — a thing which after all was mercifully averted by the relative
+isolation of our cottage — my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily
+emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.
+
+For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the
+spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in
+nightmares — a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered
+with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between
+its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny
+hand.
+
+IV. The Scream of the Dead
+
+Pubhshed May 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 53-58.
+
+The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert
+West which harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that
+such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously, not a
+pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence
+suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I
+have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.
+
+Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests
+far beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when
+establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near the
+potter's field. Briefly and brutally stated. West's sole absorbing interest was a
+secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the
+reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution. For this
+ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh
+human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly damaged the
+
+
+
+
+brain structure, and human because we found that the solution had to be
+compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and
+guinea-pigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had
+never fully succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse
+sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just
+departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the
+impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this second
+and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we
+had learned that an ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To
+establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct — the specimens must
+be very fresh, but genuinely dead.
+
+The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic
+University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the
+thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West
+looked scarcely a day older now — he was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-
+voiced, and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of
+the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his
+terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme;
+the results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had been
+galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by various
+modifications of the vital solution.
+
+One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently,
+beaten us both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it
+could be placed behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome African
+monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed — West had
+had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace
+of reason when reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was
+disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived — that
+thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful
+circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the
+isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely
+fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that
+he looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.
+
+It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had
+been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in
+a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved
+the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle — that
+of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly
+unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out
+well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a
+
+
+
+
+compound could help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the
+specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured them. This, I
+now saw. West had clearly recognised; creating his embalming compound for
+future rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very
+recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro
+killed in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion
+there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any
+possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether we
+could hope for a revival of mind and reason. West did not venture to predict. The
+experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body
+for my return, so that both might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion.
+
+West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a
+well-dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business with
+the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town had been long, and by the
+time the traveller paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories, his heart
+had become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly
+dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to
+West a heaven-sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear
+that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently
+revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to
+make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be restored
+to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a
+dense strip of woods between the house and the potter's field. If, on the other
+hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually
+established. So without delay West had injected into the body's wrist the
+compound which would hold it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the
+presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperilled the success of our
+experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at last to
+obtain what he had never obtained before — a rekindled spark of reason and
+perhaps a normal, living creature.
+
+So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory
+and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc-light. The embalming
+compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy
+frame which had lain two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to seek West's
+assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough;
+reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without careful tests
+as to life, since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present.
+As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast
+intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand
+less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a
+drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting
+
+
+
+
+the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutrahse the compound and
+release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution might
+freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor
+seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over
+the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready
+for our attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last
+perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and finally injected
+into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared
+during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days,
+when our feats were new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless
+suspense with which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen —
+the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to
+tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.
+
+West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of
+consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of
+hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death's barrier. I did not wholly
+disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the
+primitive faith of my forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a
+certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides — I could not extract
+from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried
+our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham.
+
+Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure.
+A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the
+curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of
+the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist
+appeared on the mirror inclined above the body's mouth. There followed a few
+spasmodic muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and visible motion
+of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering.
+Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but still
+unintelligent and not even curious.
+
+In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears;
+questions of other worlds of which the memory might still be present.
+Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think the last one, which I
+repeated, was: "Where have you been?" I do not yet know whether I was
+answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped mouth; but I do know
+that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming
+syllables which I would have vocalised as "only now" if that phrase had
+possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the
+conviction that the one great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a
+reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the
+
+
+
+
+next moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution
+had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational
+and articulate life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest
+of all horrors — not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had
+witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined.
+
+For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness
+with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic
+hands in a life and death struggle with the air, and suddenly collapsing into a
+second and final dissolution from which there could be no return, screamed out
+the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain:
+
+"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend — keep that damned needle
+away from me!"
+
+V. The Horror From the Shadows
+
+Pubhshed June 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 45-50.
+
+Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened
+on the battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint,
+others have convulsed me with devastating nausea, while still others have made
+me tremble and look behind me in the dark; yet despite the worst of them I
+believe I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all — the shocking, the
+unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.
+
+In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian
+regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to precede the government itself
+into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army on my own initiative, but
+rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable
+assistant I was — the celebrated Boston surgical specialist. Dr. Herbert West. Dr.
+West had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when the
+chance had come, he carried me with him almost against my will. There were
+reasons why I could have been glad to let the war separate us; reasons why I
+found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West more and more
+irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague's influence
+secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious
+persuasion of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual
+capacity.
+
+When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that
+he was either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always
+an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think
+
+
+
+
+he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine
+neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and
+in order to secure it had had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was
+not a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the
+peculiar branch of medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to
+follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and occasionally hideous results.
+It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply of freshly killed
+men in every stage of dismemberment.
+
+Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of
+the dead. This work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so
+swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston; but was only too well known
+to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant since the old days in
+Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college days
+that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then on
+human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he injected into
+the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh enough they responded in
+strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula, for
+each type of organism was found to need a stimulus especially adapted to it.
+Terror stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless things
+resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain
+number of these failures had remained alive — one was in an asylum while
+others had vanished — and as he thought of conceivable yet virtually impossible
+eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.
+
+West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful
+specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in
+body-snatching. In college, and during our early practice together in the factory
+town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated
+admiration; but as his boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing
+fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then there
+came a nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a certain
+specimen had been a living body when he secured it. That was the first time he
+had ever been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a corpse; and his
+success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely hardened him.
+
+Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him
+by sheer force of fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat.
+Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he
+did — that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for
+prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish
+curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a
+hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he
+
+
+
+
+gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men
+drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a
+fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment — a languid Elagabalus of the
+tombs.
+
+Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax
+came when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had
+sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached
+parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the independent vital
+properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue separated from natural physiological
+systems; and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form of never-
+dying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an
+indescribable tropical reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious
+to settle — first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action be
+possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve-
+centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct
+from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what
+has previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a
+prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh — and that was why
+Herbert West had entered the Great War.
+
+The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March,
+1915, in a field hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could
+have been other than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private
+laboratory in an east room of the barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on
+his plea that he was devising new and radical methods for the treatment of
+hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst
+of his gory wares — I could never get used to the levity with which he handled
+and classified certain things. At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery
+for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic
+kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even
+amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-
+shots — surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an
+hospital. Dr. West's reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a
+large audience. Besides human tissue. West employed much of the reptile
+embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better
+than human material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was
+now my friend's chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer
+incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter;
+which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.
+
+On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen — a man at once
+physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system
+
+
+
+
+was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to
+his commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had
+in the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West.
+Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our
+division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the
+heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by
+the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his
+destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable
+afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated
+but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing which
+had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he finished
+severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue to preserve it
+for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body on the
+operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves
+at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an
+unidentified specimen which had borne an officer's uniform. I knew what he
+wanted — to see if this highly organised body could exhibit, without its head,
+any of the signs of mental life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland
+Clapham-Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now
+gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.
+
+I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his
+reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot
+describe — I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of
+classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep
+on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling,
+and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of
+black shadows.
+
+The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system.
+Much was expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I
+could see the feverish interest on West's face. He was ready, I think, to see proof
+of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can
+exist independently of the brain — that man has no central connective spirit, but
+is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in
+itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the mystery
+of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and
+beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The arms stirred
+disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive
+kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which
+was unmistakably one of desperation — an intelligent desperation apparently
+sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were
+recalling the man's last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling aeroplane.
+
+
+
+
+What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an
+hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete
+destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German shell-fire — who can
+gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved survivors? West liked to think
+that before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he could not; for
+it was queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence
+itself was very simple, notable only for what it implied.
+
+The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had
+heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet
+its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message — it
+had merely screamed, "Jump, Ronald, for God's sake, jump!" The awful thing
+was its source.
+
+For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling
+black shadows.
+
+VI. The Tomb-Legions
+
+Pubhshed July 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 57-62.
+
+When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me
+closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps
+suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the truth because they would
+not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with
+activities beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in
+the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect
+secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac
+phantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.
+
+I was West's closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years
+before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches.
+He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the veins of the
+newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance of fresh
+corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking
+were the products of some of the experiments — grisly masses of flesh that had
+been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous ammation. These
+were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to
+have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the
+delicate brain- cells.
+
+This need for very fresh corpses had been West's moral undoing. They were hard
+to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and
+
+
+
+
+vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a
+very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable
+moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a
+hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating
+appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique.
+Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that
+way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and
+after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.
+
+West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a
+life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared;
+but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on
+certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from
+which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments with
+a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was that first
+specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also
+that Arkham professor's body which had done cannibal things before it had been
+captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the
+walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were things
+less easy to speak of — for in later years West's scientific zeal had degenerated to
+an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in vitalising
+not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic
+matter other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he
+disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print. The
+Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this
+side of West.
+
+In saying that West's fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind
+particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the
+existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from
+apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him.
+Their disappearance added horror to the situation — of them all. West knew the
+whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle
+fear — a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the
+Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated
+Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew
+about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been
+removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be
+investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had
+been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate,
+we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the
+detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been
+merciful, in a way — but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we
+
+
+
+
+two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the
+possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.
+
+West's last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking
+one of the oldest burying- grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely
+symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were of
+the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh
+bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported
+workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal
+of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain
+from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During
+the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient
+masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground, yet far too deep
+to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a number of calculations
+West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the
+Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when
+he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of
+the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the
+uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West's new timidity
+conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre by
+ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till that
+final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of West's
+decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing.
+Outwardly he was the same to the last — calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired,
+with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears
+seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed
+grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous
+thing that gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.
+
+The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was
+dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline
+item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had
+seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible
+had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood
+and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men
+had entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a
+menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice
+seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried.
+His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had
+shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it — for it was a wax face
+with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A
+larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half
+eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of
+
+
+
+
+the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon
+being refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had
+beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and
+finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could
+recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men
+than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time help
+could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had
+vanished.
+
+From the hour of reading this item until midmght. West sat almost paralysed. At
+midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep
+in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon
+in the street, but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square
+box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a
+highly unnatural voice, "Express — prepaid." They filed out of the house with a
+jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning
+toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I
+slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box. It
+was about two feet square, and bore West's correct name and present address. It
+also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders."
+Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless
+reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which —
+perhaps — had uttered articulate sounds.
+
+West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he
+said, "It's the finish — but let's incinerate — this." We carried the thing down to
+the laboratory — listening. I do not remember many particulars — you can
+imagine my state of mind — but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West's
+body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened
+wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come
+from the box, after all.
+
+It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the
+ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped
+me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled
+the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the
+electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the
+nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity — or worse —
+could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and
+not human at all — the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were
+removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as
+the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file;
+led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed
+
+
+
+
+monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or
+utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes,
+bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous
+abominations. West's head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore
+a Canadian officer's uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind
+the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible
+emotion.
+
+Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator
+contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what
+can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor the
+men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they
+pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They
+imply that I am either a madman or a murderer — probably I am mad. But I
+might not be mad if those accursed tomb- legions had not been so silent.
+
+
+
+
+Hypnos
+
+Written Mar 1922
+
+Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. 5, pages 1-3.
+
+Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men
+go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not
+know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.
+
+- Baudelaire
+
+May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no
+power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the
+chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him
+who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and
+knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such
+unsanctioned phrensy into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god
+that he was - my only friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the
+end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!
+
+We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd of the
+vulgarly curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion
+which imparted to his slight black-clad body a strange rigidity. I think he was
+then approaching forty years of age, for there were deep lines in the face, wan
+and hollow-cheeked, but oval and actually beautiful; and touches of gray in the
+thick, waving hair and small full beard which had once been of the deepest raven
+black. His brow was white as the marble of Pentelicus, and of a height and
+breadth almost god-like.
+
+I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's statue
+out of antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to life in
+our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating years. And when
+he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes I knew he
+would be thenceforth my only friend - the only friend of one who had never
+possessed a friend before - for I saw that such eyes must have looked fully upon
+the grandeur and the terror of realms beyond normal consciousness and reality;
+realms which I had cherished in fancy, but vainly sought. So as I drove the
+crowd away I told him he must come home with me and be my teacher and
+leader in unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word.
+Afterward I found that his voice was music - the music of deep viols and of
+crystalline spheres. We talked often in the night, and in the day, when I chiseled
+
+
+
+
+busts of him and carved miniature heads in ivory to immortahze his different
+expressions.
+
+Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection
+with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster
+and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper
+than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain
+forms of sleep - those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common
+men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our
+waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe
+of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when
+sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little and ignore it
+mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One
+man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men
+have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than
+suspect. I had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried
+and partly succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs
+courted terrible and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old
+manor-house in hoary Kent.
+
+Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments - inarticulateness.
+What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told -
+for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first
+to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations
+correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is
+capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable
+elements of time and space - things which at bottom possess no distinct and
+definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our
+experiences by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every period of
+revelation some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and
+present, rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses,
+and occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and typical obstacles
+describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds of vapors.
+
+In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes
+together. When we were together, my friend was always far ahead; I could
+comprehend his presence despite the absence of form by a species of pictorial
+memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange light and
+frightful with its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful cheeks, its burning
+eyes, its Olympian brow, and its shadowing hair and growth of beard.
+
+Of the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us the merest
+illusion. I know only that there must have been something very singular
+
+
+
+
+involved, since we came at length to marvel why we did not grow old. Our
+discourse was unholy, and always hideously ambitious - no god or daemon
+could have aspired to discoveries and conquest like those which we planned in
+whispers. I shiver as I speak of them, and dare not be explicit; though I will say
+that my friend once wrote on paper a wish which he dared not utter with his
+tongue, and which made me burn the paper and look affrightedly out of the
+window at the spangled night sky. I will hint - only hint - that he had designs
+which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby
+the earth and the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all
+living things be his. I affirm - I swear - that I had no share in these extreme
+aspirations. Anything my friend may have said or written to the contrary must
+be erroneous, for I am no man of strength to risk the unmentionable spheres by
+which alone one might achieve success.
+
+There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into
+limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most
+maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity
+which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my
+memory and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were
+clawed through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne
+to realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known.
+
+My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of
+virgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous,
+too-youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly
+disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle
+which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a
+sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-
+material sphere.
+
+I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully
+passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream and opened my
+physical eyes to the tower studio in whose opposite corner reclined the pallid
+and still unconscious form of my fellow dreamer, weirdly haggard and wildly
+beautiful as the moon shed gold-green light on his marble features.
+
+Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying
+heaven keep from my sight and sound another thing like that which took place
+before me. I cannot tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of unvisitable hells
+gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say that I
+fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered and shook me in his phrensy for
+someone to keep away the horror and desolation.
+
+
+
+
+That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed,
+shaken, and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me
+that we must never venture within those realms again. What he had seen, he
+dared not tell me; but he said from his wisdom that we must sleep as little as
+possible, even if drugs were necessary to keep us awake. That he was right, I
+soon learned from the unutterable fear which engulfed me whenever
+consciousness lapsed.
+
+After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with
+a rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten
+almost before one's eyes. Our mode of life was now totally altered. Heretofore a
+recluse so far as I know - his true name and origin never having passed his lips -
+my friend now became frantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not be
+alone, nor would the company of a few persons calm him. His sole relief was
+obtained in revelry of the most general and boisterous sort; so that few
+assemblies of the young and gay were unknown to us.
+
+Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly
+resented, but which my friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially
+was he afraid to be out of doors alone when the stars were shining, and if forced
+to this condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted by some
+monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in the sky -
+it seemed to be a different place at different times. On spring evenings it would
+be low in the northeast. In the summer it would be nearly overhead. In the
+autumn it would be in the northwest. In winter it would be in the east, but
+mostly if in the small hours of morning.
+
+Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I
+connect this fear with anything in particular; but then I began to see that he must
+be looking at a special spot on the celestial vault whose position at different
+times corresponded to the direction of his glance - a spot roughly marked by the
+constellation Corona Borealis.
+
+We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days
+when we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged
+and weak from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinning
+hair and beard of my friend had become snow-white. Our freedom from long
+sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb more than an hour or two at a
+time to the shadow which had now grown so frightful a menace.
+
+Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were
+hard to buy. My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to
+purchase new materials, or energy to fashion them even had I possessed them.
+
+
+
+
+We suffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathing
+sleep from which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene now - the
+desolate, pitch-black garret studio under the eaves with the rain beating down;
+the ticking of our lone clock; the fancied ticking of our watches as they rested on
+the dressing-table; the creaking of some swaying shutter in a remote part of the
+house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog and space; and, worst of all, the
+deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friend on the couch - a rhythmical
+breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and agony for his
+spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.
+
+The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial
+impressions and associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I
+heard a clock strike somewhere - not ours, for that was not a striking clock - and
+my morbid fancy found in this a new starting-point for idle wanderings. Clocks -
+time - space - infinity - and then my fancy reverted to the locale as I reflected that
+even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the rain and the atmosphere. Corona
+Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona Borealis, which my friend had
+appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now be
+glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All at once my
+feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component
+in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds - a low and damnably insistent
+whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the
+northeast.
+
+But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon
+my soul such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which
+drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to
+break down the door. It was not what I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark,
+locked, shuttered, and curtained room there appeared from the black northeast
+corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light - a shaft which bore with it no glow to
+disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the recumbent head of the
+troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous and strangely
+youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal space and
+unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those secret,
+innermost and forbidden caverns of nightmare.
+
+And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep-sunken eyes
+open in terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to
+be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face, as it shone bodiless,
+luminous, and rejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark, teeming, brain-
+shattering fear than all the rest of heaven and earth has ever revealed to me.
+
+
+
+
+No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but
+as I followed the memory- face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its
+source, the source whence also the whining came, I, too, saw for an instant what
+it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking epilepsy which brought
+the lodgers and the police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was
+that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I
+did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and
+insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad
+ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.
+
+Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by the
+strange and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which
+can mean nothing if not madness. They have said, I know not for what reason,
+that I never had a friend; but that art, philosophy, and insanity had filled all my
+tragic life. The lodgers and police on that night soothed me, and the doctor
+administered something to quiet me, nor did anyone see what a nightmare event
+had taken place. My stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what they found
+on the couch in the studio made them give me a praise which sickened me, and
+now a fame which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald, gray-bearded,
+shriveled, palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and praying to the object
+they found.
+
+For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the
+thing which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is all that
+remains of my friend; the friend who led me on to madness and wreckage; a
+godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas could yield, young with the
+youth that is outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips,
+Olympian brow, and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned. They say that that
+haunting memory-face is modeled from my own, as it was at twenty-five; but
+upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica - HYPNOS.
+
+
+
+
+Ibid
+
+" . . .as Ibid says in his famous Lives of the Poets."
+
+- From a student theme.
+
+The erroneous idea that Ibid is the author of the Lives is so frequently met with,
+even among those pretending to a degree of cuhure, that it is worth correcting. It
+should be a matter of general knowledge that Cf. is responsible for this work.
+Ibid's masterpiece, on the other hand, was the famous Op. Cit. wherein all the
+significant undercurrents of Graeco-Roman expression were crystallised once for
+all - and with admirable acuteness, notwithstanding the surprisingly late date at
+which Ibid wrote. There is a false report - very commonly reproduced in modern
+books prior to Von Schweinkopf's monumental Geschichte der Ostrogothen in
+Italien - that Ibid was a Romanised Visigoth of Ataulf's horde who settled in
+Placentia about 410 A. D. The contrary cannot be too strongly emphasised; for
+Von Schweinkopf, and since his time Littlewitl and Betenoir,2 have shewn with
+irrefutable force that this strikingly isolated figure was a genuine Roman - or at
+least as genuine a Roman as that degenerate and mongrelised age could produce
+
+- of whom one might well say what Gibbon said of Boethius, "that he was the
+last whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman." He
+was, like Boethius and nearly all the eminent men of his age, of the great Anician
+family, and traced his genealogy with much exactitude and self-satisfaction to all
+the heroes of the republic. His full name - long and pompous according to the
+custom of an age which had lost the trinomial simplicity of classic Roman
+nomenclature - is stated by Von Schweinkopf3 to have been Caius Anicius
+Magnus Furius Camillus Aemilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus;
+though Littlewit4 rejects Aemilianus and adds Claudius Deciusfunianus; whilst
+BetenoirS differs radically, giving the full name as Magnus Furius Camillus
+Aurelius Antoninus Flavins Anicius Petronius Valentinianus Aegidus Ibidus.
+
+The eminent critic and biographer was born in the year 486, shortly after the
+extinction of the Roman rule in Gaul by Clovis. Rome and Ravenna are rivals for
+the honour of his birth, though it is certain that he received his rhetorical and
+philosophical training in the schools of Athens - the extent of whose suppression
+by Theodosius a century before is grossly exaggerated by the superficial. In 512,
+under the benign rule of the Ostrogoth Theodoric, we behold him as a teacher of
+rhetoric at Rome, and in 516 he held the consulship together with Pompilius
+Numantius Bombastes Marcellinus Deodamnatus. Upon the death of Theodoric
+in 526, Ibidus retired from public life to compose his celebrated work (whose
+pure Ciceronian style is as remarkable a case of classic atavism as is the verse of
+Claudius Claudianus, who flourished a century before Ibidus); but he was later
+
+
+
+
+recalled to scenes of pomp to act as court rhetorician for Theodatus, nephew of
+Theodoric.
+
+Upon the usurpation of Vitiges, Ibidus fell into disgrace and was for a time
+imprisoned; but the coming of the Byzantine-Roman army under Belisarius soon
+restored him to liberty and honours. Throughout the siege of Rome he served
+bravely in the army of the defenders, and afterward followed the eagles of
+Belisarius to Alba, Porto, and Centumcellae. After the Prankish siege of Milan,
+Ibidus was chosen to accompany the learned Bishop Datius to Greece, and
+resided with him at Corinth in the year 539. About 541 he removed to
+Constantinopolis, where he received every mark of imperial favour both from
+Justinianus and Justinus the Second. The Pmperors Tiberius and Maurice did
+kindly honour to his old age, and contributed much to his immortality -
+especially Maurice, whose delight it was to trace his ancestry to old Rome
+notwithstanding his birth at Arabiscus, in Cappadocia. It was Maurice who, in
+the poet's 101st year, secured the adoption of his work as a textbook in the
+schools of the empire, an honour which proved a fatal tax on the aged
+rhetorician's emotions, since he passed away peacefully at his home near the
+church of St. Sophia on the sixth day before the Kalends of September, A. D. 587,
+in the 102nd year of his age.
+
+His remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of Italy, were taken to Ravenna
+for interment; but being interred in the suburb of Classe, were exhumed and
+ridiculed by the Lombard Duke of Spoleto, who took his skull to King Autharis
+for use as a wassail-bowl. Ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to
+king of the Lombard line. Upon the capture of Pavia by Charlemagne in 774, the
+skull was seized from the tottering Desiderius and carried in the train of the
+Prankish conqueror. It was from this vessel, indeed, that Pope Leo administered
+the royal unction which made of the hero-nomad a Holy Roman Pmperor.
+Charlemagne took Ibid's skull to his capital at Aix, soon after- ward presenting it
+to his Saxon teacher Alcuin, upon whose death in 804 it was sent to Alcuin's
+kinsfolk in Pngland.
+
+William the Conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche where the pious family of
+Alcuin had placed it (believing it to be the skull of a saint6 who had miraculously
+annihilated the Lombards by his prayers), did reverence to its osseous antiquity;
+and even the rough soldiers of Cromwell, upon destroying Ballylough Abbey in
+Ireland in 1650 (it having been secretly transported thither by a devout Papist in
+1539, upon Henry VII's dissolution of the English monasteries), declined to offer
+violence to a relic so venerable.
+
+It was captured by the private soldier Read-'em-and-Weep Hopkins, who not
+long after traded it to Rest- in-Jehovah Stubbs for a quid of new Virginia weed.
+
+
+
+
+Stubbs, upon sending forth his son Zerubbabel to seek his fortune in New
+England in 1661 (for he thought ill of the Restoration atmosphere for a pious
+young yeoman), gave him St. Ibid's - or rather Brother Ibid's, for he abhorred all
+that was Popish - skull as a talisman. Upon landing in Salem Zerubbabel set it up
+in his cupboard beside the chimney, he having built a modest house near the
+town pump. However, he had not been wholly unaffected by the Restoration
+influence; and having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one Epenetus
+Dexter, a visiting freeman of Providence.
+
+It was in the house of Dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present
+intersection of North Main and Olney Streets, on the occasion of Canonchet's
+raid of March 30, 1676, during King Philip's War; and the astute sachem,
+recognising it at once as a thing of singular venerableness and dignity, sent it as a
+symbol of alliance to a faction of the Pequots in Connecticut with whom he was
+negotiating. On April 4 he was captured by the colonists and soon after executed,
+but the austere head of Ibid continued on its wanderings.
+
+The Pequots, enfeebled by a previous war, could give the now stricken
+Narragansetts no assistance; and in 1680 a Dutch furtrader of Albany, Petrus van
+Schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders,
+he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in
+Lombardic minuscules (palaeography, it might be explained, was one of the
+leading accomplishments of New-Netherland fur-traders of the seventeenth
+century).
+
+From van Schaack, sad to say, the relic was stolen in 1683 by a French trader,
+Jean Grenier, whose Popish zeal recognised the features of one whom he had
+been taught at his mother's knee to revere as St. Ibide. Grenier, fired with
+virtuous rage at the possession of this holy symbol by a Protestant, crushed van
+Schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty;
+soon, however, being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur Michel
+Savard, who took the skull - despite the illiteracy which prevented his
+recognising it - to add to a collection of similar but more recent material.
+
+Upon his death in 1701 his half-breed son Pierre traded it among other things to
+some emissaries of the Sacs and Foxes, and it was found outside the chief's tepee
+a generation later by Charles de Langlade, founder of the trading post at Green
+Bay, Wisconsin. De Langlade regarded this sacred object with proper veneration
+and ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; yet after his time it found
+itself in many other hands, being traded to settlements at the head of Lake
+Winnebago, to tribes around Lake Mendota, and finally, early in the nineteenth
+century, to one Solomon Juneau, a Frenchman, at the new trading post of
+Milwaukee on the Menominee River and the shore of Lake Michigan.
+
+
+
+
+Later traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of
+chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being used by him as a
+beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its contents, he suffered it to roll from
+his front stoop to the prairie path before his home - where, falling into the
+burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery
+upon his awaking.
+
+So for generations did the sainted skull of Caius Anicius Magnus Furius
+Camillus Aemilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus, consul of
+Rome, favourite of emperors, and saint of the Romish church, lie hidden beneath
+the soil of a growing town. At first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-
+dogs, who saw in it a deity sent from the upper world, it afterward fell into dire
+neglect as the race of simple, artless burrowers succumbed before the onslaught
+of the conquering Aryan. Sewers came, but they passed by it. Houses went up -
+2303 of them, and more - and at last one fateful night a titan thing occurred.
+Subtle Nature, convulsed with a spiritual ecstasy, like the froth of that region's
+quondam beverage, laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble - and behold!
+In the roseal dawn the burghers of Milwaukee rose to find a former prairie
+turned to a highland! Vast and far-reaching was the great upheaval. Subterrene
+arcana, hidden for years, came at last to the light. For there, full in the rifted
+roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly, and consular pomp the
+dome-like skull of Ibid!
+
+[Notes]
+
+1 Rome and Byzantium: A Study in Survival (Waukesha, 1869), Vol. XX, p. 598. 2
+Influences Romains clans le Moyen Age (Fond du Lac, 1877), Vol. XV, p. 720.
+3Following Procopius, Goth, x.y.z. 4Following Jornandes, Codex Murat. xxj.
+4144. 5After Pagi, 50-50. 6Not till the appearance of von Schweinkopf's work in
+1797 were St. Ibid and the rhetorician properly re- identified.
+
+
+
+
+Imprisoned with the Pharaos
+
+Written in March of 1924
+
+Published in May of 1924 in Weird Tales
+
+Mystery attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my name as a
+performer of unexplained feats, I have encountered strange narratives and events
+which my calling has led people to link with my interests and activities. Some of
+these have been trivial and irrelevant, some deeply dramatic and absorbing,
+some productive of weird and perilous experiences and some involving me in
+extensive scientific and historical research. Many of these matters I have told and
+shall continue to tell very freely; but there is one of which I speak with great
+reluctance, and which I am now relating only after a session of grilling
+persuasion from the publishers of this magazine, who had heard vague rumors
+of it from other members of my family.
+
+The hitherto guarded subject pertains to my non-professional visit to Egypt
+fourteen years ago, and has been avoided by me for several reasons. For one
+thing, I am averse to exploiting certain unmistakably actual facts and conditions
+obviously unknown to the myriad tourists who throng about the pyramids and
+apparently secreted with much diligence by the authorities at Cairo, who cannot
+be wholly ignorant of them. For another thing, I dislike to recount an incident in
+which my own fantastic imagination must have played so great a part. What I
+saw - or thought I saw - certainly did not take place; but is rather to be viewed as
+a result of my then recent readings in Egyptology, and of the speculations anent
+this theme which my environment naturally prompted. These imaginative
+stimuli, magnified by the excitement of an actual event terrible enough in itself,
+undoubtedly gave rise to the culminating horror of that grotesque night so long
+past.
+
+In January, 1910, I had finished a professional engagement in England and
+signed a contract for a tour of Australian theatres. A liberal time being allowed
+for the trip, I determined to make the most of it in the sort of travel which chiefly
+interests me; so accompanied by my wife I drifted pleasantly down the Continent
+and embarked at Marseilles on the P & O Steamer Malwa, bound for Port Said.
+From that point I proposed to visit the principal historical localities of lower
+Egypt before leaving finally for Australia.
+
+The voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by many of the amusing
+incidents which befall a magical performer apart from his work. I had intended,
+for the sake of quiet travel, to keep my name a secret; but was goaded into
+
+
+
+
+betraying myself by a fellow-magician whose anxiety to astound the passengers
+with ordinary tricks tempted me to duplicate and exceed his feats in a manner
+quite destructive of my incognito. I mention this because of its ultimate effect - an
+effect I should have foreseen before unmasking to a shipload of tourists about to
+scatter throughout the Nile valley. What it did was to herald my identity
+wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife and me of all the placid
+inconspicuousness we had sought. Traveling to seek curiosities, I was often
+forced to stand inspection as a sort of curiosity myself!
+
+We had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque and the mystically
+impressive, but found little enough when the ship edged up to Port Said and
+discharged its passengers in small boats. Low dunes of sand, bobbing buoys in
+shallow water, and a drearily European small town with nothing of interest save
+the great De Lesseps statue, made us anxious to get to something more worth
+our while. After some discussion we decided to proceed at once to Cairo and the
+Pyramids, later going to Alexandria for the Australian boat and for whatever
+Greco-Roman sights that ancient metropolis might present.
+
+The railway journey was tolerable enough, and con sumed only four hours and a
+half. We saw much of the Suez Canal, whose route we followed as far as
+Ismailiya and later had a taste of Old Egypt in our glimpse of the restored fresh-
+water canal of the Middle Empire. Then at last we saw Cairo glimmering
+through the growing dusk; a winkling constellation which became a blaze as we
+halted at the great Care Centrale.
+
+But once more disappointment awaited us, for all that we beheld was European
+save the costumes and the crowds. A prosaic subway led to a square teeming
+with carriages, taxicabs, and trolley-cars and gorgeous with electric lights
+shining on tall buildings; whilst the very theatre where I was vainly requested to
+play and which I later attended as a spectator, had recently been renamed the
+'American Cosmograph'. We stopped at Shepheard's Hotel, reached in a taxi that
+sped along broad, smartly built-up streets; and amidst the perfect service of its
+restaurant, elevators and generally Anglo-American luxuries the mysterious East
+and immemorial past seemed very far away.
+
+The next day, however, precipitated us delightfully into the heart of the Arabian
+Nights atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic skyline of Cairo, the
+Bagdad of Harun-al-Rashid seemed to live again. Guided by our Baedeker, we
+had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens along the Mouski in quest of the
+native quarter, and were soon in the hands of a clamorous cicerone who -
+notwith standing later developments - was assuredly a master at his trade.
+
+
+
+
+Not until afterward did I see that I should have applied at the hotel for a licensed
+guide. This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced and relatively cleanly fellow
+who looked like a Pharaoh and called himself 'Abdul Reis el Drogman' appeared
+to have much power over others of his kind; though subsequently the police
+professed not to know him, and to suggest that reis is merely a name for any
+person in authority, whilst 'Drogman' is obviously no more than a clumsy
+modification of the word for a leader of tourist parties - dragoman.
+
+Abdul led us among such wonders as we had before only read and dreamed of.
+Old Cairo is itself a story-book and a dream - labyrinths of narrow alleys
+redolent of aromatic secrets; Arabesque balconies and oriels nearly meeting
+above the cobbled streets; maelstroms of Oriental traffic with strange cries,
+cracking whips, rattling carts, jingling money, and braying donkeys;
+kaleidoscopes of polychrome robes, veils, turbans, and tarbushes; water-carriers
+and dervishes, dogs and cats, soothsayers and barbers; and over all the whining
+of blind beggars crouched in alcoves, and the sonorous chanting of muezzins
+from minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep, unchanging blue.
+
+The roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less alluring. Spice, perfume, incense
+beads, rugs, silks, and brass - old Mahmoud Suleiman squats cross-legged
+amidst his gummy bottles while chattering youths pulverize mustard in the
+hoUowed-out capital of an ancient classic column - a Roman Corinthian, perhaps
+from neighboring Heliopolis, where Augustus stationed one of his three
+Egyptian legions. Antiquity begins to mingle with exoticism. And then the
+mosques and the museum - we saw them all, and tried not to let our Arabian
+revel succumb to the darker charm of Pharaonic Egypt which the museum's
+priceless treasures offered. That was to be our climax, and for the present we
+concentrated on the mediaeval Saracenic glories of the Califs whose magnificent
+tomb-mosques form a glittering faery necropolis on the edge of the Arabian
+Desert.
+
+At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali to the ancient mosque
+of Sultan Hassan, and the tower-flanked Babel-Azab, beyond which climbs the
+steep-walled pass to the mighty citadel that Saladin himself built with the stones
+of forgotten pyramids. It was sunset when we scaled that cliff, circled the
+modern mosque of Mohammed Ali, and looked down from the dizzy parapet
+over mystic Cairo - mystic Cairo all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal
+minarets and its flaming gardens.
+
+Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and
+beyond it - across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons and dynasties
+- lurked the menacing sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridesc ent and
+evil with older arcana.
+
+
+
+
+The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it
+stood poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis - Re-
+Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun - we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the
+black outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh - the palaeogean tombs there were hoary
+with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in
+distant Thebes. Then we knew that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that
+we must taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt - the black Kem of Re and
+Amen, Isis and Osiris.
+
+The next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the
+island of Chizereh with its massive lebbakh trees, and the smaller English bridge
+to the western shore. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows of
+lebbakhs and past the vast Zoological Gardens to the suburb of Gizeh, where a
+new bridge to Cairo proper has since been built. Then, turning inland along the
+Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a region of glassy canals and shabby native villages
+till before us loomed the objects of our quest, cleaving the mists of dawn and
+forming inverted replicas in the roadside pools. Forty centuries, as Napoleon had
+told his campaigners there, indeed looked down upon us.
+
+The road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of transfer between
+the trolley station and the Mena House Hotel. Abdul Reis, who capably
+purchased our Pyramid tickets, seemed to have an understanding with the
+crowding, yelling and offensive Bedouins who inhabited a squalid mud village
+some distance away and pestiferously assailed every traveler; for he kept them
+very decently at bay and secured an excellent pair of camels for us, himself
+mounting a donkey and assigning the leadership of our animals to a group of
+men and boys more expensive than useful. The area to be traversed was so small
+that camels were hardly needed, but we did not regret adding to our experience
+this troublesome form of desert navigation.
+
+The pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to the
+northernmost of the series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries built in the
+neighborhood of the extinct capital Memphis, which lay on the same side of the
+Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and which flourished between 3400 and 2000
+B.C. The greatest pyramid, which lies nearest the modern road, was built by King
+Cheops or Khufu about 2800 B.C., and stands more than 450 feet in
+perpendicular height. In a line southwest from this are successively the Second
+Pyramid, built a generation later by King Khephren, and though slightly smaller,
+looking even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically smaller
+Third Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B.C. Near the edge of the
+plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form
+a colossal portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx -
+mute, sardonic, and wise beyond mankind and memory.
+
+
+
+
+Minor pyramids and the traces of ruined minor pyramids are found in several
+places, and the whole plateau is pitted with the tombs of dignitaries of less than
+royal rank. These latter were originally marked by mastabas, or stone bench- like
+structures about the deep burial shafts, as found in other Memphian cemeteries
+and exemplified by Perneb's Tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of New York.
+At Gizeb, however, all such visible things have been swept away by time and
+pillage; and only the rock-hewn shafts, either sand-filled or cleared out by
+archaeologists, remain to attest their former existence. Connected with each tomb
+was a chapel in which priests and relatives offered food and prayer to the
+hovering ka or vital principle of the deceased. The small tombs have their
+chapels contained in their stone mastabas or superstructures, but the mortuary
+chapels of the pyramids, where regal Pharaohs lay, were separate temples, each
+to the east of its corresponding pyramid, and connec ted by a causeway to a
+massive gate-chapel or propylon at the edge of the rock plateau.
+
+The gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the drifting
+sands, yawns subterraneously south-east of the Sphinx. Persistent tradition dubs
+it the 'Temple of the Sphinx'; and it may perhaps be rightly called such if the
+Sphinx indeed represents the Second Pyramid's builder Khephren. There are
+unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren - but whatever its elder features
+were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the
+colossus without fear.
+
+It was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size diorite statue of Khephren
+now in the Cairo museum was found; a statue before which I stood in awe when
+I beheld it. Whether the whole edifice is now excavated I am not certain, but in
+1910 most of it was below ground, with the entrance heavily barred at night.
+Germans were in charge of the work, and the war or other things may have
+stopped them. I would give much, in view of my experience and of certain
+Bedouin whisperings discredited or unknown in Cairo, to know what has
+developed in connection with a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues
+of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of baboons.
+
+The road, as we traversed it on our camels that morning, curved sharply past the
+wooden police quarters, post office, drug store and shops on the left, and
+plunged south and east in a complete bend that scaled the rock plateau and
+brought us face to face with the desert under the lee of the Great Pyramid. Past
+Cyclopean masonry we rode, rounding the eastern face and looking down ahead
+into a valley of minor pyramids beyond which the eternal Nile glistened to the
+east, and the eternal desert shimmered to the west. Very close loomed the three
+major pyramids, the greatest devoid of outer casing and showing its bulk of
+great stones, but the others retaining here and there the neatly fitted covering
+which had made them smooth and finished in their day.
+
+
+
+
+Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of
+those terrible unseeing eyes. On the vast stone breast we faintly discerned the
+emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late
+dynasty; and though sand covered the tablet between the great paws, we recalled
+what Thutmosis IV inscribed thereon, and the dream he had when a prince. It
+was then that the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us
+wonder about the legends of subterranean pas sages beneath the monstrous
+creature, leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint at - depths
+connected with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having
+a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods in the
+ancient Nilotic pantheon. Then, too, it was I asked myself in idle question whose
+hideous significance was not to appear for many an hour.
+
+Other tourists now began to overtake us, and we moved on to the sand-choked
+Temple of the Sphinx, fifty yards to the southeast, which I have previously
+mentioned as the great gate of the causeway to the Second Pyramid's mortuary
+chapel on the plateau. Most of it was still underground, and although we
+dismounted and descended through a modern passageway to its alabaster
+corridor and pillared hall, I felt that Adul and the local German attendant had
+not shown us all there was to see.
+
+After this we made the conventional circuit of the pyramid plateau, examining
+the Second Pyramid and the peculiar ruins of its mortuary chapel to the east, the
+Third Pyramid and its miniature southern satellites and ruined eastern chapel,
+the rock tombs and the honeycombings of the Fourth and Fifth dynasties, and the
+famous Campbell's Tomb whose shadowy shaft sinks precipitously for fifty-
+three feet to a sinister sarcophagus which one of our camel drivers divested of
+the cumbering sand after a vertiginous descent by rope.
+
+Cries now assailed us from the Great Pyramid, where Bedouins were besieging a
+party of tourists with offers of speed in the performance of solitary trips up and
+down. Seven minutes is said to be the record for such an ascent and descent, but
+many lusty sheiks and sons of sheiks assured us they could cut it to five if given
+the requisite impetus of liberal baksheesh. They did not get this impetus, though
+we did let Abdul take us up, thus obtaining a view of unprecedented
+magnificence which included not only remote and glittering Cairo with its
+crowned citadel back ground of gold-violet hills, but all the pyramids of the
+Memphian district as well, from Abu Roash on the north to the Dashur on the
+south. The Sakkara step-pyramid, which marks the evolution of the low mastaba
+into the true pyramid, showed clearly and alluringly in the sandy distance. It is
+close to this transition-monument that the famed :omb of Perneb was found -
+more than four hundred miles orth of the Theban rock valley where Tut-Ankh-
+Amen sleeps. Again I was forced to silence through sheer awe. The prospect of
+
+
+
+
+such antiquity, and the secrets each hoary monument seemed to hold and brood
+over, filled me with a reverence and sense of immensity nothing else ever gave
+me.
+
+Fatigued by our climb, and disgusted with the importunate Bedouins whose
+actions seemed to defy every rule of taste, we omitted the arduous detail of
+entering the cramped interior passages of any of the pyramids, though we saw
+several of the hardiest tourists preparing for the suffocating crawl through
+Cheops' mightiest memorial. As we dismissed and overpaid our local bodyguard
+and drove back to Cairo with Abdul Reis under the afternoon sun, we half
+regretted the omission we had made. Such fascinating things were whispered
+about lower pyramid pas sages not in the guide books; passages whose entrances
+had been hastily blocked up and concealed by certain uncommunicative
+archaeologists who had found and begun to explore them.
+
+Of course, this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was
+curious to reflect how persistently visitors were forbidden to enter the Pyramids
+at night, or to visit the lowest burrows and crypt of the Great Pyramid. Perhaps
+in the latter case it was the psychological effect which was feared - the effect on
+the visitor of feeling himself huddled down beneath a gigantic world of solid
+masonry; joined to the life he has known by the merest tube, in which he may
+only crawl, and which any accident or evil design might block. The whole subject
+seemed so weird and alluring that we resolved to pay the pyramid plateau
+another visit at the earliest possible opportun ity. For me this opportunity came
+much earlier than I expected.
+
+That evening, the members of our party feeling some what tired after the
+strenuous program of the day, I went alone with Abdul Reis for a walk through
+the picturesque Arab quarter. Though I had seen it by day, I wished to study the
+alleys and bazaars in the dusk, when rich shadows and mellow gleams of light
+would add to their glamor and fantastic illusion. The native crowds were
+thinning, but were still very noisy and numerous when we came upon a knot of
+reveling Bedouins in the Suken-Nahhasin, or bazaar of the coppersmiths. Their
+apparent leader, an insolent youth with heavy features and saucily cocked
+tarbush, took some notice of us, and evidently recognized with no great
+friendliness my competent but admittedly supercilious and sneeringly disposed
+guide.
+
+Perhaps, I thought, he resented that odd reproduction of the Sphinx's half-smile
+which I had often remarked with amused irritation; or perhaps he did not like
+the hollow and sepulchral resonance of Abdul's voice. At any rate, the exchange
+of ancestrally opprobrious language became very brisk; and before long Ali Ziz,
+as I heard the stranger called when called by no worse name, began to pull
+
+
+
+
+violently at Abdul's robe, an action quickly reciprocated and leading to a spirited
+scuffle in which both combatants lost their sacredly cherished headgear and
+would have reached an even direr condition had I not intervened and separated
+them by main force.
+
+My interference, at first seemingly unwelcome on both sides, succeeded at last in
+effecting a truce. Sullenly each belligerent composed his wrath and his attire, and
+with an assumption of dignity as profound as it was sudden, the two formed a
+curious pact of honor which I soon learned is a custom of great antiquity in Cairo
+- a pact for the settle ment of their difference by means of a nocturnal fist fight
+atop the Great Pyramid, long after the departure of the last moon light sightseer.
+Each duelist was to assemble a party of seconds, and the affair was to begin at
+midnight, proceeding by rounds in the most civilized possible fashion.
+
+In all this planning there was much which excited my interest. The fight itself
+promised to be unique and spectacular, while the thought of the scene on that
+hoary pile overlooking the antediluvian plateau of Gizeh under the wan moon of
+the pallid small hours appealed to every fiber of imagination in me. A request
+found Abdul exceedingly willing to admit me to his party of seconds; so that all
+the rest of the early evening I accompanied him to various dens in the most
+lawless regions of the town - mostly northeast of the Ezbekiyeh - where he
+gathered one by one a select and formidable band of congenial cutthroats as his
+pugilistic background.
+
+Shortly after nine our party, mounted on donkeys bearing such royal or tourist-
+reminiscent names as 'Rameses,' 'Mark Twain,' 'J. P. Morgan,' and 'Minnehaha',
+edged through street labyrinths both Oriental and Occidental, crossed the
+muddy and mast-forested Nile by the bridge of the bronze lions, and cantered
+philosophically between the lebbakhs on the road to Gizeh. Slightly over two
+hours were consumed by the trip, toward the end of which we passed the last of
+the returning tourists, saluted the last inbound trolley-car, and were alone with
+the night and the past and the spectral moon.
+
+Then we saw the vast pyramids at the end of the avenue, ghoulish with a dim
+atavistical menace which I had not seemed to notice in the daytime. Even the
+smallest of them held a hint of the ghastly -for was it not in this that they had
+buried Queen Nitocris alive in the Sixth Dynasty; subtle Queen Nitocris, who
+once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned
+them by opening the water-gates? I recalled that the Arabs whisper things about
+Nitocris, and shun the Third Pyramid at certain phases of the moon. It must have
+been over her that Thomas Moore was brooding when he wrote a thing muttered
+about by Memphian boatmen:
+
+
+
+
+'The subterranean nymph that dwells
+
+'Mid sunless gems and glories hid
+
+The lady of the Pyramid!'
+
+Early as we were, Ali Ziz and his party were ahead of us; for we saw their
+donkeys outlined against the desert plateau at Kafrel-Haram; toward which
+squalid Arab settlement, close to the Sphinx, we had diverged instead of
+following the regular road to the Mena House, where some of the sleepy,
+inefficient police might have observed and halted us. Here, where filthy
+Bedouins stabled camels and donkeys in the rock tombs of Khephren's courtiers,
+we were led up the rocks and over the sand to the Great Pyramid, up whose
+time-worn sides the Arabs swarmed eagerly, Abdul Reis offering me the
+assistance I did not need.
+
+As most travelers know, the actual apex of this structure has long been worn
+away, leaving a reasonably flat platform twelve yards square. On this eery
+pinnacle a squared circle was formed, and in a few moments the sardonic desert
+moon leered down upon a battle which, but for the quality of the ringside cries,
+might well have occurred at some minor athletic club in America. As I watched
+it, I felt that some of our less -desirable institutions were not lacking; for every
+blow, feint, and defense bespoke 'stalling' to my not inexperienced eye. It was
+quickly over, and despite my misgivings as to methods I felt a sort of proprietary
+pride when Abdul Reis was adjudged the winner.
+
+Reconciliation was phenomenally rapid, and amidst the singing, fraternizing and
+drinking that followed, I found it difficult to realize that a quarrel had ever
+occurred. Oddly enough, I myself seemed to be more a center of notice than the
+antagonists; and from my smattering of Arabic I judged that they were
+discussing my professional performances and escapes from every sort of manacle
+and confinement, in a manner which indicated not only a surprising knowledge
+of me, but a distinct hostility and skepticism concerning my feats of escape. It
+gradually dawned on me that the elder magic of Egypt did not depart without
+leaving traces, and that fragments of a strange secret lore and priestly cult
+practises have survived surreptitiously amongst the fella heen to such an extent
+that the prowess of a strange hahwi or magician is resented and disputed. I
+thought of how much my hollow-voiced guide Abdul Reis looked like an old
+Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling Sphinx . . . and wondered.
+
+Suddenly something happened which in a flash proved the correctness of my
+reflections and made me curse the denseness whereby I had accepted this night's
+events as other than the empty and malicious 'frame-up' they now showed
+themselves to be. Without warning, and doubtless in answer to some subtle sign
+from Abdul, the entire band of Bedouins precipitated itself upon me; and having
+
+
+
+
+produced heavy ropes, soon had me bound as securely as I was ever bound in
+the course of my Hfe, either on the stage or off.
+
+I struggled at first, but soon saw that one man could make no headway against a
+band of over twenty sinewy barbarians. My hands were tied behind my back, my
+knees bent to their fullest extent, and my wrists and ankles stoutly linked
+together with unyielding cords. A stifling gag was forced into my mouth, and a
+blindfold fastened tightly over my eyes. Then, as Arabs bore me aloft on their
+shoulders and began a jouncing descent of the pyramid, I heard the taunts of my
+late guide Abdul, who mocked and jeered delightedly in his hollow voice, and
+assured me that I was soon to have my 'magic -powers' put to a supreme test -
+which would quickly remove any egotism I might have gained through
+triumphing over all the tests offered by America and Europe. Egypt, he
+reminded me, is very old, and full of inner mysteries and antique powers not
+even conceivable to the experts of today, whose devices had so uniformly failed
+to entrap me.
+
+How far or in what direction I was carried, I cannot tell; for the circumstances
+were all against the formation of any accurate judgment. I know, however, that it
+could not have been a great distance; since my bearers at no point hastened
+beyond a walk, yet kept me aloft a surprisingly short time. It is this perplexing
+brevity which makes me feel almost like shuddering whenever I think of Gizeh
+and its plateau - for one is oppressed by hints of the closeness to everyday tourist
+routes of what existed then and must exist still.
+
+The evil abnormality I speak of did not become manifest at first. Setting me
+down on a surface which I recognized as sand rather than rock, my captors
+passed a rope around my chest and dragged me a few feet to a ragged opening in
+the ground, into which they presently lowered me with much rough handling.
+For apparent eons I bumped against the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn
+well which I took to be one of the numerous burial-shafts of the plateau until the
+prodigious, almost incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of conjecture.
+
+The horror of the experience deepened with every dragging second. That any
+descent through the sheer solid rock could be so vast without reaching the core
+of the planet itself, or that any rope made by man could be so long as to dangle
+me in these unholy and seemingly fathomless pro fundities of nether earth, were
+beliefs of such grotesqueness that it was easier to doubt my agitated senses than
+to accept them. Even now I am uncertain, for I know how deceitful the sense of
+time becomes when one is removed or distorted. But I am quite sure that I
+preserved a logical consciousness that far; that at least I did not add any
+fullgrown phantoms of imagination to a picture hideous enough in its reality,
+and explicable by a type of cerebral illusion vastly short of actual hallucination.
+
+
+
+
+All this was not the cause of my first bit of fainting. The shocking ordeal was
+cumulative, and the beginning of the later terrors was a very perceptible increase
+in my rate of descent. They were paying out that infinitely long rope very swiftly
+now, and I scraped cruelly against the rough and constricted sides of the shaft as
+I shot madly downward. My clothing was in tatters, and I felt the trickle of blood
+all over, even above the mounting and excruciating pain. My nostrils, too, were
+assailed by a scarcely definable menace: a creeping odor of damp and staleness
+curiously unlike anything I had ever smelled before, and having faint overtones
+of spice and incense that lent an element of mockery.
+
+Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible - hideous beyond all articulate
+description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It
+was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness
+of it was apocalyptic and demoniac - one moment I was plunging agonizingly
+down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was
+soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swooping through
+illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless
+pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous,
+nauseous lower vacua ... Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion
+those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore
+harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength
+and sanity to endure those still greater sublima tions of cosmic panic that lurked
+and gibbered on the road ahead.
+
+
+It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch flight through
+Stygian space. The process was infinitely painful, and colored by fantastic
+dreams in which my bound and gagged condition found singular embodiment.
+The precise nature of these dreams was very clear while I was experiencing
+them, but became blurred in my recollection almost immediately afterward, and
+was soon reduced to the merest outline by the terrible events - real or imaginary -
+which followed. I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a
+yellow, hairy, five- clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and
+engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that
+it was Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the events of the preceding weeks,
+and saw myself lured and enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously, by
+some hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery; some spirit that was in Egypt
+before ever man was, and that will be when man is no more.
+
+I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it
+has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom
+processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats, and ibises; phantom
+processions marching interminably through subterraneous labyrinths and
+
+
+
+
+avenues of titanic propylaea beside which a man is as a fly, and offering
+unnamable sacrifice to indescribable gods. Stone colossi marched in endless
+night and drove herds of grinning androsphinxes down to the shores of
+illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity
+of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after
+me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by
+emulation.
+
+In my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama of sinister hatred and
+pursuit, and I saw the black soul of Egypt singling me out and calling me in
+inaudible whispers; calling and luring me, leading me on with the glitter and
+glamor of a Saracenic surface, but ever pulling me down to the age-mad
+catacombs and horrors of its dead and abysmal pharaonic heart.
+
+Then the dream faces took on human resemblances, and I saw my guide Abdul
+Reis in the robes of a king, with the sneer of the Sphinx on his features. And I
+knew that those features were the features of Khephren the Great, who raised the
+Second Pyramid, carved over the Sphinx's face in the likeness of his own and
+built that titanic gateway temple whose myriad corridors the archaeologists
+think they have dug out of the cryptical sand and the uninformative rock. And I
+looked at the long, lean rigid hand of Khephren; the long, lean, rigid hand as I
+had seen it on the diorite statue in the Cairo Museum - the statue they had found
+in the terrible gateway temple - and wondered that I had not shrieked when I
+saw it on Abdul Reis... That hand! It was hideously cold, and it was crushing
+me; it was the cold and cramping of the sarcophagus . . . the chill and constriction
+of unrememberable Egypt... It was nighted, necropolitan Egypt itself.., that
+yellow paw. .. and they whisper such things of Khephren. . .
+
+But at this juncture I began to wake - or at least, to assume a condition less
+completely that of sleep than the one just preceding. I recalled the fight atop the
+pyramid, the treacherous Bedouins and their attack, my frightful descent by rope
+through endless rock depths, and my mad swinging and plunging in a chill void
+redolent of aromatic putrescence. I perceived that I now lay on a damp rock
+floor, and that my bonds were still biting into me with unloosened force. It was
+very cold, and I seemed to detect a faint current of noisome air sweeping across
+me. The cuts and bruises I had received from the jagged sides of the rock shaft
+were paining me woefully, their soreness enhanced to a stinging or burning
+acuteness by some pungent quality in the faint draft, and the mere act of rolling
+over was enough to set my whole frame throbbing with untold agony.
+
+As I turned I felt a tug from above, and concluded that the rope whereby I was
+lowered still reached to the surface. Whether or not the Arabs still held it, I had
+no idea; nor had I any idea how far within the earth I was. I knew that the
+
+
+
+
+darkness around me was wholly or nearly total, since no ray of moonlight
+penetrated my blindfold; but I did not trust my senses enough to accept as
+evidence of extreme depth the sensation of vast duration which had
+characterized my descent.
+
+Knowing at least that I was in a space of considerable extent reached from the
+above surface directly by an opening in the rock, I doubtfully conjectured that
+my prison was perhaps the buried gateway chapel of old Khephren - the Temple
+of the Sphinx - perhaps some inner corridors which the guides had not shown
+me during my morning visit, and from which I might easily escape if I could find
+my way to the barred entrance. It would be a labyrinthine wandering, but no
+worse than others out of which I had in the past found my way.
+
+The first step was to get free of my bonds, gag, and blindfold; and this I knew
+would be no great task, since subtler experts than these Arabs had tried every
+known species of fetter upon me during my long and varied career as an
+exponent of escape, yet had never succeeded in defeating my methods.
+
+Then it occurred to me that the Arabs might be ready to meet and attack me at
+the entrance upon any evidence of my probable escape from the binding cords,
+as would be furnished by any decided agitation of the rope which they probably
+held. This, of course, was taking for granted that my place of confinement was
+indeed Khephren's Temple of the Sphinx. The direct opening in the roof,
+wherever it might lurk, could not be beyond easy reach of the ordinary modern
+entrance near the Sphinx; if in truth it were any great distance at all on the
+surface, since the total area known to visitors is not at all enormous. I had not
+noticed any such opening during my daytime pilgrimage, but knew that these
+things are easily overlooked amidst the drifting sands.
+
+Thinking these matters over as I lay bent and bound on the rock floor, I nearly
+forgot the horrors of abysmal descent and cavernous swinging which had so
+lately reduced me to a coma. My present thought was only to outwit the Arabs,
+and I accordingly determined to work myself free as quickly as possible,
+avoiding any tug on the descending line which might betray an effective or even
+problematical attempt at freedom.
+
+This, however, was more easily determined than effected. A few preliminary
+trials made it clear that little could be accomplished without considerable
+motion; and it did not surprise me when, after one especially energetic struggle, I
+began to feel the coils of falling rope as they piled up about me and upon me.
+Obviously, I thought, the Bedouins had felt my movements and released their
+end of the rope; hastening no doubt to the temple's true entrance to lie
+murderously in wait for me.
+
+
+
+
+The prospect was not pleasing - but I had faced worse in my time without
+flinching, and would not flinch now. At present I must first of all free myself of
+bonds, then trust to ingenuity to escape from the temple unharmed. It is curious
+how implicitly I had come to believe myself in the old temple of Khephren beside
+the Sphinx, only a short dis tance below the ground.
+
+That belief was shattered, and every pristine apprehen sion of preternattiral
+depth and demoniac mystery revived, by a circumstance which grew in horror
+and significance even as I formulated my philosophical plan. I have said that the
+falling rope was piling up about and upon me. Now I saw that it was continuing
+to pile, as no rope of normal length could possibly do. It gained in momentum
+and became an avalanche of hemp, accumulating moun tainously on the floor
+and half burying me beneath its swiftly multiplying coils. Soon I was completely
+engulfed and gasping for breath as the increasing convolutions submerged and
+stifled me.
+
+My senses tottered again, and I vaguely tried to fight off a menace desperate and
+ineluctable. It was not merely that I was tortured beyond human endurance - not
+merely that life and breath seemed to be crushed slowly out of me - it was the
+knowledge of what those unnatural lengths of rope implied, and the
+consciousness of what unknown and incalculable gulfs of inner earth must at this
+moment be surrounding me. My endless descent and swinging flight through
+goblin space, then, must have been real, and even now I must be lying helpless in
+some nameless cavern world toward the core of the planet. Such a sudden
+confirmation of ultimate horror was insupportable, and a second time I lapsed
+into merciful oblivion.
+
+When I say oblivion, I do not imply that I was free from dreams. On the contrary,
+my absence from the conscious world was marked by visions of the most
+unutterable hideousness. God! ... If only I had not read so much Egyptology
+before coming to this land which is the fountain of all darkness and terror! This
+second spell of fainting filled my sleeping mind anew with shivering realization
+of the country and its archaic secrets, and through some damnable chance my
+dreams turned to the ancient notions of the dead and their sojournings in soul
+and body beyond those mysterious tombs which were more houses than graves.
+I recalled, in dream-shapes which it is well that I do not remember, the peculiar
+and elaborate construction of Egyptian sepulchers; and the exceedingly singular
+and terrific doctrines which determined this construction.
+
+All these people thought of was death and the dead. They conceived of a literal
+resurrection of the body which made them mummify it with desperate care, and
+preserve all the vital organs in canopic jars near the corpse; whilst besides the
+body they believed in two other elements, the soul, which after its weighing and
+
+
+
+
+approval by Osiris dwelt in the land of the blest, and the obscure and portentous
+ka or life-principle which wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a
+horrible way, demanding occasional access to the preserved body, consuming
+the food offerings brought by priests and pious relatives to the mortuary chapel,
+and sometimes - as men whispered - taking its body or the wooden double
+always buried beside it and stalking noxiously abroad on errands peculiarly
+repellent.
+
+For thousands of years those bodies rested gorgeously encased and staring
+glassily upward when not visited by the ka, awaiting the day when Osiris should
+restore both ka and soul, and lead forth the stiff legions of the dead from the
+sunken houses of sleep. It was to have been a glorious rebirth - but not all souls
+were approved, nor were all tombs inviolate, so that certain grotesque mistakes
+and fiendish abnormalities were to be looked for. Even today the Arabs murmur
+of unsanctified convocations and unwholesome worship in forgotten nether
+abysses, which only winged invisible kas and soulless mummies may visit and
+return unscathed.
+
+Perhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which relate to
+certain perverse products of decadent priestcraft - composite mummies made by
+the artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in
+imitation of the elder gods. At all stages of history the sacred animals were
+mummified, so that consecrated bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles and the like might
+return some day to greater glory. But only in the decadence did they mix the
+human and the animal in the same mummy - only in the decadence, when they
+did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the ka and the soul.
+
+What happened to those composite mummies is not told of- at least publicly -
+and it is certain that no Egyptologist ever found one. The whispers of Arabs are
+very wild, and cannot be relied upon. They even hint that old Khephren - he of
+the Sphinx, the Second Pyramid and the yawning gateway temple - lives far
+underground wedded to the ghoul-queen Nitocris and ruling over the mummies
+that are neither of man nor of beast.
+
+It was of these - of Khephren and his consort and his strange armies of the hybrid
+dead - that I dreamed, and that is why I am glad the exact dream-shapes have
+faded from my memory. My most horrible vision was connected with an idle
+question I had asked myself the day before when looking at the great carven
+riddle of the desert and wondering with what unknown depth the temple close
+to it might be secretly connected. That question, so innocent and whimsical then,
+assumed in my dream a meaning of frenetic and hysterical madness ... what
+huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?
+
+
+
+
+My second awakening - if awakening it was - is a memory of stark hideousness
+which nothing else in my Hfe - save one thing which came after - can parallel;
+and that life has been full and adventurous beyond most men's. Remember that I
+had lost consciousness whilst buried beneath a cascade of falling rope whose
+immensity revealed the cataclysmic depth of my present position. Now, as
+perception returned, I felt the entire weight gone; and realized upon rolling over
+that although I was still tied, gagged and blindfolded, some agency had removed
+completely the suffocating hempen landslide which had overwhelmed me. The
+significance of this condition, of course, came to me only gradually; but even so I
+think it would have brought unconsciousness again had I not by this time
+reached such a state of emotional exhaustion that no new horror could make
+much difference. I was alone. . . with what?
+
+Before I could torture myself with any new reflection, or make any fresh effort to
+escape from my bonds, an additional circumstance became manifest. Pains not
+formerly felt were racking my arms and legs, and I seemed coated with a
+profusion of dried blood beyond anything my former cuts and abrasions could
+furnish. My chest, too, seemed pierced by a hundred wounds, as though some
+malign, titanic ibis had been pecking at it. Assuredly the agency which had
+removed the rope was a hostile one, and had begun to wreak terrible injuries
+upon me when somehow impelled to desist. Yet at the same time my sensations
+were distinctly the reverse of what one might expect. Instead of sinking into a
+bottomless pit of despair, I was stirred to a new courage and action; for now I felt
+that the evil forces were physical things which a fearless man might encounter on
+an even basis.
+
+On the strength of this thought I tugged again at my bonds, and used all the art
+of a lifetime to free myself as I had so often done amidst the glare of lights and
+the applause of vast crowds. The familiar details of my escaping process
+commenced to engross me, and now that the long rope was gone I half regained
+my belief that the supreme horrors were hallucinations after all, and that there
+had never been any terrible shaft, measureless abyss or interminable rope. Was I
+after all in the gateway temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, and had the
+sneaking Arabs stolen in to torture me as I lay helpless there? At any rate, I must
+be free. Let me stand up unbound, ungagged, and with eyes open to catch any
+glimmer of light which might come trickling from any source, and I could
+actually delight in the combat against evil and treacherous foes!
+
+How long I took in shaking off my encumbrances I cannot tell. It must have been
+longer than in my exhibition performances, because I was wounded, exhausted,
+and enervated by the experiences I had passed through. When I was finally free,
+and taking deep breaths of a chill, damp, evilly spiced air all the more horrible
+when encountered without the screen of gag and blindfold edges, I found that I
+
+
+
+
+was too cramped and fatigued to move at once. There I lay, trying to stretch a
+frame bent and mangled, for an indefinite period, and straining my eyes to catch
+a glimpse of some ray of light which would give a hint as to my position.
+
+By degrees my strength and flexibility returned, but my eyes beheld nothing. As
+I staggered to my feet I peered diligently in every direction, yet met only an
+ebony blackness as great as that I had known when blindfolded. I tried my legs,
+blood-encrusted beneath my shredded trousers, and found that I could walk; yet
+could not decide in what direction to go. Obviously I ought not to walk at
+random, and perhaps retreat directly from the entrance I sought; so I paused to
+note the difference of the cold, fetid, natron-scented air-current which I had
+never ceased to feel. Accepting the point of its source as the possible entrance to
+the abyss, I strove to keep track of this landmark and to walk consistently toward
+it.
+
+I had a match-box with me, and even a small electric flashlight; but of course the
+pockets of my tossed and tattered clothing were long since emptied of all heavy
+articles. As I walked cautiously in the blackness, the draft grew stronger and
+more offensive, till at length I could regard it as nothing less than a tangible
+stream of detestable vapor pouring out of some aperture like the smoke of the
+genie from the fisherman's jar in the Eastern tale. The East . . . Egypt . . . truly, this
+dark cradle of civilization was ever the wellspring of horrors and marvels
+unspeakable!
+
+The more I reflected on the nature of this cavern wind, the greater my sense of
+disquiet became; for although despite its odor I had sought its source as at least
+an indirect clue to the outer world, I now saw plainly that this foul emanation
+could have no admixture or connection whatsoever with the clean air of the
+Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister gulfs still
+lower down. I had, then, been walking in the wrong direction!
+
+After a moment's reflection I decided not to retrace my steps. Away from the
+draft I would have no landmarks, for the roughly level rock floor was devoid of
+distinctive configurations. If, however, I followed up the strange current, I would
+undoubtedly arrive at an aperture of some sort, from whose gate I could perhaps
+work round the walls to the opposite side of this Cyclopean and otherwise
+unnavigable hall. That I might fail, I well realized. I saw that this was no part of
+Khephren's gateway temple which tourists know, and it struck me that this
+particular hall might be unknown even to archaeologists, and merely stumbled
+upon by the inquisitive and malignant Arabs who had imprisoned me. If so, was
+there any present gate of escape to the known parts or to the outer air?
+
+
+
+
+What evidence, indeed, did I now possess that this was the gateway temple at
+all? For a moment all my wildest speculations rushed back upon me, 'and I
+thought of that vivid melange of impressions - descent, suspension in space, the
+rope, my wounds, and the dreams that were frankly dreams. Was this the end of
+life for me? Or indeed, would it be merciful if this moment were the end? I could
+answer none of my own questions, but merely kept on, till Fate for a third time
+reduced me to oblivion.
+
+This time there were no dreams, for the suddenness of the incident shocked me
+out of all thought either conscious or subconscious. Tripping on an unexpected
+descending step at a point where the offensive draft became strong enough to
+offer an actual physical resistance, I was precipitated headlong down a black
+flight of huge stone stairs into a gulf of hideousness unrelieved.
+
+That I ever breathed again is a tribute to the inherent vitality of the healthy
+human organism. Often I look back to that night and feel a touch of actual humor
+in those repeated lapses of consciousness; lapses whose succession reminded me
+at the time of nothing more than the crude cinema melodramas of that period. Of
+course, it is possible that the repeated lapses never occurred; and that all the
+features of that underground nightmare were merely the dreams of one long
+coma which began with the shock of my descent into that abyss and ended with
+the healing balm of the outer air and of the rising sun which found me stretched
+on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic and dawn-flushed face of the Great
+Sphinx.
+
+I prefer to believe this latter explanation as much as I can, hence was glad when
+the police told me that the barrier to Krephren's gateway temple had been found
+unfastened, and that a sizeable rift to the surface did actually exist in one corner
+of the still buried part. I was glad, too, when the doctors pronounced my wounds
+only those to be expected from my seizure, blindfolding, lowering, struggling
+with bonds, falling some distance - perhaps into a depression in the temple's
+inner gallery - dragging myself to the outer barrier and escaping from it, and
+experiences like that.., a very soothing diagnosis. And yet I know that there must
+be more than appears on the surface. That extreme descent is too vivid a memory
+to be dismissed - and it is odd that no one has ever been able to find a man
+answering the description of my guide, Abdul Reis el Drogman- the tomb-
+throated guide who looked and smiled like King Khephren.
+
+I have digressed from my connected narrative - perhaps in the vain hope of
+evading the telling of that final incident; that incident which of all is most
+certainly an hallucination. But I promised to relate it, and I do not break
+promises. When I recovered - or seemed to recover - my senses after that fall
+down the black stone stairs, I was quite as alone and in darkness as before. The
+
+
+
+
+windy stench, bad enough before, was now fiendish; yet I had acquired enough
+famiharity by this time to bear it stoically. Dazedly I began to crawl away from
+the place whence the putrid wind came, and with my bleeding hands felt the
+colossal blocks of a mighty pavement. Once my head struck against a hard
+object, and when I felt of it I learned that it was the base of a column - a column
+of unbelievable immensity - whose surface was covered with gigantic chiseled
+hieroglyphics very perceptible to my touch.
+
+Crawling on, I encountered other titan columns at incomprehensible distances
+apart; when suddenly my attention was captured by the realization of something
+which must have been impinging on my subconscious hearing long before the
+conscious sense was aware of it.
+
+From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds,
+measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before. That they were
+very ancient and distinctly ceremonial I felt almost intuitively; and much reading
+in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum,
+and the tympa num. In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and beat ing I felt
+an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth - a terror peculiarly
+dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for
+our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond
+these aegipanic cacophonies. The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they
+were approaching. Then - and may all the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the
+like from my ears again - I began to hear, faintly and afar off, the morbid and
+millennial tramping of the marching things.
+
+It was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such perfect rhythm.
+The training of unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind that march of
+earth's inmost monstrosities ... padding, clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling,
+lumbering, crawling.. . and all to the abhorrent discords of those mocking
+instruments. And then - God keep the memory of those Arab legends out of my
+
+head! - the mummies without souls ... the meeting-place of the wandering
+
+the hordes of the devil-cursed pharaonic dead of forty centuries.. . the composite
+mummies led through the uttermost onyx voids by King Khephren and his
+ghoul-queen Nitocris . . .
+
+The tramping drew nearer - Heaven save me from the sound of those feet and
+paws and hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire detail! Down
+limitless reaches of sunless pavement a spark of light flickered in the malodorous
+wind and I drew behind the enormous circumference of a Cyclopic column that I
+might escape for a while the horror that was stalking million-footed toward me
+through gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers
+increased, and the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the
+
+
+
+
+quivering orange light there stood faintly forth a scene of such stony awe that I
+gasped from sheer wonder that conquered even fear and repulsion. Bases of
+columns whose middles were higher than human sight. . . mere bases of things
+that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance . . . hieroglyphics carved
+by unthinkable hands in caverns where daylight can be only a remote legend. . .
+
+I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard
+their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead
+tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak... but God! their crazy torches
+began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns.
+Hippopotami should not have human hands and carzy torches. . . men should not
+have the heads of crocodiles. . .
+
+I tried to turn away, but the shadows and the sounds and the stench were
+everywhere. Then I remembered something I used to do in half-conscious
+nightmares as a boy, and began to repeat to myself, 'This is a dream! This is a
+dream!' But it was of no use, and I could only shut my eyes and pray ... at least,
+that is what I think I did, for one is never sure in visions - and I know this can
+have been nothing more. I wondered whether I should ever reach the world
+again, and at times would furtively open my eyes to see if I could discern any
+feature of the place other than the wind of spiced putrefaction, the topless
+columns, and the thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal horror. The
+sputtering glare of multiplying torches now shone, and unless this hellish place
+were wholly without walls, I could not fail to see some boundary or fixed
+landmark soon. But I had to shut my eyes again when I realized how many of the
+things were assembling - and when I glimpsed a certain object walking solemnly
+and steadily without any body above the waist.
+
+A fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or death-rattle now split the very
+atmosphere - the charnel atmosphere poisonous with naftha and bitumen blasts -
+in one concerted chorus from the ghoulish legion of hybrid blasphemies. My
+eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human
+creature could even imagine without panic, fear and physical exhaustion. The
+things had filed ceremonially in one direction, the direction of the noisome wind,
+where the light of their torches showed their bended heads - or the bended heads
+of such as had heads. They were worshipping before a great black fetor-belching
+aperture which reached up almost out of sight, -and which I could see was
+flanked at right angles by two giant staircases whose ends were far away in
+shadow. One of these was indubitably the staircase I had fallen down.
+
+The dimensions of the hole were fully in proportion with those of the columns -
+an ordinary house would have been lost in it, and any average public building
+could easily have been moved in and out. It was so vast a surface that only by
+
+
+
+
+moving the eye could one trace its boundaries.. . so vast, so hideously black, and
+so aromatically stinking . .. Directly in front of this yawning Polyphemus-door
+the things were throwing objects - evidently sacrifices or religious offerings, to
+judge by their gestures. Khephren was their leader; sneering King Khephren or
+the guide Abdul Reis, crowned with a golden pshent and intoning endless
+formulae with the hollow voice of the dead. By his side knelt beautiful Queen
+Nitocris, whom I saw in profile for a moment, noting that the right half of her
+face was eaten away by rats or other ghouls. And I shut my eyes again when I
+saw what objects were being thrown as offerings to the fetid aperture or its
+possible local deity.
+
+It occurred to me that, judging from the elaborateness of this worship, the
+concealed deity must be one of considerable importance. Was it Osiris or Isis,
+Horus or Anubis, or some vast unknown God of the Dead still more central and
+supreme? There is a legend that terrible altars and colossi were reared to an
+Unknown One before ever the known gods were worshipped. . .
+
+And now, as I steeled myself to watch the rapt and sepulchral adorations of
+those nameless things, a thought of escape flashed upon me. The hall was dim,
+and the columns heavy with shadow. With every creature of that nightmare
+throng absorbed in shocking raptures, it might be barely possible for me to creep
+past to the far-away end of one of the staircases and ascend unseen; trusting to
+Fate and skill to deliver me from the upper reaches. Where I was, I neither knew
+nor seriously reflected upon - and for a
+
+moment it struck me as amusing to plan a serious escape from that which I knew
+to be a dream. Was I in some hidden and unsuspected lower realm of
+Khephren' s gateway temple - that temple which generations have persis tently
+called the Temple of the Sphinx? I could not conjecture, but I resolved to ascend
+to life and consciousness if wit and muscle could carry me.
+
+Wriggling flat on my stomach, I began the anxious journey toward the foot of the
+left-hand staircase, which seemed the more accessible of the two. I cannot
+describe the incidents and sensations of that crawl, but they may be guessed
+when one reflects on what I had to watch steadily in that malign, wind-blown
+torchlight in order to avoid detection. The bottom of the staircase was, as I have
+said, far away in shadow, as it had to be to rise without a bend to the dizzy
+parapeted landing above the titanic aperture. This placed the last stages of my
+crawl at some distance from the noisome herd, though the spectacle chilled me
+even when quite remote at my right.
+
+At length I succeeded in reaching the steps and began to climb; keeping close to
+the wall, on which I observed decorations of the most hideous sort, and relying
+
+
+
+
+for safety on the absorbed, ecstatic interest with which the monstrosities watched
+the foul-breezed aperture and the impious objects of nourishment they had flung
+on the pavement before it. Though the staircase was huge and steep, fashioned of
+vast porphyry blocks as if for the feet of a giant, the ascent seemed virtually
+interminable. Dread of discovery and the pain which renewed exercise had
+brought to my wounds combined to make that upward crawl a thing of
+agonizing memory. I had intended, on reaching the landing, to climb
+immediately onward along whatever upper staircase might mount from there;
+stopping for no last look at the carrion abominations that pawed and genuflected
+some seventy or eighty feet below - yet a sudden repetition of that thunderous
+corpse-gurgle and death-rattle chorus, coming as I had nearly gained the top of
+the flight and showing by its ceremonial rhythm that it was not an alarm of my
+discovery, caused me to pause and peer cautiously over the parapet.
+
+The monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of the
+nauseous aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was something quite
+ponderous, even as seen from my height; something yellowish and hairy, and
+endowed with a sort of nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized
+hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five
+separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the
+first very small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal and largest of
+all, and the fifth rather small, though not so small as the first.
+
+Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the
+excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture.
+Once in a while the thing would leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into
+its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was so inexplicable that I stared in
+fascination, wishing it would emerge farther from the cavernous lair beneath me.
+
+Then it did emerge ... it did emerge, and at the sight I turned and fled into the
+darkness up the higher staircase that rose behind me; fled unknowingly up
+incredible steps and ladders and inclined planes to which no human sight or
+logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate to the world of dreams for want
+of any confirmation. It must have been a dream, or the dawn would never have
+found me breathing on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face
+of the Great Sphinx.
+
+The Great Sphinx! God! - that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest
+morning before ... what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx
+originally carven to represent?
+
+Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme
+horror - the unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the
+
+
+
+
+unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not
+exist. The five-headed monster that emerged ... that five-headed monster as
+large as a hippopotamus ... the five headed monster - and that of which it is the
+merest forepaw. . .
+
+But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.
+
+
+
+
+In The Vault
+
+Written on September 18, 1925
+
+Published November 1925 in The Tryout
+
+There is nothing more absurd, as 1 view it, than that conventional association of
+the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the
+multitude. Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village
+undertaker, and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be
+brought to expect more than a hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy. God
+knows, though, that the prosy tale which George Birch's death permits me to tell
+has in it aspects beside which some of our darkest tragedies are light.
+
+Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet never discussed
+the case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who
+died years ago. It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were results
+of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the
+receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous
+mechanical means; but while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other
+and blacker things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium
+toward the last. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he
+probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. He was a
+bachelor, wholly without relatives.
+
+Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of Peck Valley; and was a
+very calloused and primitive specimen even as such specimens go. The practices
+I heard attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even
+Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its
+mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly "laying-out"
+apparel invisible beneath the casket's lid, and the degree of dignity to be
+maintained in posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to
+containers not always calculated with sublimest accuracy. Most distinctly Birch
+was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think he was not an
+evil man. He was merely crass of fibre and function- thoughtless, careless, and
+liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of
+imagination which holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste.
+
+Just where to begin Birch's story I can hardly decide, since I am no practiced
+teller of tales. I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the
+ground froze and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till
+spring. Fortunately the village was small and the death rate low, so that it was
+
+
+
+
+possible to give all of Birch's inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single
+antiquated receiving tomb. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter
+weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness. Never did he knock
+together flimsier and ungainlier caskets, or disregard more flagrantly the needs
+of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he slammed open and shut with such
+nonchalant abandon.
+
+At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine
+silent harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb. Birch, though
+dreading the bother of removal and interment, began his task of transference one
+disagreeable April morning, but ceased before noon because of a heavy rain that
+seemed to irritate his horse, after having laid but one mortal tenement to its
+permanent rest. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not
+far from the tomb. Birch decided that he would begin the next day with little old
+Matthew Tenner, whose grave was also near by; but actually postponed the
+matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Priday, the 15th. Being
+without superstition, he did not heed the day at all; though ever afterward he
+refused to do anything of importance on that fateful sixth day of the week.
+Certainly, the events of that evening greatly changed George Birch.
+
+On the afternoon of Triday, April 15th, then. Birch set out for the tomb with
+horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Tenner. That he was not
+perfectly sober, he subsequently admitted; though he had not then taken to the
+wholesale drinking by which he later tried to forget certain things. He was just
+dizzy and careless enough to annoy his sensitive horse, which as he drew it
+viciously up at the tomb neighed and pawed and tossed its head, much as on
+that former occasion when the rain had vexed it. The day was clear, but a high
+wind had sprung up; and Birch was glad to get to shelter as he unlocked the iron
+door and entered the side-hill vault. Another might not have relished the damp,
+odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins; but Birch in those days
+was insensitive, and was concerned only in getting the right coffin for the right
+grave. He had not forgotten the criticism aroused when Hannah Bixby's
+relatives, wishing to transport her body to the cemetery in the city whither they
+had moved, found the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone.
+
+The light was dim, but Birch's sight was good, and he did not get Asaph
+Sawyer's coffin by mistake, although it was very similar. He had, indeed, made
+that coffin for Matthew Tenner; but had cast it aside at last as too awkward and
+flimsy, in a fit of curious sentimentality aroused by recalling how kindly and
+generous the little old man had been to him during his bankruptcy five years
+before. He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce, but was thrifty
+enough to save the rejected specimen, and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a
+malignant fever. Sawyer was not a lovable man, and many stories were told of
+
+
+
+
+his almost inhuman vindictiveness and tenacious memory for wrongs real or
+fancied. To him Birch had felt no compunction in assigning the carelessly made
+coffin which he now pushed out of the way in his quest for the Fenner casket.
+
+It was just as he had recognised old Matt's coffin that the door slammed to in the
+wind, leaving him in a dusk even deeper than before. The narrow transom
+admitted only the feeblest of rays, and the overhead ventilation funnel virtually
+none at all; so that he was reduced to a profane fumbling as he made his halting
+way among the long boxes toward the latch. In this funereal twilight he rattled
+the rusty handles, pushed at the iron panels, and wondered why the massive
+portal had grown so suddenly recalcitrant. In this twilight too, he began to
+realise the truth and to shout loudly as if his horse outside could do more than
+neigh an unsympathetic reply. For the long-neglected latch was obviously
+broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his own
+oversight.
+
+The thing must have happened at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Birch,
+being by temperament phlegmatic and practical, did not shout long; but
+proceeded to grope about for some tools which he recalled seeing in a corner of
+the tomb. It is doubtful whether he was touched at all by the horror and exquisite
+weirdness of his position, but the bald fact of imprisonment so far from the daily
+paths of men was enough to exasperate him thoroughly. His day's work was
+sadly interrupted, and unless chance presently brought some rambler hither, he
+might have to remain all night or longer. The pile of tools soon reached, and a
+hammer and chisel selected. Birch returned over the coffins to the door. The air
+had begun to be exceedingly unwholesome; but to this detail he paid no
+attention as he toiled, half by feeling, at the heavy and corroded metal of the
+latch. He would have given much for a lantern or bit of candle; but lacking these,
+bungled semi-sightlessly as best he might.
+
+When he perceived that the latch was hopelessly unyielding, at least to such
+meagre tools and under such tenebrous conditions as these. Birch glanced about
+for other possible points of escape. The vault had been dug from a hillside, so
+that the narrow ventilation funnel in the top ran through several feet of earth,
+making this direction utterly useless to consider. Over the door, however, the
+high, slit-like transom in the brick facade gave promise of possible enlargement
+to a diligent worker; hence upon this his eyes long rested as he racked his brains
+for means to reach it. There was nothing like a ladder in the tomb, and the coffin
+niches on the sides and rear- which Birch seldom took the trouble to use-
+afforded no ascent to the space above the door. Only the coffins themselves
+remained as potential stepping-stones, and as he considered these he speculated
+on the best mode of transporting them. Three coffin-heights, he reckoned, would
+permit him to reach the transom; but he could do better with four. The boxes
+
+
+
+
+were fairly even, and could be piled up like blocks; so he began to compute how
+he might most stably use the eight to rear a scalable platform four deep. As he
+planned, he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had
+been more securely made. Whether he had imagination enough to wish they
+were empty, is strongly to be doubted.
+
+Finally he decided to lay a base of three parallel with the wall, to place upon this
+two layers of two each, and upon these a single box to serve as the platform. This
+arrangement could be ascended with a minimum of awkwardness, and would
+furnish the desired height. Better still, though, he would utilise only two boxes of
+the base to support the superstructure, leaving one free to be piled on top in case
+the actual feat of escape required an even greater altitude. And so the prisoner
+toiled in the twilight, heaving the unresponsive remnants of mortality with little
+ceremony as his miniature Tower of Babel rose course by course. Several of the
+coffins began to split under the stress of handling, and he planned to save the
+stoutly built casket of little Matthew Tenner for the top, in order that his feet
+might have as certain a surface as possible. In the semi-gloom he trusted mostly
+to touch to select the right one, and indeed came upon it almost by accident,
+since it tumbled into his hands as if through some odd volition after he had
+unwittingly placed it beside another on the third layer.
+
+The tower at length finished, and his aching arms rested by a pause during
+which he sat on the bottom step of his grim device. Birch cautiously ascended
+with his tools and stood abreast of the narrow transom. The borders of the space
+were entirely of brick, and there seemed little doubt but that he could shortly
+chisel away enough to allow his body to pass. As his hammer blows began to
+fall, the horse outside whinnied in a tone which may have been encouraging and
+to others may have been mocking. In either case it would have been appropriate;
+for the unexpected tenacity of the easy-looking brickwork was surely a sardonic
+commentary on the vanity of mortal hopes, and the source of a task whose
+performance deserved every possible stimulus.
+
+Dusk fell and found Birch still toiling. He worked largely by feeling now, since
+newly gathered clouds hid the moon; and though progress was still slow, he felt
+heartened at the extent of his encroachments on the top and bottom of the
+aperture. He could, he was sure, get out by midnight- though it is characteristic
+of him that this thought was untinged with eerie implications. Undisturbed by
+oppressive reflections on the time, the place, and the company beneath his feet,
+he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment
+hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse
+that pawed near the cypress tree. In time the hole grew so large that he ventured
+to try his body in it now and then, shifting about so that the coffins beneath him
+rocked and creaked. He would not, he found, have to pile another on his
+
+
+
+
+platform to make the proper height; for the hole was on exactly the right level to
+use as soon as its size might permit.
+
+It must have been midnight at least when Birch decided he could get through the
+transom. Tired and perspiring despite many rests, he descended to the floor and
+sat a while on the bottom box to gather strength for the final wriggle and leap to
+the ground outside. The hungry horse was neighing repeatedly and almost
+uncannily, and he vaguely wished it would stop. He was curiously unelated over
+his impending escape, and almost dreaded the exertion, for his form had the
+indolent stoutness of early middle age. As he remounted the splitting coffins he
+felt his weight very poignantly; especially when, upon reaching the topmost one,
+he heard that aggravated crackle which bespeaks the wholesale rending of wood.
+He had, it seems, planned in vain when choosing the stoutest coffin for the
+platform; for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave
+way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not care to
+imagine. Maddened by the sound, or by the stench which billowed forth even to
+the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh, and
+plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it.
+
+Birch, in his ghastly situation, was now too low for an easy scramble out of the
+enlarged transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. Clutching the
+edges of the aperture, he sought to pull himself up, when he noticed a queer
+retardation in the form of an apparent drag on both his ankles. In another
+moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he
+could not shake clear of the unknown grasp which held his feet in relentless
+captivity. Horrible pains, as of savage wounds, shot through his calves; and in
+his mind was a vortex of fright mixed with an unquenchable materialism that
+suggested splinters, loose nails, or some other attribute of a breaking wooden
+box. Perhaps he screamed. At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and
+automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon.
+
+Instinct guided him in his wriggle through the transom, and in the crawl which
+followed his jarring thud on the damp ground. He could not walk, it appeared,
+and the emerging moon must have witnessed a horrible sight as he dragged his
+bleeding ankles toward the cemetery lodge; his fingers clawing the black mould
+in brainless haste, and his body responding with that maddening slowness from
+which one suffers when chased by the phantoms of nightmare. There was
+evidently, however, no pursuer; for he was alone and alive when Armington, the
+lodge-keeper, answered his feeble clawing at the door.
+
+Armington helped Birch to the outside of a spare bed and sent his little son
+Edwin for Dr. Davis. The afflicted man was fully conscious, but would say
+nothing of any consequence; merely muttering such things as "Oh, my ankles!".
+
+
+
+
+"Let go!", or "Shut in the tomb". Then the doctor came with his medicine-case
+and asked crisp questions, and removed the patient's outer clothing, shoes, and
+socks. The wounds- for both ankles were frightfully lacerated about the Achilles'
+tendons- seemed to puzzle the old physician greatly, and finally almost to
+frighten him. His questioning grew more than medically tense, and his hands
+shook as he dressed the mangled members; binding them as if he wished to get
+the wounds out of sight as quickly as possible.
+
+For an impersonal doctor, Davis' ominous and awestruck cross-examination
+became very strange indeed as he sought to drain from the weakened undertaker
+every least detail of his horrible experience. He was oddly anxious to know if
+Birch were sure- absolutely sure- of the identity of that top coffin of the pile; how
+he had chosen it, how he had been certain of it as the Tenner coffin in the dusk,
+and how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious
+Asaph Sawyer. Would the firm Tenner casket have caved in so readily? Davis, an
+old-time village practitioner, had of course seen both at the respective funerals,
+as indeed he had attended both Tenner and Sawyer in their last illnesses. He had
+even wondered, at Sawyer's funeral, how the vindictive farmer had managed to
+lie straight in a box so closely akin to that of the diminutive Tenner.
+
+After a full two hours Dr. Davis left, urging Birch to insist at all times that his
+wounds were caused entirely by loose nails and splintering wood. What else, he
+added, could ever in any case be proved or believed? But it would be well to say
+as little as could be said, and to let no other doctor treat the wounds. Birch
+heeded this advice all the rest of his life till he told me his story; and when I saw
+the scars- ancient and whitened as they then were- 1 agreed that he was wise in
+so doing. He always remained lame, for the great tendons had been severed; but
+I think the greatest lameness was in his soul. His thinking processes, once so
+phlegmatic and logical, had become ineffaceably scarred; and it was pitiful to
+note his response to certain chance allusions such as "Triday", "Tomb", "Coffin",
+and words of less obvious concatenation. His frightened horse had gone home,
+but his frightened wits never quite did that. He changed his business, but
+something always preyed upon him. It may have been just fear, and it may have
+been fear mixed with a queer belated sort of remorse for bygone crudities. His
+drinking, of course, only aggravated what it was meant to alleviate.
+
+When Dr. Davis left Birch that night he had taken a lantern and gone to the old
+receiving tomb. The moon was shining on the scattered brick fragments and
+marred facade, and the latch of the great door yielded readily to a touch from the
+outside. Steeled by old ordeals in dissecting rooms, the doctor entered and
+looked about, stifling the nausea of mind and body that everything in sight and
+smell induced. He cried aloud once, and a little later gave a gasp that was more
+terrible than a cry. Then he fled back to the lodge and broke all the rules of his
+
+
+
+
+calling by rousing and shaking his patient, and hurling at him a succession of
+shuddering whispers that seared into the bewildered ears like the hissing of
+vitriol.
+
+"It was Asaph's coffin. Birch, just as I thought! I knew his teeth, with the front
+ones missing on the upper jaw- never, for God's sake, show those wounds! The
+body was pretty badly gone, but if ever I saw vindictiveness on any face- or
+former face... You know what a fiend he was for revenge- how he ruined old
+Raymond thirty years after their boundary suit, and how he stepped on the
+puppy that snapped at him a year ago last August. . . He was the devil incarnate.
+Birch, and I believe his eye-for-an-eye fury could beat old Father Death himself.
+God, what a rage! I'd hate to have it aimed at me!
+
+"Why did you do it. Birch? He was a scoundrel, and I don't blame you for giving
+him a cast-aside coffin, but you always did go too damned far! Well enough to
+skimp on the thing some way, but you knew what a little man old Fenner was.
+
+"I'll never get the picture out of my head as long as I live. You kicked hard, for
+Asaph's coffin was on the floor. His head was broken in, and everything was
+tumbled about. I've seen sights before, but there was one thing too much here.
+An eye for an eye! Great heavens. Birch, but you got what you deserved. The
+skull turned my stomach, but the other was worse- those ankles cut neatly off to
+fit Matt Fenner's cast-aside coffin!"
+
+
+
+
+Memory
+
+Written 1919
+
+Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. p. 5, 9.
+
+In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its
+light with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree. And within
+the depths of the valley, where the light reaches not, move forms not meant to be
+beheld. Rank is the herbage on each slope, where evil vines and creeping plants
+crawl amidst the stones of ruined palaces, twining tightly about broken columns
+and strange monoliths, and heaving up marble pavements laid by forgotten
+hands. And in trees that grow gigantic in crumbling courtyards leap little apes,
+while in and out of deep treasure-vaults writhe poison serpents and scaly things
+without a name. Vast are the stones which sleep beneath coverlets of dank moss,
+and mighty were the walls from which they fell. For all time did their builders
+erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath them the grey toad
+makes his habitation.
+
+At the very bottom of the valley lies the river Than, whose waters are slimy and
+filled with weeds. From hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it
+flows, so that the Daemon of the Valley knows not why its waters are red, nor
+whither they are bound.
+
+The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Daemon of the Valley,
+saying, "I am old, and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of
+them who built these things of Stone." And the Daemon replied, "I am Memory,
+and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the
+waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they
+were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, it was like to that of the little
+apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river.
+These beings of yesterday were called Man."
+
+So the Genie flew back to the thin horned moon, and the Daemon looked intently
+at a little ape in a tree that grew in a crumbling courtyard.
+
+
+
+
+Nyarlathotep
+
+
+
+Written in December of 1920
+
+Published November 1920 in The United Amateur
+
+Nyarlathotep. . . the crawling chaos. . . I am the last. . . I will tell the audient void. . .
+
+I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general
+tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a
+strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger
+widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the
+most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with
+pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one
+dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense
+of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars
+swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a
+demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons the autumn heat lingered
+fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had
+passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which
+were unknown.
+
+And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could
+tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin
+knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of
+the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from
+places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep,
+swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and
+metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the
+sciences of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent
+his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding
+magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And
+where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the
+screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a
+public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the
+small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying
+moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples
+crumbling against a sickly sky.
+
+I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city the great, the old, the terrible
+city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling
+fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to
+
+
+
+
+explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and
+impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; and what was thrown on a
+screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared
+prophesy, and in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which
+had never been taken before yet which showed only in the eyes. And I heard it
+hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others
+saw not.
+
+It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds
+to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the
+choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and
+yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world
+battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space;
+whirling, churning, struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the
+sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up
+on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on
+the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest,
+mumbled a trembling protest about imposture and static electricity,
+Nyarlathotep drove us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted
+midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be
+afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the
+city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to
+fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces
+we made.
+
+I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we
+began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary marching
+formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of
+them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced
+by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to show where the tramways had run.
+And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its
+side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by
+the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the
+top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a
+different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the
+echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance,
+howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the
+open country, and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as
+we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter
+of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only,
+where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very
+thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black
+rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the
+
+
+
+
+reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power
+to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated
+between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of
+the unimaginable.
+
+Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A
+sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled
+blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with
+sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them
+flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen
+columns of unsanctifled temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and
+reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through
+this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of
+drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable,
+unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping
+whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous
+ultimate gods the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is
+Nyarlathotep.
+
+
+
+
+Picktnan's Model
+
+Written in 1926
+
+Published October 1927 in Weird Tales
+
+You needn't think I'm crazy, Eliot- plenty of others have queerer prejudices than
+this. Why don't you laugh at Oliver's grandfather, who won't ride in a motor? If
+I don't like that damned subway, it's my own business; and we got here more
+quickly anyhow in the taxi. We'd have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if
+we'd taken the car.
+
+I know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you don't
+need to hold a clinic over it. There's plenty of reason, God knows, and I fancy I'm
+lucky to be sane at all. Why the third degree? You didn't use to be so inquisitive.
+
+Well, if you must hear it, I don't know why you shouldn't. Maybe you ought to,
+anyhow, for you kept writing me like a grieved parent when you heard I'd
+begun to cut the Art Club and keep away from Pickman. Now that he's
+disappeared I go round to the club once in a while, but my nerves aren't what
+they were.
+
+No, I don't know what's become of Pickman, and I don't like to guess. You might
+have surmised I had some inside information when I dropped him- and that's
+why I don't want to think where he's gone. Let the police find what they can- it
+won't be much, judging from the fact that they don't know yet of the old North
+End place he hired under the name of Peters.
+
+I'm not sure that I could find it again myself- not that I'd ever try, even in broad
+daylight!
+
+Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know, why he maintained it. I'm coming to that.
+And I think you'll understand before I'm through why I don't tell the police.
+They would ask me to guide them, but I couldn't go back there even if I knew the
+way. There was something there- and now I can't use the subway or (and you
+may as well have your laugh at this, too) go down into cellars any more.
+
+I should think you'd have known I didn't drop Pickman for the same silly
+reasons that fussy old women like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or Rosworth did.
+Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel
+it an honour to know him, no matter what direction his work takes. Boston never
+had a greater painter than Richard Upton Pickman. I said it at first and I say it
+
+
+
+
+still, and I never swenved an inch, either, when he showed that 'Ghoul Feeding'.
+That, you remember, was when Minot cut him.
+
+You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out
+stuff like Pickman's. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly
+and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a
+great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only
+a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear-
+the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or
+hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting
+effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don't have to tell you why a
+Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes
+us laugh. There's something those fellows catch- beyond life- that they're able to
+make us catch for a second. Dore had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it.
+And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or- I hope to Heaven- ever will
+again.
+
+Don't ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art, there's all the
+difference in the world between the vital, breathing things drawn from Nature or
+models and the artificial truck that commercial small fry reel off in a bare studio
+by rule. Well, I should say that the really weird artist has a kind of vision which
+makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral
+world he lives in. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ from the
+pretender's mince-pie dreams in just about the same way that the life painter's
+results differ from the concoctions of a correspondence-school cartoonist. If I had
+ever seen what Pickman saw- but no! Here, let's have a drink before we get any
+deeper. God, I wouldn't be alive if I'd ever seen what that man- if he was a man-
+saw !
+
+You recall that Pickman's forte was faces. I don't believe anybody since Goya
+could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression.
+And before Goya you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the
+gargoyles and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. They believed
+all sorts of things- and maybe they saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle
+Ages had some curious phases I remember your asking Pickman yourself once,
+the year before you went away, wherever in thunder he got such ideas and
+visions. Wasn't that a nasty laugh he gave you? It was partly because of that
+laugh that Reid dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up comparative
+pathology, and was full of pompous 'inside stuff about the biological or
+evolutionary significance of this or that mental or physical symptom. He said
+Pickman repelled him more and more every day, and almost frightened him
+towards the last- that the fellow's features and expression were slowly
+developing in a way he didn't like; in a way that wasn't human. He had a lot of
+
+
+
+
+talk about diet, and mid Pickman must be abnormal and eccentric to the last
+degree. I suppose you told Reid, if you and he had any correspondence over it,
+that he'd let Pickman's paintings get on his nerves or harrow up his imagination.
+I know I told him that myself- then.
+
+But keep in mind that I didn't drop Pickman for anything like this. On the
+contrary, my admiration for him kept growing; for that 'Ghoul Feeding' was a
+tremendous achievement. As you know, the club wouldn't exhibit it, and the
+Museum of Fine Arts wouldn't accept it as a gift; and I can add that nobody
+would buy it, so Pickman had it right in his house till he went. Now his father
+has it in Salem- you know Pickman comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch
+ancestor hanged in 1692.
+
+I got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often, especially after I began
+making notes for a monograph on weird art. Probably it was his work which put
+the idea into my head, and anyhow, I found him a mine of data and suggestions
+when I came to develop it. He showed me all the paintings and drawings he had
+about; including some pen-and-ink sketches that would, I verily believe, have got
+him kicked out of the club if many of the members had seen them. Before long I
+was pretty nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art
+theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the
+Danvers asylum. My hero-worship, coupled with the fact that people generally
+were commencing to have less and less to do with him, made him get very
+confidential with me; and one evening he hinted that if I were fairly close-
+mouthed and none too squeamish, he might show me something rather unusual-
+something a bit stronger than anything he had in the house.
+
+'You know,' he said, 'there are things that won't do for Newbury Street- things
+that are out of place here, and that can't be conceived here, anyhow. It's my
+business to catch the overtones of the soul, and you won't find those in a
+parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn't Boston- it isn't
+anything yet, because it's had no time to pick up memories and attract local
+spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they're the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a
+shallow cove; and I want human ghosts- the ghosts of beings highly organized
+enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what they saw.
+
+'The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he'd
+put up with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don't you
+realize that places like that weren't merely made, but actually grew? Generation
+after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren't
+afraid to live and fed and die. Don't you know there was a mill on Copp's Hill in
+1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by 1650? I can show you
+houses that have stood two centuries and a half and more; houses that have
+
+
+
+
+witnessed what would make a modern house crumble into powder. What do
+moderns know of life and the forces behind it? You call the Salem witchcraft a
+delusion, but I'll wager my four-times-great-grandmother could have told you
+things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking
+sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in
+kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony- I wish someone had laid a spell
+on him or sucked his blood in the night!
+
+'I can show you a house he lived in, and I can show you another one he was
+afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn't dare put
+into that stupid Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World. Look
+here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept
+certain people in touch with each other's houses, and the burying ground, and
+the sea? Let them prosecute and persecute above ground- things went on every
+day that they couldn't reach, and voices laughed at night that they couldn't
+place!
+
+'Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since I'll
+wager that in eight I can show you something queer in the cellar. There's hardly
+a month that you don't read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells
+leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes down- you could see one
+near Henchman Street from the elevated last year. There were witches and what
+their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea;
+smugglers; privateers- and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to
+enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time! This wasn't the only world a bold and
+wise man could know- faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with such pale-
+pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions if
+a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!
+
+'The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question
+the past very closely. What do maps and records and guide-books really tell of
+the North End? Bah! At a guess I'll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys
+and networks of alleys north of Prince Street that aren't suspected by ten living
+beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them. And what do those Dagoes
+know of their meaning? No, Thurber, these ancient places are dreaming
+gorgeously and over-flowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the
+commonplace, and yet there's not a living soul to understand or profit by them.
+Or rather, there's only one living soul- for I haven't been digging around in the
+past for nothing !
+
+'See here, you're interested in this sort of thing. What if I told you that I've got
+another studio up there, where I can catch the night-spirit of antique horror and
+paint things that I couldn't even think of in Newbury Street? Naturally I don't
+
+
+
+
+tell those cursed old maids at the club - with Reid, damn him, whispering even
+as it is that I'm a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution.
+Yes, Thurber, I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty
+from life, so I did some exploring in places where I had reason to know terror
+lives.
+
+'I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself have
+ever seen. It isn't so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries
+away as the soul goes. I took it because of the queer old brick well in the cellar-
+one of the sort I told you about. The shack's almost tumbling down so that
+nobody else would live there, and I'd hate to tell you how little I pay for it. The
+windows are boarded up, but I like that all the better, since I don't want daylight
+for what I do. I paint in the cellar, where the inspiration is thickest, but I've other
+rooms furnished on the ground floor. A Sicilian owns it, and I've hired it under
+the name of Peters.
+
+'Now, if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd enjoy the pictures,
+for, as I said, I've let myself go a bit there. It's no vast tour- I sometimes do it on
+foot, for I don't want to attract attention with a taxi in such a place. We can take
+the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn't
+much.'
+
+Well, Eliot, there wasn't much for me to do after that harangue but to keep
+myself from running instead of walking for the first vacant cab we could sight.
+We changed to the elevated at the South Station, and at about twelve o'clock had
+climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past
+Constitution Wharf. I didn't keep track of the cross streets, and can't tell you yet
+which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn't Greenough Lane.
+
+When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the oldest and
+dirtiest alley I ever saw in my life, with crumbling-looking gables, broken small-
+paned windows, and archaic chimneys that stood out half-disintegrated against
+the moonlit sky. I don't believe there were three houses in sight that hadn't been
+standing in Cotton Mather's time- certainly I glimpsed at least two with an
+overhang, and once I thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten
+pre-gambrel type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in Boston.
+
+From that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left into an equally silent
+and still narrower alley with no light at all: and in a minute made what I think
+was an obtuse-angled bend towards the right in the dark. Not long after this
+Pickman produced a flashlight and revealed an antediluvian ten-panelled door
+that looked damnably worm-eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren
+hallway with what was once splendid dark-oak panelling- simple, of course, but
+
+
+
+
+thrillingly suggestive of the times of Andros and Phipps and the Witchcraft.
+Then he took me through a door on the left, Hghted an oil lamp, and told me to
+make myself at home.
+
+Now, Eliot, I'm what the man in the street would call fairly 'hard-boiled,' but I'll
+confess that what I saw on the walls of that room gave me a bad turn. They were
+his pictures, you know - the ones he couldn't paint or even show in Newbury
+Street- and he was right when he said he had 'let himself go.' Here- have another
+drink- I need one anyhow!
+
+There's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful,
+the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor
+came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify. There
+was none of the exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime, none of the trans-
+Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the
+blood. The backgrounds were mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the
+sea, brick tunnels, ancient panelled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's
+Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very
+house, was a favourite scene.
+
+The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground- for Pickman's
+morbid art was pre-eminently one of demoniac portraiture. These figures were
+seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree.
+Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a
+vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant
+rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations - well, don't ask me to
+be too precise. They were usually feeding- I won't say on what. They were
+sometimes shown in groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often
+appeared to be in battle over their prey- or rather, their treasure-trove. And what
+damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this
+charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shown leaping through open
+windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their
+throats. One canvas showed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on
+Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to theirs.
+
+But don't get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme and setting
+which struck me faint. I'm not a three-year-old kid, and I'd seen much like this
+before. It was the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and slavered out
+of the canvas with the very breath of life! By God, man, I verily believe they were
+alive! That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his
+brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand. Give me that decanter, Eliot!
+
+
+
+
+There was one thing called 'The Lesson'- Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it!
+Listen- can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a
+churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a
+changeling, I suppose- you know the old myth about how the weird people leave
+their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was
+showing what happens to those stolen babes- how they grow up- and then I
+began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human
+figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-
+human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and
+evolution. The dog- things were developed from mortals!
+
+And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as left with
+mankind in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a picture embodying
+that very thought. It was that of an ancient Puritan interior- a heavily beamed
+room with lattice windows, a settle, and clumsy seventeenth-century furniture,
+with the family sitting about while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face
+but one showed nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the
+pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a supposed
+son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of the unclean things. It was
+their changeling- and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman had given the features
+a very perceptible resemblance to his own.
+
+By this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining room and was politely
+holding open the door for me; asking me if I would care to see his 'modern
+studies.' I hadn't been able to give him much of my opinions- I was too
+speechless with fright and loathing- but I think he fully understood and felt
+highly complimented. And now I want to assure you again, Eliot, that I'm no
+mollycoddle to scream at anything which shows a bit of departure from the
+usual. I'm middle-aged and decently sophisticated, and I guess you saw enough
+of me in France to know I'm not easily knocked out. Remember, too, that I'd just
+about recovered my wind and gotten used to those frightful pictures which
+turned colonial New England into a kind of annex of hell. Well, in spite of all
+this, that next room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at the
+doorway to keep from keeling over. The other chamber had shown a pack of
+ghouls and witches over-running the world of our forefathers, but this one
+brought the horror right into our own daily life!
+
+God, how that man could paint! There was a study called 'Subway Accident,' in
+which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown
+catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking
+a crowd of people on the platform. Another showed a dance on Copp's Hill
+among the tombs with the background of today. Then there were any number of
+cellar views, with monsters creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry
+
+
+
+
+and grinning as they squatted behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their
+first victim to descend the stairs.
+
+One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with
+ant-like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows
+that honeycombed the ground. Dances in the modern cemeteries were freely
+pictured, and another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest- a
+scene in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who
+had a well-known Boston guidebook and was evidently reading aloud. All were
+pointing to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic
+and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The
+title of the picture was, 'Holmes, Lowell and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount
+Auburn.'
+
+As I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this second room of deviltry
+and morbidity, I began to analyse some of the points in my sickening loathing. In
+the first place, I said to myself, these things repelled because of the utter
+inhumanity and callous crudity they showed in Pickman. The fellow must be a
+relentless enemy of all mankind to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh
+and the degradation of the mortal tenement. In the second place, they terrified
+because of their very greatness. Their art was the art that convinced- when we
+saw the pictures we saw the demons themselves and were afraid of them. And
+the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from the use of
+selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalized;
+outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were almost painfully defined. And
+the faces!
+
+It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium
+itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by Heaven! The man was not a
+fantaisiste or romanticist at all- he did not even try to give us the churning,
+prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable,
+mechanistic, and well-established horror- world which he saw fully, brilliantly,
+squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that world can have been, or
+where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and trotted and
+crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of his images, one thing was
+plain. Pickman was in every sense- in conception and in execution- a thorough,
+painstaking, and almost scientific realist.
+
+My host was now leading the way down the cellar to his actual studio, and I
+braced myself for some hellish efforts among the unfinished canvases. As we
+reached the bottom of the damp stairs he fumed his flash-light to a corner of the
+large open space at hand, revealing the circular brick curb of what was evidently
+a great well in the earthen floor. We walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five
+
+
+
+
+feet across, with walls a good foot thick and some six inches above the ground
+level- solid work of the seventeenth century, or I was much mistaken. That,
+Pickman said, was the kind of thing he had been talking about- an aperture of
+the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I noticed idly that it did
+not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disc of wood formed the apparent
+cover. Thinking of the things this well must have been connected with if
+Pickman's wild hints had not been mere rhetoric, I shivered slightly; then turned
+to follow him up a step and through a narrow door into a room of fair size,
+provided with a wooden floor and furnished as a studio. An acetylene gas outfit
+gave the light necessary for work.
+
+The unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were as ghastly as
+the finished ones upstairs, and showed the painstaking methods of the artist.
+Scenes were blocked out with extreme care, and pencilled guide lines told of the
+minute exactitude which Pickman used in getting the right perspective and
+proportions. The man was great- I say it even now, knowing as much as I do. A
+large camera on a table excited my notice, and Pickman told me that he used it in
+taking scenes for backgrounds, so that he might paint them from photographs in
+the studio instead of carting his oufit around the town for this or that view. He
+thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene or model for sustained
+work, and declared he employed them regularly.
+
+There was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and half-
+finished monstrosities that leered round from every side of the room, and when
+Pickman suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on the side away from the light I
+could not for my life keep back a loud scream- the second I had emitted that
+night. It echoed and echoed through the dim vaultings of that ancient and
+nitrous cellar, and I had to choke back a flood of reaction that threatened to burst
+out as hysterical laughter. Merciful Creator! Eliot, but I don't know how much
+was real and how much was feverish fancy. It doesn't seem to me that earth can
+hold a dream like that!
+
+It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in
+bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at
+a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that
+at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel. But damn
+it all, it wasn't even the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain-
+head of all panic- not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes,
+flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn't the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body
+nor the half-hooved feet- none of these, though any one of them might well have
+driven an excitable man to madness.
+
+
+
+
+It was the technique, Ehot- the cursed, the impious, the unnatural technique! As I
+am a Hving being, I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into a
+canvas. The monster was there- it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared-
+and I knew that only a suspension of Nature's laws could ever let a man paint a
+thing like that without a model- without some glimpse of the nether world which
+no mortal unsold to the Fiend has ever had.
+
+Pinned with a thumb-tack to a vacant part of the canvas was a piece of paper
+now badly curled up- probably, I thought, a photograph from which Pickman
+meant to paint a background as hideous as the nightmare it was to enhance. I
+reached out to uncurl and look at it, when suddenly I saw Pickman start as if
+shot. He had been listening with peculiar intensity ever since my shocked scream
+had waked unaccustomed echoes in the dark cellar, and now he seemed struck
+with a fright which, though not comparable to my own, had in it more of the
+physical than of the spiritual. He drew a revolver and motioned me to silence,
+then stepped out into the main cellar and closed the door behind him.
+
+I think I was paralysed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's listening, I fancied I
+heard a faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of squeals or beats in a
+direction I couldn't determine. I thought of huge rats and shuddered. Then there
+came a subdued sort of clatter which somehow set me all in gooseflesh- a furtive,
+groping kind of clatter, though I can't attempt to convey what I mean in words. It
+was like heavy wood falling on stone or brick- wood on brick- what did that
+make me think of?
+
+It came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had fallen farther
+than it had fallen before. After that followed a sharp grating noise, a shouted
+gibberish from Pickman, and the deafening discharge of all six chambers of a
+revolver, fired spectacularly as a lion tamer might fire in the air for effect. A
+muffled squeal or squawk, and a thud. Then more wood and brick grating, a
+pause, and the opening of the door- at which I'll confess I started violently.
+Pickman reappeared with his smoking weapon, cursing the bloated rats that
+infested the ancient well.
+
+'The deuce knows what they eat, Thurber,' he grinned, 'for those archaic tunnels
+touched graveyard and witch-den and sea-coast. But whatever it is, they must
+have run short, for they were devilish anxious to get out. Your yelling stirred
+them up, I fancy. Better be cautious in these old places- our rodent friends are the
+one drawback, though I sometimes think they're a positive asset by way of
+atmosphere and colour.'
+
+Well, Eliot, that was the end of the night's adventure. Pickman had promised to
+show me the place, and Heaven knows he had done it. He led me out of that
+
+
+
+
+tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post
+we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement
+blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered
+to notice just where we hit it. We were too late for the elevated, and walked back
+downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that wall. We switched from
+Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I turned off.
+I never spoke to him again.
+
+Why did I drop him? Don't be impatient. Wait till I ring for coffee. We've had
+enough of the other stuff, but I for one need something. No -it wasn't the
+paintings I saw in that place; though I'll swear they were enough to get him
+ostracised in nine-tenths of the homes and clubs of Boston, and I guess you won't
+wonder now why I have to steer clear of subways and cellars. It was- something I
+found in my coat the next morning. You know, the curled-up paper tacked to the
+frightful canvas in the cellar; the thing I thought was a photograph of some scene
+he meant to use as a background for that monster. That last scare had come while
+I was reaching to uncurl it, and it seems I had vacantly crumpled it into my
+pocket. But here's the coffee- take it black, Eliot, if you're wise.
+
+Yes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton Pickman, the
+greatest artist I have ever known- and the foulest being that ever leaped the
+bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness. Eliot- old Reid was right. He
+wasn't strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a
+way to unlock the forbidden gate. It's all the same now, for he's gone- back into
+the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt. Here, let's have the chandelier going.
+
+Don't ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don't ask me,
+either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pass
+off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old
+Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. You know how
+damned lifelike Pickman's paintings were- how we all wondered where he got
+those faces.
+
+Well - that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What it
+showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas.
+It was the model he was using- and its background was merely the wall of the
+cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life!
+
+
+
+
+Polaris
+
+
+
+Written in 1918
+
+Published December in 1920 in The Philosopher
+
+Into the North Window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light.
+All through the long hellish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the
+autumn of the year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the
+red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of
+the morning under the horned waning moon, I sit by the casement and watch
+that star. Down from the heights reels the glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear
+on, while Charles' Wain lumbers up from behind the vapour-soaked swamp
+trees that sway in the night wind. Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from
+above the cemetary on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers weirdly
+afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from the same
+place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which
+strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had
+a message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.
+Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played
+the shocking corruscations of the demon light. After the beam came clouds, and
+then I slept.
+
+And it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time.
+Still and somnolent did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow between strange
+peaks. Of ghastly marble were its walls and its towers, its columns, domes, and
+pavements. In the marble streets were marble pillars, the upper parts of which
+were carven into the images of grave bearded men. The air was warm and stirred
+not. And overhead, scarce ten degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching
+Pole Star. Long did I gaze on the city, but the day came not. When the red
+Aldebaran, which blinked low in the sky but never set, had crawled a quarter of
+the way around the horizon, I saw light and motion in the houses and the streets.
+Forms strangely robed, but at once noble and familiar, walked abroad and under
+the horned waning moon men talked wisdom in a tongue which I understood,
+though it was unlike any language which I had ever known. And when the red
+Aldebaran had crawled more than half-way around the horizon, there were
+again darkness and silence.
+
+When I awaked, I was not as I had been. Upon my memory was graven the
+vision of the city, and within my soul had arisen another and vaguer recollection,
+of whose nature I was not then certain. Thereafter, on the cloudy nights when I
+could not sleep, I saw the city often; sometimes under the hot, yellow rays of a
+
+
+
+
+sun which did not set, but which wheeled low in the horizon. And on the clear
+nights the Pole Star leered as never before.
+
+Gradually I came to wonder what might be my place in that city on the strange
+plateau betwixt strange peaks. At first content to view the scene as an all-
+observant uncorporeal presence, I now desired to define my relation to it, and to
+speak my mind amongst the grave men who conversed each day in the public
+squares. I said to myself, "This is no dream, for by what means can I prove the
+greater reality of that other life in the house of stone and brick south of the
+sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star peeps
+into my north window each night?"
+
+One night as I listened to the discourses in the large square containing many
+statues, I felt a change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor was I a
+stranger in the streets of Olathoe, which lies on the plateau of Sarkia, betwixt the
+peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek. It was my friend Alos who spoke, and his
+speech was one that pleased my soul, for it was the speech of a true man and
+patriot. That night had the news come of Daikos' fall, and of the advance of the
+Inutos; squat, hellish yellow fiends who five years ago had appeared out of the
+unknown west to ravage the confines of our kingdom, and to besiege many of
+our towns. Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the mountains, their
+way now lay open to the plateau, unless every citizen could resist with the
+strength of ten men. For the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and
+knew not the scruples of honour which held back our tall, grey-eyed men of
+Lomar from ruthless conquest.
+
+Alos, my friend, was commander of all the forces on the plateau, and in him lay
+the last hope of our country. On this occasion he spoke of the perils to be faced
+and exhorted the men of Olathoe, bravest of the Lomarians, to sustain the
+traditions of their ancestors, who when forced to move southward from Zobna
+before the advance of the great ice sheet (even as our descendents must some day
+flee from the land of Lomar) valiently and victoriously swept aside the hairly,
+long-armed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their way. To me Alos denied the
+warriors part, for I was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to
+stress and hardships. But my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long
+hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts and the wisdom
+of the Zobnarian Fathers; so my friend, desiring not to doom me to inaction,
+rewarded me with that duty which was second to nothing in importance. To the
+watchtower of Thapnen he sent me, there to serve as the eyes of our army.
+Should the Inutos attempt to gain the citadel by the narrow pass behind the peak
+Noton and thereby surprise the garrison, I was to give the signal of fire which
+would warn the waiting soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.
+
+
+
+
+Alone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the
+passes below. My brain was sore dazed with excitement and fatigue, for I had
+not slept in many days; yet was my purpose firm, for I loved my native land of
+Lomar, and the marble city Olathoe that lies betwixt the peaks Noton and
+Kadiphonek.
+
+But as I stood in the tower's topmost chamber, I beheld the horned waning
+moon, red and sinister, quivering through the vapours that hovered over the
+distant valley of Banof. And through an opening in the roof glittered the pale
+Pole Star, fluttering as if alive, and leering like a fiend and tempter. Methought
+its spirit whispered evil counsel, soothing me to traitorous somnolence with a
+damnable rhythmical promise which it repeated over and over:
+
+
+
+Slumber,
+
+
+watcher.
+
+
+
+
+till
+
+
+
+
+
+
+the
+
+
+
+
+spheres.
+
+
+Six
+Have
+
+
+and
+
+revolv'd.
+
+
+twenty
+
+and
+
+
+
+
+thousand
+
+years
+return
+
+
+To
+
+
+the spot
+
+
+
+
+where
+
+
+
+
+now
+
+
+
+
+I burn.
+
+
+Other
+
+
+stars
+
+
+
+
+anon
+
+
+
+
+
+
+shall
+
+
+
+
+rise
+
+
+To
+
+
+the axis
+
+
+
+
+of
+
+
+
+
+the
+
+
+
+
+skies;
+
+
+Stars
+
+
+that soothe
+
+
+
+
+and
+
+
+
+
+stars
+
+
+
+
+that
+
+
+bless
+
+
+With
+
+
+a
+
+
+
+
+sweet
+
+
+
+
+
+
+for
+
+
+getfulness:
+
+
+Only
+
+
+when
+
+
+my
+
+
+
+
+round
+
+
+
+
+is
+
+
+o'er
+
+
+
+Shall the past disturb thy door.
+
+Vainly did I struggle with my drowsiness, seeking to connect these strange
+words with some lore of the skies which I had learnt from the Pnakotic
+manuscripts. My head, heavy and reeling, drooped to my breast, and when next
+I looked up it was in a dream, with the Pole Star grinning at me through a
+window from over the horrible and swaying trees of a dream swamp. And I am
+still dreaming.
+
+In my shame and despair I sometimes scream frantically, begging the dream-
+creatures around me to waken me ere the Inutos steal up the pass behind the
+peak Noton and take the citadel by surprise; but these creatures are demons, for
+they laugh at me and tell me I am not dreaming. They mock me whilst I sleep,
+and whilst the squat yellow foe may be creeping silently upon us. I have failed in
+my duties and betrayed the marble city of Olathoe; I have proven false to Alos,
+my friend and commander. But still these shadows of my dreams deride me.
+They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in
+these realms where the Pole Star shines high, and red Aldebaran crawls low
+around the horizon, there has been naught save ice and snow for thousands of
+years of years, and never a man save squat, yellow creatures, blighted by the
+cold, called "Esquimaux."
+
+
+
+
+And as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every
+moment grows, and vainly striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house
+of stone and brick south of a sinister swamp and a cemetery on a low hillock, the
+Pole Star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black vault, winking
+hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some message, yet
+recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.
+
+
+
+
+The Alchemist
+
+Written in 1908
+
+Published November 1916 in The United Amateur
+
+High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelHng mount whose sides are
+wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old
+chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down
+upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold
+for the proud house whose honored line is older even than the moss-grown
+castle walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and
+crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of
+feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From
+its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even
+Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the
+footsteps of the invader.
+
+But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above the level
+of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the
+pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from
+maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the
+walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the ill-
+paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the sagging floors, the
+worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all tell a gloomy tale of
+fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of the four great
+turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly reduced
+descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.
+
+It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I,
+Antoine, last of the unhappy and accursed Counts de C-, first saw the light of
+day, ninety long years ago. Within these walls and amongst the dark and
+shadowy forests, the wild ravines and grottos of the hillside below, were spent
+the first years of my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had been
+killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I was born, by the fall of a stone
+somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle. And my
+mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon
+one remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence,
+whose name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the lack of
+companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange
+care exercised by my aged guardian, in excluding me from the society of the
+peasant children whose abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains
+
+
+
+
+that surround the base of the hill. At that time, Pierre said that this restriction
+was imposed upon me because my noble birth placed me above association with
+such plebeian company. Now I know that its real object was to keep from my
+ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line that were nightly told and
+magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the
+glow of their cottage hearths.
+
+Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my
+childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow haunted
+library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the
+perpetual dust of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its foot. It
+was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade
+of melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and occult
+in nature most strongly claimed my attention.
+
+Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small
+knowledge of it I was able to gain seemed to depress me much. Perhaps it was at
+first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my
+paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention of
+my great house, yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able to piece together
+disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which
+had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a certain
+circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became dimly
+terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all the
+Counts of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto considered this but a
+natural attribute of a family of short-lived men, I afterward pondered long upon
+these premature deaths, and began to connect them with the wanderings of the
+old man, who often spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives
+of the holders of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty-two years.
+Upon my twenty-first birthday, the aged Pierre gave to me a family document
+which he said had for many generations been handed down from father to son,
+and continued by each possessor. Its contents were of the most startling nature,
+and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my apprehensions. At this time, my
+belief in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated, else I should have dismissed
+with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my eyes.
+
+The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the old
+castle in which I sat had been a feared and impregnable fortress. It told of a
+certain ancient man who had once dwelled on our estates, a person of no small
+accomplishments, though little above the rank of peasant, by name, Michel,
+usually designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his
+sinister reputation. He had studied beyond the custom of his kind, seeking such
+things as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Eternal Life, and was reputed
+
+
+
+
+wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy. Michel Mauvais had one
+son, named Charles, a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, who had
+therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the Wizard. This pair, shunned by all honest
+folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices. Old Michel was said to have
+burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable
+disappearance of many small peasant children was laid at the dreaded door of
+these two. Yet through the dark natures of the father and son ran one redeeming
+ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity, whilst
+the youth had for his parent a more than filial affection.
+
+One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the
+vanishment of young Godfrey, son to Henri, the Count. A searching party,
+headed by the frantic father, invaded the cottage of the sorcerers and there came
+upon old Michel Mauvais, busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron.
+Without certain cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the
+Count laid hands on the aged wizard, and ere he released his murderous hold,
+his victim was no more. Meanwhile, joyful servants were proclaiming the finding
+of young Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the great edifice, telling
+too late that poor Michel had been killed in vain. As the Count and his associates
+turned away from the lowly abode of the alchemist, the form of Charles Le
+Sorcier appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the menials standing
+about told him what had occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his father's
+fate. Then, slowly advancing to meet the Count, he pronounced in dull yet
+terrible accents the curse that ever afterward haunted the house of C-.
+
+'May ne'er a noble of thy murd'rous line
+
+Survive to reach a greater age than thine!'
+
+spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black woods, he drew
+from his tunic a phial of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his
+father's slayer as he disappeared behind the inky curtain of the night. The Count
+died without utterance, and was buried the next day, but little more than two
+and thirty years from the hour of his birth. No trace of the assassin could be
+found, though relentless bands of peasants scoured the neighboring woods and
+the meadowland around the hill.
+
+Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the
+minds of the late Count's family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the
+whole tragedy and now bearing the title, was killed by an arrow whilst hunting
+at the age of thirty-two, there were no thoughts save those of grief at his demise.
+But when, years afterward, the next young Count, Robert by name, was found
+dead in a nearby field of no apparent cause, the peasants told in whispers that
+their seigneur had but lately passed his thirty-second birthday when surprised
+
+
+
+
+by early death. Louis, son to Robert, was found drowned in the moat at the same
+fateful age, and thus down through the centuries ran the ominous chronicle:
+Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and Armands snatched from happy and virtuous lives
+when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his murder.
+
+That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain to
+me by the words which I had read. My life, previously held at small value, now
+became dearer to me each day, as I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries
+of the hidden world of black magic. Isolated as I was, modern science had
+produced no impression upon me, and I laboured as in the Middle Ages, as
+wrapt as had been old Michel and young Charles themselves in the acquisition of
+demonological and alchemical learning. Yet read as I might, in no manner could I
+account for the strange curse upon my line. In unusually rational moments I
+would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation, attributing the early deaths
+of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le Sorcier and his heirs; yet, having found
+upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the alchemist, I
+would fall back to occult studies, and once more endeavor to find a spell, that
+would release my house from its terrible burden. Upon one thing I was
+absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for, since no other branch of my family
+was in existence, I might thus end the curse with myself.
+
+As I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond. Alone I
+buried him beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved to
+wander in life. Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human creature
+within the great fortress, and in my utter solitude my mind began to cease its
+vain protest against the impending doom, to become almost reconciled to the fate
+which so many of my ancestors had met. Much of my time was now occupied in
+the exploration of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers of the old chateau,
+which in youth fear had caused me to shun, and some of which old Pierre had
+once told me had not been trodden by human foot for over four centuries.
+Strange and awesome were many of the objects I encountered. Furniture,
+covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long dampness, met
+my eyes. Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun
+everywhere, and huge bats flapped their bony and uncanny wings on all sides of
+the otherwise untenanted gloom.
+
+Of my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record, for
+each movement of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so
+much of my doomed existence. At length I approached that time which I had so
+long viewed with apprehension. Since most of my ancestors had been seized
+some little while before they reached the exact age of Count Henri at his end, I
+was every moment on the watch for the coming of the unknown death. In what
+strange form the curse should overtake me, I knew not; but I was resolved at
+
+
+
+
+least that it should not find me a cowardly or a passive victim. With new vigour I
+applied myself to my examination of the old chateau and its contents.
+
+It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted
+portion of the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I felt must
+mark the utmost limit of my stay on earth, beyond which I could have not even
+the slightest hope of continuing to draw breath that I came upon the culminating
+event of my whole life. I had spent the better part of the morning in climbing up
+and down half ruined staircases in one of the most dilapidated of the ancient
+turrets. As the afternoon progressed, I sought the lower levels, descending into
+what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of confinement, or a more recently
+excavated storehouse for gunpowder. As I slowly traversed the nitre-encrusted
+passageway at the foot of the last staircase, the paving became very damp, and
+soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank, water-stained wall
+impeded my journey. Turning to retrace my steps, my eye fell upon a small
+trapdoor with a ring, which lay directly beneath my foot. Pausing, I succeeded
+with difficulty in raising it, whereupon there was revealed a black aperture,
+exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and disclosing in the
+unsteady glare the top of a flight of stone steps.
+
+As soon as the torch which I lowered into the repellent depths burned freely and
+steadily, I commenced my descent. The steps were many, and led to a narrow
+stone-flagged passage which I knew must be far underground. This passage
+proved of great length, and terminated in a massive oaken door, dripping with
+the moisture of the place, and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it.
+Ceasing after a time my efforts in this direction, I had proceeded back some
+distance toward the steps when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the
+most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind.
+Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its
+rusted hinges. My immediate sensations were incapable of analysis. To be
+confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with
+evidence of the presence of man or spirit produced in my brain a horror of the
+most acute description. When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my
+eyes must have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld.
+
+There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. It was that of a man
+clad in a skull-cap and long mediaeval tunic of dark colour. His long hair and
+flowing beard were of a terrible and intense black hue, and of incredible
+profusion. His forehead, high beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks, deep-
+sunken and heavily lined with wrinkles; and his hands, long, claw-like, and
+gnarled, were of such a deadly marble-like whiteness as I have never elsewhere
+seen in man. His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton, was strangely bent
+and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment. But
+
+
+
+
+strangest of all were his eyes, twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in
+expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of wickedness. These were
+now fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their hatred, and rooting me to the
+spot whereon I stood.
+
+At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull
+hoUowness and latent malevolence. The language in which the discourse was
+clothed was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men of
+the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into the
+works of the old alchemists and demonologists. The apparition spoke of the
+curse which had hovered over my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on
+the wrong perpetrated by my ancestor against old Michel Mauvais, and gloated
+over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier. He told how young Charles has escaped
+into the night, returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just
+as he approached the age which had been his father's at his assassination; how
+he had secretly returned to the estate and established himself, unknown, in the
+even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed the
+hideous narrator, how he had seized Robert, son of Godfrey, in a field, forced
+poison down his throat, and left him to die at the age of thirty-two, thus
+maintaing the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to
+imagine the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been
+fulfilled since that time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of nature
+have died, for the man digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies
+of the two wizards, father and son, speaking most particularly of the researches
+of Charles Le Sorcier concerning the elixir which should grant to him who
+partook of it eternal life and youth.
+
+His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the
+black malevolence that had first so haunted me, but suddenly the fiendish glare
+returned and, with a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the stranger
+raised a glass phial with the evident intent of ending my life as had Charles Le
+Sorcier, six hundred years before, ended that of my ancestor. Prompted by some
+preserving instinct of self-defense, I broke through the spell that had hitherto
+held me immovable, and flung my now dying torch at the creature who menaced
+my existence. I heard the phial break harmlessly against the stones of the passage
+as the tunic of the strange man caught fire and lit the horrid scene with a ghastly
+radiance. The shriek of fright and impotent malice emitted by the would-be
+assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves, and I fell prone upon
+the slimy floor in a total faint.
+
+When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind,
+remembering what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding any more;
+yet curiosity over-mastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this man of evil, and
+
+
+
+
+how came he within the castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge the death of
+Michel Mauvais, and how bad the curse been carried on through all the long
+centuries since the time of Charles Le Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted from
+my shoulder, for I knew that he whom I had felled was the source of all my
+danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I burned with the desire to learn
+more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for centuries, and made of
+my own youth one long-continued nightmare. Determined upon further
+exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch which
+I had with me.
+
+First of all, new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the
+mysterious stranger. The hideous eyes were now closed. Disliking the sight, I
+turned away and entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. Here I found
+what seemed much like an alchemist's laboratory. In one corner was an immense
+pile of shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It
+may have been gold, but I did not pause to examine it, for I was strangely
+affected by that which I had undergone. At the farther end of the apartment was
+an opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of the dark hillside
+forest. Filled with wonder, yet now realizing how the man had obtained access to
+the chauteau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by the remains of the
+stranger with averted face but, as I approached the body, I seemed to hear
+emanating from it a faint sound, as though life were not yet wholly extinct.
+Aghast, I turned to examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor.
+
+Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they
+were set, opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret. The
+cracked lips tried to frame words which I could not well understand. Once I
+caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied that the words 'years'
+and 'curse' issued from the twisted mouth. Still I was at a loss to gather the
+purport of his disconnnected speech. At my evident ignorance of his meaning,
+the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at me, until, helpless as I saw my
+opponent to be, I trembled as I watched him.
+
+Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his piteous
+head from the damp and sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralyzed with
+fear, he found his voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words
+which have ever afterward haunted my days and nights. 'Fool!' he shrieked,
+'Can you not guess my secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognize
+the will which has through six long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon
+the house? Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life? Know you not
+how the secret of Alchemy was solved? I tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for
+six hundred years to maintain my revenge, for I am Charles Le Sorcier!'
+
+
+
+
+The Beast in the Cave
+
+Written on April 21, 1905
+
+Published in June 1918 in The Vagrant
+
+The horrible conclusion which had been gradually intruding itself upon my
+confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely,
+hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as
+I might, in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of
+serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I
+behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant bills and dales of the
+beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest
+unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of
+philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my
+unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild
+frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced
+none of these, but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.
+
+Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of
+an ordinary search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment. If I
+must die, I reflected, then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a
+sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford, a conception which carried
+with it more of tranquillity than of despair.
+
+Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew, had
+gone mad under circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would not be
+mine. My disaster was the result of no fault save my own, since unknown to the
+guide I had separated myself from the regular party of sightseers; and,
+wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself
+unable to retrace the devious windings which I had pursued since forsaking my
+companions.
+
+Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total
+and almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the
+waning, unsteady light, I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my
+coming end. I remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of
+consumptives, who, taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health
+from the apparently salubrious air of the underground world, with its steady,
+uniform temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found, instead, death in
+strange and ghastly form. I had seen the sad remains of their ill-made cottages as
+I passed them by with the party, and had wondered what unnatural influence a
+
+
+
+
+long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy
+and vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for settling this
+point had arrived, provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a
+departure from this life.
+
+As the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity, I resolved to leave no
+stone unturned, no possible means of escape neglected; so, summoning all the
+powers possessed by my lungs, I set up a series of loud shoutings, in the vain
+hope of attracting the attention of the guide by my clamour. Yet, as I called, I
+believed in my heart that my cries were to no purpose, and that my voice,
+magnified and reflected by the numberless ramparts of the black maze about me,
+fell upon no ears save my own.
+
+All at once, however, my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that I heard
+the sound of soft approaching steps on the rocky floor of the cavern.
+
+Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon? Had, then, all my
+horrible apprehensions been for naught, and was the guide, having marked my
+unwarranted absence from the party, following my course and seeking me out in
+this limestone labyrinth? Whilst these joyful queries arose in my brain, I was on
+the point of renewing my cries, in order that my discovery might come the
+sooner, when in an instant my delight was turned to horror as I listened; for my
+ever acute ear, now sharpened in even greater degree by the complete silence of
+the cave, bore to my benumbed understanding the unexpected and dreadful
+knowledge that these footfalls were not like those of any mortal man. In the
+unearthly stillness of this subterranean region, the tread of the booted guide
+would have sounded like a series of sharp and incisive blows. These impacts
+were soft, and stealthy, as of the paws of some feline. Besides, when I listened
+carefully, I seemed to trace the falls of four instead of two feet.
+
+I was now convinced that I had by my own cries aroused and attracted some
+wild beast, perhaps a mountain lion which had accidentally strayed within the
+cave. Perhaps, I considered, the Almighty had chosen for me a swifter and more
+merciful death than that of hunger; yet the instinct of self-preservation, never
+wholly dormant, was stirred in my breast, and though escape from the on-
+coming peril might but spare me for a sterner and more lingering end, I
+determined nevertheless to part with my life at as high a price as I could
+command. Strange as it may seem, my mind conceived of no intent on the part of
+the visitor save that of hostility. Accordingly, I became very quiet, in the hope
+that the unknown beast would, in the absence of a guiding sound, lose its
+direction as had I, and thus pass me by. But this hope was not destined for
+realisation, for the strange footfalls steadily advanced, the animal evidently
+having obtained my scent, which in an atmosphere so absolutely free from all
+
+
+
+
+distracting influences as is that of the cave, could doubtless be followed at great
+distance.
+
+Seeing therefore that I must be armed for defense against an uncanny and unseen
+attack in the dark, I groped about me the largest of the fragments of rock which
+were strewn upon all parts of the floor of the cavern in the vicinity, and grasping
+one in each hand for immediate use, awaited with resignation the inevitable
+result. Meanwhile the hideous pattering of the paws drew near. Certainly, the
+conduct of the creature was exceedingly strange. Most of the time, the tread
+seemed to be that of a quadruped, walking with a singular lack of unison betwixt
+hind and fore feet, yet at brief and infrequent intervals I fancied that but two feet
+were engaged in the process of locomotion. I wondered what species of animal
+was to confront me; it must, I thought, be some unfortunate beast who had paid
+for its curiosity to investigate one of the entrances of the fearful grotto with a life-
+long confinement in its interminable recesses. It doubtless obtained as food the
+eyeless fish, bats and rats of the cave, as well as some of the ordinary fish that are
+wafted in at every freshet of Green River, which communicates in some occult
+manner with the waters of the cave. I occupied my terrible vigil with grotesque
+conjectures of what alteration cave life might have wrought in the physical
+structure of the beast, remembering the awful appearances ascribed by local
+tradition to the consumptives who had died after long residence in the cave.
+Then I remembered with a start that, even should I succeed in felling my
+antagonist, I should never behold its form, as my torch had long since been
+extinct, and I was entirely unprovided with matches. The tension on my brain
+now became frightful. My disordered fancy conjured up hideous and fearsome
+shapes from the sinister darkness that surrounded me, and that actually seemed
+to press upon my body. Nearer, nearer, the dreadful footfalls approached. It
+seemed that I must give vent to a piercing scream, yet had I been sufficiently
+irresolute to attempt such a thing, my voice could scarce have responded. I was
+petrified, rooted to the spot. I doubted if my right arm would allow me to hurl its
+missile at the oncoming thing when the crucial moment should arrive. Now the
+steady pat, pat, of the steps was close at hand; now very close. I could hear the
+laboured breathing of the animal, and terror-struck as I was, I realised that it
+must have come from a considerable distance, and was correspondingly
+fatigued. Suddenly the spell broke. My right hand, guided by my ever
+trustworthy sense of hearing, threw with full force the sharp-angled bit of
+limestone which it contained, toward that point in the darkness from which
+emanated the breathing and pattering, and, wonderful to relate, it nearly reached
+its goal, for I heard the thing jump, landing at a distance away, where it seemed
+to pause.
+
+Having readjusted my aim, I discharged my second missile, this time most
+effectively, for with a flood of joy I listened as the creature fell in what sounded
+
+
+
+
+like a complete collapse and evidently remained prone and unmoving. Almost
+overpowered by the great relief which rushed over me, I reeled back against the
+wall. The breathing continued, in heavy, gasping inhalations and expirations,
+whence I realised that I had no more than wounded the creature. And now all
+desire to examine the thing ceased. At last something allied to groundless,
+superstitious fear had entered my brain, and I did not approach the body, nor
+did I continue to cast stones at it in order to complete the extinction of its life.
+Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as nearly as I could estimate in my
+frenzied condition, the direction from which I had come. Suddenly I heard a
+sound or rather, a regular succession of sounds. In another Instant they had
+resolved themselves into a series of sharp, metallic clicks. This time there was no
+doubt. It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled, screamed, even shrieked
+with joy as I beheld in the vaulted arches above the faint and glimmering
+effulgence which I knew to be the reflected light of an approaching torch. I ran to
+meet the flare, and before I could completely understand what had occurred, was
+lying upon the ground at the feet of the guide, embracing his boots and
+gibbering, despite my boasted reserve, in a most meaningless and idiotic
+manner, pouring out my terrible story, and at the same time overwhelming my
+auditor with protestations of gratitude. At length, I awoke to something like my
+normal consciousness. The guide had noted my absence upon the arrival of the
+party at the entrance of the cave, and had, from his own intuitive sense of
+direction, proceeded to make a thorough canvass of by-passages just ahead of
+where he had last spoken to me, locating my whereabouts after a quest of about
+four hours.
+
+By the time he had related this to me, I, emboldened by his torch and his
+company, began to reflect upon the strange beast which I had wounded but a
+short distance back in the darkness, and suggested that we ascertain, by the
+flashlight's aid, what manner of creature was my victim. Accordingly I retraced
+my steps, this time with a courage born of companionship, to the scene of my
+terrible experience. Soon we descried a white object upon the floor, an object
+whiter even than the gleaming limestone itself. Cautiously advancing, we gave
+vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of wonderment, for of all the unnatural
+monsters either of us had in our lifetimes beheld, this was in surpassing degree
+the strangest. It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large proportions, escaped,
+perhaps, from some itinerant menagerie. Its hair was snow-white, a thing due no
+doubt to the bleaching action of a long existence within the inky confines of the
+cave, but it was also surprisingly thin, being indeed largely absent save on the
+head, where it was of such length and abundance that it fell over the shoulders in
+considerable profusion. The face was turned away from us, as the creature lay
+almost directly upon it. The inclination of the limbs was very singular,
+explaining, however, the alternation in their use which I bad before noted,
+whereby the beast used sometimes all four, and on other occasions but two for its
+
+
+
+
+progress. From the tips of the fingers or toes, long rat-Hke claws extended. The
+hands or feet were not prehensile, a fact that I ascribed to that long residence in
+the cave which, as I before mentioned, seemed evident from the all-pervading
+and almost unearthly whiteness so characteristic of the whole anatomy. No tail
+seemed to be present.
+
+The respiration had now grown very feeble, and the guide had drawn his pistol
+with the evident intent of despatching the creature, when a sudden sound
+emitted by the latter caused the weapon to fall unused. The sound was of a
+nature difficult to describe. It was not like the normal note of any known species
+of simian, and I wonder if this unnatural quality were not the result of a long
+continued and complete silence, broken by the sensations produced by the
+advent of the light, a thing which the beast could not have seen since its first
+entrance into the cave. The sound, which I might feebly attempt to classify as a
+kind of deep-tone chattering, was faintly continued.
+
+All at once a fleeting spasm of energy seemed to pass through the frame of the
+beast. The paws went through a convulsive motion, and the limbs contracted.
+With a jerk, the white body rolled over so that its face was turned in our
+direction. For a moment I was so struck with horror at the eyes thus revealed that
+I noted nothing else. They were black, those eyes, deep jetty black, in hideous
+contrast to the snow-white hair and flesh. Like those of other cave denizens, they
+were deeply sunken in their orbits, and were entirely destitute of iris. As I looked
+more closely, I saw that they were set in a face less prognathous than that of the
+average ape, and infinitely less hairy. The nose was quite distinct. As we gazed
+upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision, the thick lips opened, and
+several sounds issued from them, after which the thing relaxed in death.
+
+The guide clutched my coat sleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook
+fitfully, casting weird moving shadows on the walls.
+
+I made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the floor
+ahead.
+
+The fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its
+place, for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the
+limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the strange
+beast of the unfathomed cave, was, or had at one time been a MAN!!!
+
+
+
+
+The Book
+
+Written in 1934
+
+My memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they
+begin; for at times I feel appaUing vistas of years stretching behind me, while at
+other times it seems as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey,
+formless infinity. I am not even certain how I am communicating this message.
+While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and
+perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where
+I wish to be heard. My identity, too, is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have
+suffered a great shock- perhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my
+cycles of unique, incredible experience.
+
+These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I
+remember when I found it- in a dimly lighted place near the black, oily river
+where the mists always swirl. That place was very old, and the ceiling-high
+shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner
+rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the
+floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I
+never learned its title, for the early pages were missing; but it fell open toward
+the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling.
+
+There was a formula- a sort of list of things to say and do- which I recognized as
+something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive
+paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient
+delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to
+absorb. It was a key- a guide- to certain gateways and transitions of which
+mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead
+to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and
+matter that we know. Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance
+or known where to find it, but this book was very old indeed. No printing-press,
+but the hand of some half-crazed monk, had traced these ominous Latin phrases
+in uncials of awesome antiquity.
+
+I remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign with
+his hand when I bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it, and only long
+afterwards did I guess why. As I hurried home through those narrow, winding,
+mist-cloaked waterfront streets I had a frightful impression of being stealthily
+followed by softly padding feet. The centuried, tottering houses on both sides
+seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignity- as if some hitherto closed
+channel of evil understanding had abruptly been opened. I felt that those walls
+
+
+
+
+and over-hanging gables of mildewed brick and fungoid plaster and timber-
+with eyelike, diamond-paned windows that leered- could hardly desist from
+advancing and crushing me . . . yet I had read only the least fragment of that
+blasphemous rune before closing the book and bringing it away.
+
+I remember how I read the book at last- white-faced, and locked in the attic room
+that I had long devoted to strange searchings. The great house was very still, for I
+had not gone up till after midnight. I think I had a family then- though the details
+are very uncertain- and I know there were many servants. Just what the year was
+I cannot say; for since then I have known many ages and dimensions, and have
+had all my notions of time dissolved and refashioned. It was by the light of
+candles that I read- I recall the relentless dripping of the wax- and there were
+chimes that came every now and then from distant belfries. I seemed to keep
+track of those chimes with a peculiar intentness, as if I feared to hear some very
+remote, intruding note among them.
+
+Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked
+out high above the other roofs of the city. It came as I droned aloud the ninth
+verse of that primal lay, and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant. For he
+who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be
+alone. I had evoked- and the book was indeed all I had suspected. That night I
+passed the gateway to a vortex of twisted time and vision, and when morning
+found me in the attic room I saw in the walls and shelves and fittings that which
+I had never seen before.
+
+Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the present
+scene was always a little of the past and a little of the future, and every once-
+familiar object loomed alien in the new perspective brought by my widened
+sight. From then on I walked in a fantastic dream of unknown and half-known
+shapes; and with each new gateway crossed, the less plainly could I recognise the
+things of the narrow sphere to which I had so long been bound. What I saw
+about me, none else saw; and I grew doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought
+mad. Dogs had a fear of me, for they felt the outside shadow which never left my
+side. But still I read more- in hidden, forgotten books and scrolls to which my
+new vision led me- and pushed through fresh gateways of space and being and
+life-patterns toward the core of the unknown cosmos.
+
+I remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor, and
+stood in the innermost one chanting that monstrous litany the messenger from
+Tartary had brought. The walls melted away, and I was swept by a black wind
+through gulfs of fathomless grey with the needle-like pinnacles of unknown
+mountains miles below me. After a while there was utter blackness, and then the
+light of myriad stars forming strange, alien constellations. Finally I saw a green-
+
+
+
+
+litten plain far below me, and discerned on it the twisted towers of a city built in
+no fashion I had ever known or read or dreamed of. As I floated closer to that
+city I saw a great square building of stone in an open space, and felt a hideous
+fear clutching at me. I screamed and struggled, and after a blankness was again
+in my attic room sprawled flat over the five phosphorescent circles on the floor.
+In that night's wandering there was no more of strangeness than in many a
+former night's wandering; but there was more of terror because I knew I was
+closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been before. Thereafter I
+was more cautious with my incantations, for I had no wish to be cut off from my
+body and from the earth in unknown abysses whence I could never return. . .
+
+
+
+
+The Call of Cthulhu
+
+
+
+Written in 1926
+
+Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival. . . a survival
+of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in
+shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity. . .
+forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called
+them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds. . .
+
+- Algernon Blackwood
+
+I. The Horror In Clay
+
+The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind
+to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of
+black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The
+sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but
+some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such
+terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall
+either go mad from the revelation or flee from the 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
+eons 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 intented 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
+great-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 great-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 showing 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 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 the papers
+and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species,
+or even hint at its remotest affiliations.
+
+Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident 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 suggestions 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 pretense to Hterary 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. This 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 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 outre mental
+illness and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
+
+The first half of the principal manuscript told a very particular 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 recognized 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 chidhood 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
+esthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its
+conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.
+
+On the ocassion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the sculptor abruptly
+asked for the benefit of his host's archeological knowledge in identifying the
+hieroglyphics of the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which
+suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness
+in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with
+anything but archeology. 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 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 afterwards
+said, for his slowness in recognizing 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 imaginery 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 frequently
+repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."
+
+On March 23, 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 the whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever
+rather than mental disorder.
+
+On April 2 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 22. 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 skepticism 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 inquires 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 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 23 and and April 2 -
+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 cognizant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
+imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from esthetes told disturbing
+tale. From February 28 to April 2 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 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 dispatch from California
+describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some
+"glorious fulfiment" which never arrives, whilst items from India speak
+guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March 22-23.
+
+The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic
+painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the
+Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane
+asylums that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting
+strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of
+cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism
+with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had
+known of the older matters mentioned by the professor.
+
+II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
+
+The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so
+significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long
+
+
+
+
+manuscript. Once before, it appears. Professor Angell had seen the helHsh
+outhnes 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.
+
+This 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 outHne,
+but with an octopus-Hke 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 clown 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 chffs. It
+was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-rehef 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 Esquimaux 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 pale undergrowth beyond the 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 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 license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights
+by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those
+nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the
+less organized 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 in 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
+fetishism 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 the 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 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 surrection 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, for 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 tall idols which
+the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras 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 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 the 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 desert 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 Esquimaux 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 olonial 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. Then 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 ofhis 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 1 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 rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in
+Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries
+of my uncle after encountering the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears?. I
+think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely
+to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have
+learned much now.
+
+III. The Madness from the Sea
+
+If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results
+of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It
+was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily
+round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for
+April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of
+its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's research.
+
+I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the
+"Cthulhu Cult", and was visiting a learned friend in Pater son. 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
+
+
+
+
+had 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 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 water-hne they managed to heave
+alongside their enemy and board her, grappHng 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 - or 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 23rd 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
+mentnon; 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 Old 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 reembarked 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 th disappointment when she told me in halting
+English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
+
+He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings sea in 1925 had
+broken him. He had told her no more than he told the public, but had left a long
+manuscript - of "technical matters" as he said - written in English, evidently in
+order to guard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk rough 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 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. Persuad-g 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 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 upon 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 123°43', come upon a coastline 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 faithfull 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 mates 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 anything 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 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 hke 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 lintel 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 rising 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
+Angstrom. 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
+could 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 comets 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.
+
+
+
+
+The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
+
+Written from January to March, 1927
+
+Published May and July of 1941 in Weird Tales
+
+'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an
+ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the
+fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method
+from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any
+criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust
+whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.'
+
+- Borellus
+
+I. A Result and a Prologe
+
+
+From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there
+recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of
+Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the
+grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to
+a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a
+profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind. Doctors
+confess themselves quite baffled by his case, since it presented oddities of a
+general physiological as well as psychological character.
+
+In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would
+warrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this
+young man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally
+acquire. In the second place, his organic processes shewed a certain queerness of
+proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel. Respiration and
+heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no
+sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion was incredibly prolonged and
+minimised, and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all to
+anything heretofore recorded, either normal or pathological. The skin had a
+morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed
+exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on the right
+hip had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole
+or blackish spot of which no trace existed before. In general, all physicians agree
+that in Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a degree
+beyond precedent.
+
+
+
+
+Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to
+any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was
+conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had
+it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was
+Ward's family physician, affirms that the patient's gross mental capacity, as
+gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his insanity, had actually
+increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was always a scholar and an
+antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work did not shew the prodigious
+grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists. It was,
+indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so
+powerful and lucid did the youth's mind seem; and only on the evidence of
+others, and on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as
+distinguished from his intelligence, was he finally placed in confinement. To the
+very moment of his vanishment he was an omnivorous reader and as great a
+conversationalist as his poor voice permitted; and shrewd observers, failing to
+foresee his escape, freely predicted that he would not be long in gaining his
+discharge from custody.
+
+Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his
+growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his
+future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible
+discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical colleagues. Willett, indeed,
+presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion with the case. He was the
+last to see the patient before his flight, and emerged from that final conversation
+in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Ward's escape
+became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the unsolved
+wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer drop of sixty feet
+could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the youth was undeniably
+gone. Willett himself has no public explanations to offer, though he seems
+strangely easier in mind than before the escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would
+like to say more if he thought any considerable number would believe him. He
+had found Ward in his room, but shortly after his departure the attendants
+knocked in vain. When they opened the door the patient was not there, and all
+they found was the open window with a chill April breeze blowing in a cloud of
+fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them. True, the dogs howled some time
+before; but that was while Willett was still present, and they had caught nothing
+and shewn no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told at once over the
+telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr. Waite
+called in person. Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both disavowed any
+knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential
+friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained, and even
+these are too wildly fantastic for general credence. The one fact which remains is
+that up to the present time no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.
+
+
+
+
+Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from
+the venerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which filled every
+corner of his parents' old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the hill. With
+the years his devotion to ancient things increased; so that history, genealogy, and
+the study of colonial architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length
+crowded everything else from his sphere of interests. These tastes are important
+to remember in considering his madness; for although they do not form its
+absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its superficial form. The gaps of
+information which the alienists noticed were all related to modern matters, and
+were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive though outwardly
+concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out by adroit questioning; so
+that one would have fancied the patient literally transferred to a former age
+through some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward
+seemed no longer interested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it
+appears, lost his regard for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final
+efforts were obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern
+world which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain.
+That this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to hide; but it was clear
+to all who watched him that his whole programme of reading and conversation
+was determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life and
+of the ordinary practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as
+ought to have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education in the
+schools of our own time. Alienists are now wondering how, in view of his vitally
+impaired range of data, the escaped patient manages to cope with the
+complicated world of today; the dominant opinion being that he is "lying low" in
+some humble and unexacting position till his stock of modern information can be
+brought up to the normal.
+
+The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists. Dr.
+Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy's
+last year at the Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of
+the past to the study of the occult, and refused to qualify for college on the
+ground that he had individual researches of much greater importance to make.
+This is certainly borne out by Ward's altered habits at the time, especially by his
+continual search through town records and among old burying-grounds for a
+certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen, some
+of whose papers he professed to have found behind the panelling of a very old
+house in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill, which Curwen was known to have
+built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919-20
+saw a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his general
+antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects
+both at home and abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his
+forefather's grave.
+
+
+
+
+From this opinion, however. Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his verdict
+on his close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain frightful
+investigations and discoveries which he made toward the last. Those
+investigations and discoveries have left their mark upon him; so that his voice
+trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles when he tries to write of
+them. Willett admits that the change of 1919-20 would ordinarily appear to mark
+the beginning of a progressive decadence which culminated in the horrible and
+uncanny alienation of 1928; but believes from personal observation that a finer
+distinction must be made. Granting freely that the boy was always ill-balanced
+temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in his
+responses to phenomena around him, he refuses to concede that the early
+alteration marked the actual passage from sanity to madness; crediting instead
+Ward's own statement that he had discovered or rediscovered something whose
+effect on human though was likely to be marvellous and profound. The true
+madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after the Curwen portrait and
+the ancient papers had been unearthed; after a trip to strange foreign places had
+been made, and some terrible invocations chanted under strange and secret
+circumstances; after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly
+indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonising and inexplicable
+conditions; after the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and
+after the patient's memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst
+his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequently
+noticed.
+
+It was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness, that the
+nightmare qualities became indubitably linked with Ward; and the doctor feels
+shudderingly sure that enough solid evidence exists to sustain the youth's claim
+regarding his crucial discovery. In the first place, two workmen of high
+intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's ancient papers found. Secondly, the boy once
+shewed Dr. Willett those papers and a page of the Curwen diary, and each of the
+documents had every appearance of genuineness. The hole where Ward claimed
+to have found them was long a visible reality, and Willett had a very convincing
+final glimpse of them in surroundings which can scarcely be believed and can
+never perhaps be proved. Then there were the mysteries and coincidences of the
+Orne and Hutchinson letters, and the problem of the Curwen penmanship and of
+what the detectives brought to light about Dr. Allen; these things, and the terrible
+message in mediaeval minuscules found in Willett's pocket when he gained
+consciousness after his shocking experience.
+
+And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous results which the doctor
+obtained from a certain pair of formulae during his final investigations; results
+which virtually proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous
+
+
+
+
+implications at the same time that those papers were borne forever from human
+knowledge.
+
+
+
+One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at something belonging as
+much to the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly. In the autumn of 1918, and
+with a considerable show of zest in the military training of the period, he had
+begun his junior year at the Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home.
+The old main building, erected in 1819, had always charmed his youthful
+antiquarian sense; and the spacious park in which the academy is set appealed to
+his sharp eye for landscape. His social activities were few; and his hours were
+spent mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his classes and drills, and in pursuit
+of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall, the State House, the Public
+Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John Carter Brown and John
+Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened Shepley Library in
+Benefit Street. One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and
+blond, with studious eyes and a slight droop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and
+giving a dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than
+attractiveness.
+
+His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed to
+recapture from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected
+picture of the centuries before. His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the
+well-nigh precipitous hill that rises just east of the river; and from the rear
+windows of its rambling wings he could look dizzily out over all the clustered
+spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper summits of the lower town to the purple
+hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was born, and from the lovely classic
+porch of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had first wheeled him in his
+carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years before that the
+town had long ago overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges along the
+shady, sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden
+houses with narrow, heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and
+exclusive amidst their generous yards and gardens.
+
+He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower down on
+the steep hill, and with all its eastern homes on high terraces. The small wooden
+houses averaged a greater age here, for it was up this hill that the growing town
+had climbed; and in these rides he had imbibed something of the colour of a
+quaint colonial village. The nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect
+Terrace to chat with policemen; and one of the child's first memories was of the
+great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he
+saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, and violet and
+
+
+
+
+mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and
+curious greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive
+silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted
+stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.
+
+When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently dragged
+nurse, and then alone in dreamy meditation. Farther and farther down that
+almost perpendicular hill he would venture, each time reaching older and
+quainter levels of the ancient city. He would hesitate gingerly down vertical
+Jenckes Street with its bank walls and colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street
+corner, where before him was a wooden antique with an lonic-pilastered pair of
+doorways, and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal
+farmyard remaining, and the great Judge Durfee house with its fallen vestiges of
+Georgian grandeur. It was getting to be a slum here; but the titan elms cast a
+restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past the long
+lines of the pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and
+classic portals. On the eastern side they were set high over basements with railed
+double flights of stone steps, and the young Charles could picture them as they
+were when the street was new, and red heels and periwigs set off the painted
+pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming so visible.
+
+Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the old "Town
+Street" that the founders had laid out at the river's edge in 1636. Here ran
+innumerable little lanes with leaning, huddled houses of immense antiquity; and
+fascinated though he was, it was long before he dared to thread their archaic
+verticality for fear they would turn out a dream or a gateway to unknown
+terrors. He found it much less formidable to continue along Benefit Street past
+the iron fence of St. John's hidden churchyard and the rear of the 1761 Colony
+House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden Ball Inn where Washington
+stopped. At Meeting Street - the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other
+periods - he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to
+which the highway had to resort in climbing the slope, and downward to the
+west, glimpsing the old brick colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at
+the ancient Sign of Shakespeare's Head where the Providence Gazette and
+Country-Journal was printed before the Revolution. Then came the exquisite
+First Baptist Church of 1775, luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple, and the
+Georgian roofs and cupolas hovering by. Here and to the southward the
+neighbourhood became better, flowering at last into a marvellous group of early
+mansions; but still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west,
+spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent decay
+where the wicked old water-front recalls its proud East India days amidst
+polyglot vice and squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries.
+
+
+
+
+with such surviving alley names as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon,
+Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.
+
+Sometimes, as he grew taller and more adventurous, young Ward would venture
+down into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, tumbling steps,
+twisted balustrades, swarthy faces, and nameless odours; winding from South
+Main to South Water, searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers
+still touched, and returning northward at this lower level past the steep-roofed
+1816 warehouses and the broad square at the Great Bridge, where the 1773
+Market House still stands firm on its ancient arches. In that square he would
+pause to drink in the bewildering beauty of the old town as it rises on its
+eastward bluff, decked with its two Georgian spires and crowned by the vast
+new Christian Science dome as London is crowned by St. Paul's. He like mostly
+to reach this point in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches the
+Market House and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws
+magic around the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at
+anchor. After a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet's love for the
+sight, and then he would scale the slope homeward in the dusk past the old
+white church and up the narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams would
+begin to peep out in small-paned windows and through fanlights set high over
+double flights of steps with curious wrought-iron railings.
+
+At other times, and in later years, he would seek for vivid contrasts; spending
+half a walk in the crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the
+hill drops to the lower eminence of Stampers' Hill with its ghetto and negro
+quarter clustering round the place where the Boston stage coach used to start
+before the Revolution, and the other half in the gracious southerly realm about
+George, Benevolent, Power, and Williams Streets, where the old slope holds
+unchanged the fine estates and bits of walled garden and steep green lane in
+which so many fragrant memories linger. These rambles, together with the
+diligent studies which accompanied them, certainly account for a large amount
+of the antiquarian lore which at last crowded the modern world from Charles
+Ward's mind; and illustrate the mental soil upon which fell, in that fateful winter
+of 1919-20, the seeds that came to such strange and terrible fruition.
+
+Dr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter of first change, Charles
+Ward's antiquarianism was free from every trace of the morbid. Graveyards held
+for him no particular attraction beyond their quaintness and historic value, and
+of anything like violence or savage instinct he was utterly devoid. Then, by
+insidious degrees, there appeared to develop a curious sequel to one of his
+genealogical triumphs of the year before; when he had discovered among his
+maternal ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen, who
+
+
+
+
+had come from Salem in March of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of
+highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered.
+
+Ward's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a certain
+'Ann Tillinghast, daughter of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt. James Tillinghast,' of
+whose paternity the family had preserved no trace. Late in 1918, whilst
+examining a volume of original town records in manuscript, the young
+genealogist encountered an entry describing a legal change of name, by which in
+1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her
+seven-year-old daughter Ann, her maiden name of Tillinghast; on the ground
+'that her Husband's name was become a public Reproach by Reason of what was
+knowne after his Decease; the which confirming an antient common Rumour,
+tho' not to be credited by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be wholely past
+Doubting.'
+
+This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of two leaves which had
+been carefully pasted together and treated as one by a laboured revision of the
+page numbers.
+
+It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a hitherto
+unknown great-great-great-grandfather. The discovery doubly excited him
+because he had already heard vague reports and seen scattered allusions relating
+to this person; about whom there remained so few publicly available records,
+aside from those becoming public only in modern times, that it almost seemed as
+if a conspiracy had existed to blot him from memory. What did appear,
+moreover, was of such a singular and provocative nature that one could not fail
+to imagine curiously what it was that the colonial recorders were so anxious to
+conceal and forget; or to suspect that the deletion had reasons all too valid.
+
+Before this. Ward had been content to let his romancing about old Joseph
+Curwen remain in the idle stage; but having discovered his own relationship to
+this apparently "hushed-up" character, he proceeded to hunt out as
+systematically as possible whatever he might find concerning him. In this excited
+quest he eventually succeeded beyond his highest expectations; for old letters,
+diaries, and sheaves of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed Providence garrets
+and elsewhere yielded many illuminating passages which their writers had not
+thought it worth their while to destroy. One important sidelight came from a
+point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island colonial correspondence
+was stored in the Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The really crucial thing, though,
+and what in Dr, Willett's opinion formed the definite source of Ward's undoing,
+was the matter found in August 1919 behind the panelling of the crumbling
+house in Olney Court. It was that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black
+vistas whose end was deeper than the pit.
+
+
+
+
+II. An Antecedent and a Horror
+
+
+
+Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambhng legends embodied in what Ward
+heard and unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic, and obscurely horrible
+individual. He had fled from Salem to Providence - that universal haven of the
+odd, the free, and the dissenting - at the beginning of the great witchcraft panic;
+being in fear of accusation because of his solitary ways and queer chemical or
+alchemical experiments. He was a colourless-looking man of about thirty, and
+was soon found qualified to become a freeman of Providence; thereafter buying a
+home lot just north of Gregory Dexter's at about the foot of Olney Street. His
+house was built on Stampers' Hill west of the Town Street, in what later became
+Olney Court; and in 1761 he replaced this with a larger one, on the same site,
+which is still standing.
+
+Now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem to grow
+much older than he had been on his arrival. He engaged in shipping enterprises,
+purchased wharfage near Mile-End Cove, helped rebuild the Great Bridge in
+1713, and in 1723 was one of the founders of the Congregational Church on the
+hill; but always did he retain his nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over
+thirty or thirty-five. As decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite
+wide notice; but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy
+forefathers, and practised a simplicity of living which did not wear him our.
+How such simplicity could be reconciled with the inexplicable comings and
+goings of the secretive merchant, and with the queer gleaming of his windows at
+all hours of night, was not very clear to the townsfolk; and they were prone to
+assign other reasons for his continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the
+most part, that Curwen's incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much
+to do with his condition. Gossip spoke of the strange substances he brought from
+London and the Indies on his ships or purchased in Newport, Boston, and New
+York; and when old Dr. Jabez Bowen came from Rehoboth and opened his
+apothecary shop across the Great Bridge at the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar,
+there was ceaseless talk of the drugs, acids, and metals that the taciturn recluse
+incessantly bought or ordered from him. Acting on the assumption that Curwen
+possessed a wondrous and secret medical skill, many sufferers of various sorts
+applied to him for aid; but though he appeared to encourage their belief in a non-
+committal way, and always gave them odd-coloured potions in response to their
+requests, it was observed that his ministrations to others seldom proved of
+benefit. At length, when over fifty years had passed since the stranger's advent,
+and without producing more than five years' apparent change in his face and
+physique, the people began to whisper more darkly; and to meet more than half
+way that desire for isolation which he had always shewn.
+
+
+
+
+Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude of other reasons
+why Joseph Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and finally shunned like a plague.
+His passion for graveyards, in which he was glimpsed at all hours, and under all
+conditions, was notorious; though no one had witnessed any deed on his part
+which could actually be termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he had a farm,
+at which he generally lived during the summer, and to which he would
+frequently be seen riding at various odd times of the day or night. Here his only
+visible servants, farmers, and caretakers were a sullen pair of aged Narragansett
+Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the wife of a very
+repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro blood. In the
+lead-to of this house was the laboratory where most of the chemical experiments
+were conducted. Curious porters and teamers who delivered bottles, bags, or
+boxes at the small read door would exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks,
+crucibles, alembics, and furnaces they saw in the low shelved room; and
+prophesied in whispers that the close-mouthed "chymist" - by which they meant
+alchemist - would not be long in finding the Philosopher's Stone. The nearest
+neighbours to this farm - the Fenners, a quarter of a mile away - had still queerer
+things to tell of certain sounds which they insisted came from the Curwen place
+in the night. There were cries, they said, and sustained bowlings; and they did
+not like the large numbers of livestock which thronged the pastures, for no such
+amount was needed to keep a lone old man and a very few servants in meat,
+milk, and wool. The identity of the stock seemed to change from week to week as
+new droves were purchased from the Kingstown farmers. Then, too, there was
+something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with only high
+narrow slits for windows.
+
+Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen's town house in Olney
+Court; not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man must have been
+nearly a century old, but the first low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless
+attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took the peculiar precaution of
+burning after its demolition. Here there was less mystery, it is true; but the hours
+at which lights were seen, the secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who
+comprised the only menservants, the hideous indistinct mumbling of the
+incredibly aged French housekeeper, the large amounts of food seen to enter a
+door within which only four persons lived, and the quality of certain voices often
+heard in muffled conversation at highly unseasonable times, all combined with
+what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give the place a bad name.
+
+In choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed; for as the
+newcomer had gradually worked into the church and trading life of the town, he
+had naturally made acquaintances of the better sort, whose company and
+conversation he was well fitted by education to enjoy. His birth was known to be
+good, since the Curwens or Corwins of Salem needed no introduction in New
+
+
+
+
+England. It developed that Joseph Curwen had travelled much in very early life,
+living for a time in England and making at least two voyages to the Orient; and
+his speech, when he deigned to use it, was that of a learned and cultivated
+Englishman. But for some reason or other Curwen did not care for society.
+Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall of reserve
+that few could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane.
+
+There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance, as if he
+had come to find all human beings dull though having moved among stranger
+and more potent entities. When Dr. Checkley the famous wit came from Boston
+in 1738 to be rector of King's Church, he did not neglect calling on one of whom
+he soon heard so much; but left in a very short while because of some sinister
+undercurrent he detected in his host's discourse. Charles Ward told his father,
+when they discussed Curwen one winter evening, that he would give much to
+learn what the mysterious old man had said to the sprightly cleric, but that all
+diarists agree concerning Dr. Checkley's reluctance to repeat anything he had
+heard. The good man had been hideously shocked, and could never recall Joseph
+Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for which he was famed.
+
+More definite, however, was the reason why another man of taste and breeding
+avoided the haughty hermit. In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English
+gentleman of literary and scientific leanings, came from Newport to the town
+which was so rapidly overtaking it in standing, and built a fine country seat on
+the Neck in what is now the heart of the best residence section. He lived in
+considerable style and comfort, keeping the first coach and liveried servants in
+town, and taking great pride in his telescope, his microscope, and his well-
+chosen library of English and Latin books. Hearing of Curwen as the owner of
+the best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt early paid him a call, and was more
+cordially received than most other callers at the house had been. His admiration
+for his host's ample shelves, which besides the Greek, Latin, and English classics
+were equipped with a remarkable battery of philosophical, mathematical, and
+scientific works including Paracelsus, Agricola, Van Helmont, Sylvius, Glauber,
+Boyle, Boerhaave, Becher, and Stahl, led Curwen to suggest a visit to the
+farmhouse and laboratory whither he had never invited anyone before; and the
+two drove out at once in Mr. Merritt's coach.
+
+Mr. Merritt always confessed to seeing nothing really horrible at the farmhouse,
+but maintained that the titles of the books in the special library of
+thaumaturgical, alchemical, and theological subjects which Curwen kept in a
+front room were alone sufficient to inspire him with a lasting loathing. Perhaps,
+however, the facial expression of the owner in exhibiting them contributed much
+of the prejudice. This bizarre collection, besides a host of standard works which
+Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly all the cabbalists.
+
+
+
+
+daemonologists, and magicians known to man; and was a treasure-house of lore
+in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology. Hermes Trismegistus in
+Mesnard's edition, the Turba Philosophorum, Geber's Liber Investigationis, and
+Artephius's Key of Wisdom all were there; with the cabbalistic Zohar, Peter
+Jammy's set of Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully's Ars Magna et Ultima in
+Zetsner's edition, Roger Bacon's Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd's Clavis Alchimiae,
+and Trithemius's De Lapide Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews
+and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when,
+upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam,
+he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
+Alhazred, of which he had heard such monstrous things whispered some years
+previously after the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little fishing village
+of Kingsport, in the province of the Massachussetts-Bay.
+
+But oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably
+disquieted by a mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face
+downwards a badly worn copy of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia
+and interlineations in Curwen's hand. The book was open at about its middle,
+and one paragraph displayed such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the
+lines of mystic black-letter that the visitor could not resist scanning it through.
+Whether it was the nature of the passage underscored, or the feverish heaviness
+of the strokes which formed the underscoring, he could not tell; but something in
+that combination affected him very badly and very peculiarly. He recalled it to
+the end of his days, writing it down from memory in his diary and once trying to
+recite it to his close friend Dr. Checkley till he saw how greatly it disturbed the
+urbane rector. It read:
+
+'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an
+ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the
+fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method
+from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any
+criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust
+whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.'
+
+It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street, however, that
+the worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen. Sailors are superstitious
+folk; and the seasoned salts who manned the infinite rum, slave, and molasses
+sloops, the rakish privateers, and the great brigs of the Browns, Crawfords, and
+Tillinghasts, all made strange furtive signs of protection when they saw the slim,
+deceptively young-looking figure with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering
+the Curwen warehouse in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and
+supercargoes on the long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly.
+Curwen's own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were
+
+
+
+
+mongrel riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal. It was, in
+a way, the frequency with which these sailors were replaced which inspired the
+acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which the old man was held. A crew
+would be turned loose in the town on shore leave, some of its members perhaps
+charged with this errand or that; and when reassembled it would be almost sure
+to lack one or more men. That many of the errands had concerned the farm of
+Pawtuxet Road, and that few of the sailors had ever been seen to return from that
+place, was not forgotten; so that in time it became exceedingly difficult for
+Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost invariably several would
+desert soon after hearing the gossip of the Providence wharves, and their
+replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great problem to the
+merchant.
+
+By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and
+daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not
+be named, understood, or even proved to exist. The last straw may have come
+from the affair of the missing soldiers in 1758, for in March and April of that year
+two Royal regiments on their way to New France were quartered in Providence,
+and depleted by an inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of desertion.
+Rumour dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking
+with the red-coated strangers; and as several of them began to be missed, people
+thought of the odd conditions among his own seamen. What would have
+happened if the regiments had not been ordered on, no one can tell.
+
+Meanwhile the merchant's worldly affairs were prospering. He had a virtual
+monopoly of the town's trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and cinnamon, and
+easily led any other one shipping establishment save the Browns in his
+importation of brassware, indigo, cotton, woollens, salt, rigging, iron, paper, and
+English goods of every kind. Such shopkeepers as James Green, at the Sign of the
+Elephant in Cheapside, the Russells, at the Sign of the Golden Eagle across the
+Bridge, or Clark and Nightingale at the Frying-Pan and Fish near New Coffee-
+House, depended almost wholly upon him for their stock; and his arrangements
+with the local distillers, the Narragansett dairymen and horse-breeders, and the
+Newport candle-makers, made him one of the prime exporters of the Colony.
+
+Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the
+Colony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which
+the new brick one - still standing at the head of its parade in the old main street -
+was built in 1761. In that same year, too, he helped rebuild the Great Bridge after
+the October gale. He replaced many of the books of the public library consumed
+in the Colony House fire, and bought heavily in the lottery that gave the muddy
+Market Parade and deep-rutted Town Street their pavement of great round
+stones with a brick footwalk or "causey" in the middle. About this time, also, he
+
+
+
+
+built the plain but excellent new house whose doorway is still such a triumph of
+carving. When the Whitefield adherents broke off from Dr. Cotton's hill church
+in 1743 and founded Deacon Snow's church across the Bridge, Curwen had gone
+with them; though his zeal and attendance soon abated. Now, however, he
+cultivated piety once more; as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown him into
+isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes if not sharply
+checked.
+
+
+
+The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly
+not less than a full century old, seeking at last to emerge from a cloud of fright
+and detestation too vague to pin down or analyse, was at once a pathetic, a
+dramatic, and a contemptible thing. Such is the power of wealth and of surface
+gestures, however, that there came indeed a slight abatement in the visible
+aversion displayed toward him; especially after the rapid disappearances of his
+sailors abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to practice an extreme care
+and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for he was never again caught at such
+wanderings; whilst the rumours of uncanny sounds and manoeuvres at his
+Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion. His rate of food consumption and
+cattle replacement remained abnormally high; but not until modern times, when
+Charles Ward examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley Library,
+did it occur to any person - save one embittered youth, perhaps - to make dark
+comparisons between the large number of Guinea blacks he imported until 1766,
+and the disturbingly small number for whom he could produce bona fide bills of
+sale either to slave-dealers at the Great Bridge or to the planters of the
+Narragansett Country. Certainly, the cunning and ingenuity of this abhorred
+character were uncannily profound, once the necessity for their exercise had
+become impressed upon him.
+
+But of course the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight.
+Curwen continued to be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact of his
+continued air of youth at a great age would have been enough to warrant; and he
+could see that in the end his fortunes would be likely to suffer. His elaborate
+studies and experiments, whatever they may have been, apparently required a
+heavy income for their maintenance; and since a change of environment would
+deprive him of the trading advantages he had gained, it would not have profited
+him to begin anew in a different region just then. Judgement demanded that he
+patch up his relations with the townsfolk of Providence, so that his presence
+might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation, transparent excuses or
+errands elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of constraint and uneasiness. His
+clerks, being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue whom no
+one else would employ, were giving him much worry; and he held to his sea-
+
+
+
+
+captains and mates only by shrewdness in gaining some kind of ascendancy over
+them - a mortgage, a promissory note, or a bit of information very pertinent to
+their welfare. In many cases, diarists have recorded with some awe, Curwen
+shewed almost the power of a wizard in unearthing family secrets for
+questionable use. During the final five years of his life it seemed as though only
+direct talks with the long-dead could possibly have furnished some of the data
+which he had so glibly at his tongue's end.
+
+About this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regain
+his footing in the community. Hitherto a complete hermit, he now determined to
+contract an advantageous marriage; securing as a bride some lady whose
+unquestioned position would make all ostracism of his home impossible. It may
+be that he also had deeper reasons for wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside
+the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and a half after his
+death caused anyone to suspect them; but of this nothing certain can ever be
+learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and indignation with which any
+ordinary courtship of his would be received, hence he looked about for some
+likely candidate upon whose parents he might exert a suitable pressure. Such
+candidates, he found, were not at all easy to discover; since he had very
+particular requirements in the way of beauty, accomplishments, and social
+security. At length his survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best
+and oldest ship-captains, a widower of high birth and unblemished standing
+named Dutee Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with
+every conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Capt. Tillinghast was
+completely under the domination of Curwen; and consented, after a terrible
+interview in his cupolaed house on Power's Lane hill, to sanction the
+blasphemous alliance.
+
+Eliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age, and had been reared as
+gently as the reduced circumstances of her father permitted. She had attended
+Stephen Jackson's school opposite the Court-House Parade; and had been
+diligently instructed by her mother, before the latter's death of smallpox in 1757,
+in all the arts and refinements of domestic life. A sampler of hers, worked in 1753
+at the age of nine, may still be found in the rooms of the Rhode Island Historical
+Society. After her mother's death she had kept the house, aided only by one old
+black woman. Her arguments with her father concerning the proposed Curwen
+marriage must have been painful indeed; but of these we have no record. Certain
+it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second mate of the Crawford
+packet Enterprise, was dutifully broken off, and that her union with Joseph
+Curwen took place on the seventh of March, 1763, in the Baptist church, in the
+presence of the most distinguished assemblages which the town could boast; the
+ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel Winsor. The Gazette
+mentioned the event very briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in
+
+
+
+
+question seems to be cut or torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much
+search in the archives of a private collector of note, observing with amusement
+the meaningless urbanity of the language:
+
+'Monday evening last, Mr. Joseph Curwen, of this Town, Merchant, was married
+to Miss Eliza Tillinghast, Daughter of Capt. Dutee Tillinghast, a young Lady who
+has real Merit, added to a beautiful Person, to grace the connubial State and
+perpetuate its Felicity.'
+
+The collection of Durfee-Arnold letters, discovered by Charles Ward shortly
+before his first reputed madness in the private collection of Melville F. Peters,
+Esq., of George St., and covering this and a somewhat antecedent period, throws
+vivid light on the outrage done to public sentiment by this ill-assorted match.
+The social influence of the Tillinghasts, however, was not to be denied; and once
+more Joseph Curwen found his house frequented by persons whom he could
+never otherwise have induced to cross his threshold. His acceptance was by no
+means complete, and his bride was socially the sufferer through her forced
+venture; but at all events the wall of utter ostracism was somewhat torn down. In
+his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom astonished both her and the
+community by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration. The new
+house in Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations, and
+although Curwen was much absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his wife never
+visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen than at any other time in his long
+years of residence. Only one person remained in open enmity with him, this
+being the youthful ship's officer whose engagement to Eliza Tillinghast had been
+so abruptly broken. Ezra Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance; and though of a
+quiet and ordinarily mild disposition, was now gaining a hate-bred, dogged
+purpose which boded no good to the usurping husband.
+
+On the seventh of May, 1765, Curwen's only child Ann was born; and was
+christened by the Rev. John Graves of King's Church, of which both husband and
+wife had become communicants shortly after their marriage, in order to
+compromise between their respective Congregational and Baptist affiliations.
+The record of this birth, as well as that of the marriage two years before, was
+stricken from most copies of the church and town annals where it ought to
+appear; and Charles Ward located both with the greatest difficulty after his
+discover of the widow's change of name had apprised him of his own
+relationship, and engendered the feverish interest which culminated in his
+madness. The birth entry, indeed, was found very curiously through
+correspondence with the heirs of the loyalist Dr. Graves, who had taken with
+him a duplicate set of records when he left his pastorate at the outbreak of the
+Revolution. Ward had tried this source because he knew that his great-great-
+grandmother Ann Tillinghast Potter had been an Episcopalian.
+
+
+
+
+Shortly after the birth of his daughter, an event he seemed to welcome with a
+fervour greatly out of keeping with his usual coldness, Curwen resolved to sit for
+a portrait. This he had painted by a very gifted Scotsman named Cosmo
+Alexander, then a resident of Newport, and since famous as the early teacher of
+Gilbert Stuart. The likeness was said to have been executed on a wall-panel of the
+library of the house in Olney Court, but neither of the two old diaries mentioning
+it gave any hint of its ultimate disposition. At this period the erratic scholar
+shewed signs of unusual abstraction, and spent as much time as he possibly
+could at his farm on the Pawtuxet Road. He seemed, as was stated, in a condition
+of suppressed excitement or suspense; as if expecting some phenomenal thing or
+on the brink of some strange discovery. Chemistry or alchemy would appear to
+have played a great part, for he took from his house to the farm the greater
+number of his volumes on that subject.
+
+His affectation of civic interest did not diminish, and he lost no opportunities for
+helping such leaders as Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Benjamin West in
+their efforts to raise the cultural tone of the town, which was then much below
+the level of Newport in its patronage of the liberal arts. He had helped Daniel
+Jenckes found his bookshop in 1763, and was thereafter his best customer;
+extending aid likewise to the struggling Gazette that appeared each Wednesday
+at the Sign of Shakespeare's Head. In politics he ardently supported Governor
+Hopkins against the Ward party whose prime strength was in Newport, and his
+really eloquent speech at Hacher's Hall in 1765 against the setting off of North
+Providence as a separate town with a pro-Ward vote in the General Assembly
+did more than any other thing to wear down the prejudice against him. But Ezra
+Weeden, who watched him closely, sneered cynically at all this outward activity;
+and freely swore it was no more than a mask for some nameless traffick with the
+blackest gulfs of Tartarus. The revengeful youth began a systematic study of the
+man and his doings whenever he was in port; spending hours at night by the
+wharves with a dory in readiness when he saw lights in the Curwen warehouses,
+and following the small boat which would sometimes steal quietly off and down
+the bay. He also kept as close a watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm, and was
+once severely bitten by the dogs the old Indian couple loosed upon him.
+
+
+
+In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden, and gained
+wide notice amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of suspense and
+expectancy dropped like an old cloak, giving instant place to an ill-concealed
+exaltation of perfect triumph. Curwen seemed to have difficulty in restraining
+himself from public harangues on what he had found or learned or made; but
+apparently the need of secrecy was greater than the longing to share his
+rejoicing, for no explanation was ever offered by him. It was after this transition.
+
+
+
+
+which appears to have come early in July, that the sinister scholar began to
+astonish people by his possession of information which only their long-dead
+ancestors would seem to be able to impart.
+
+But Curwen's feverish secret activities by no means ceased with this change. On
+the contrary, they tended rather to increase; so that more and more of his
+shipping business was handled by the captains whom he now bound to him by
+ties of fear as potent as those of bankruptcy had been. He altogether abandoned
+the slave trade, alleging that its profits were constantly decreasing. Every
+possible moment was spent at the Pawtuxet farm; although there were rumours
+now and then of his presence in places which, though not actually near
+graveyards, were yet so situated in relation to graveyards that thoughtful people
+wondered just how thorough the old merchant's change of habits really was.
+Ezra Weeden, though his periods of espionage were necessarily brief and
+intermittent on account of his sea voyaging, had a vindictive persistence which
+the bulk of the practical townsfolk and farmers lacked; and subjected Curwen's
+affairs to a scrutiny such as they had never had before.
+
+Many of the odd manoeuvres of the strange merchant's vessels had been taken
+for granted on account of the unrest of the times, when every colonist seemed
+determined to resist the provisions of the Sugar Act which hampered a
+prominent traffick. Smuggling and evasion were the rule in Narragansett Bay,
+and nocturnal landings of illicit cargoes were continuous commonplaces. But
+Weeden, night after night following the lighters or small sloops which he saw
+steal off from the Curwen warehouses at the Town Street docks, soon felt
+assured that it was not merely His Majesty's armed ships which the sinister
+skulker was anxious to avoid. Prior to the change in 1766 these boats had for the
+most part contained chained negroes, who were carried down and across the bay
+and landed at an obscure point on the shore just north of Pawtuxet; being
+afterward driven up the bluff and across country to the Curwen farm, where
+they were locked in that enormous stone outbuilding which had only five high
+narrow slits for windows. After that change, however, the whole programme
+was altered. Importation of slaves ceased at once, and for a time Curwen
+abandoned his midnight sailings. Then, about the spring of 1767, a new policy
+appeared. Once more the lighters grew wont to put out from the black, silent
+docks, and this time they would go down the bay some distance, perhaps as far
+as Namquit Point, where they would meet and receive cargo from strange ships
+of considerable size and widely varied appearance. Curwen's sailors would then
+deposit this cargo at the usual point on the shore, and transport it overland to the
+farm; locking it in the same cryptical stone building which had formerly received
+the negroes. The cargo consisted almost wholly of boxes and cases, of which a
+large proportion were oblong and heavy and disturbingly suggestive of coffins.
+
+
+
+
+Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity; visiting it each
+night for long periods, and seldom letting a week go by without a sight except
+when the ground bore a footprint-revealing snow. Even then he would often
+walk as close as possible in the travelled road or on the ice of the neighbouring
+river to see what tracks others might have left. Finding his own vigils interrupted
+by nautical duties, he hired a tavern companion named Eleazar Smith to
+continue the survey during his absence; and between them the two could have
+set in motion some extraordinary rumours. That they did not do so was only
+because they knew the effect of publicity would be to warn their quarry and
+make further progress impossible. Instead, they wished to learn something
+definite before taking any action. What they did learn must have been startling
+indeed, and Charles Ward spoke many times to his parents of his regret at
+Weeden's later burning of his notebooks. All that can be told of their discoveries
+is what Eleazar Smith jotted down in a non too coherent diary, and what other
+diarists and letter-writers have timidly repeated from the statements which they
+finally made - and according to which the farm was only the outer shell of some
+vast and revolting menace, of a scope and depth too profound and intangible for
+more than shadowy comprehension.
+
+It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a great series
+of tunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizeable staff of persons besides
+the old Indian and his wife, underlay the farm. The house was an old peaked
+relic of the middle seventeenth century with enormous stack chimney and
+diamond-paned lattice windows, the laboratory being in a lean-to toward the
+north, where the roof came nearly to the ground. This building stood clear of any
+other; yet judging by the different voices heard at odd times within, it must have
+been accessible through secret passages beneath. These voices, before 1766, were
+mere mumblings and negro whisperings and frenzied screams, coupled with
+curious chants or invocations. After that date, however, they assumed a very
+singular and terrible cast as they ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dull
+acquiescence and explosions of frantic pain or fury, rumblings of conversations
+and whines of entreaty, pantings of eagerness and shouts of protest. They
+appeared to be in different languages, all known to Curwen, whose rasping
+accents were frequently distinguishable in reply, reproof, or threatening.
+Sometimes it seemed that several persons must be in the house; Curwen, certain
+captives, and the guards of those captives. There were voices of a sort that
+neither Weeden nor Smith had ever heard before despite their wide knowledge
+of foreign parts, and many that they did seem to place as belonging to this or that
+nationality. The nature of the conversations seemed always a kind of catechism,
+as if Curwen were extorting some sort of information from terrified or rebellious
+prisoners.
+
+
+
+
+Weeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook, for
+Enghsh, French, and Spanish, which he knew, were frequently used; but of these
+nothing has survived. He did, however, say that besides a few ghouhsh
+dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence families were concerned, most
+of the questions and answers he could understand were historical or scientific;
+occasionally pertaining to very remote places and ages. Once, for example, an
+alternately raging and sullen figure was questioned in French about the Black
+Prince's massacre at Limoges in 1370, as if there were some hidden reason which
+he ought to know. Curwen asked the prisoner - if prisoner he were - whether the
+order to slay was given because of the Sign of the Goat found on the altar in the
+ancient Roman crypt beneath the Cathedral, or whether the Dark Man of the
+Haute Vienne had spoken the Three Words. Failing to obtain replies, the
+inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means; for there was a terrific
+shriek followed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound.
+
+None of these colloquies was ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows were
+always heavily draped. Once, though, during a discourse in an unknown tongue,
+a shadow was seen on the curtain which startled Weeden exceedingly;
+reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he had seen in the autumn of
+1764 in Hacher's Hall, when a man from Germantown, Pennsylvania, had given
+a clever mechanical spectacle advertised as
+
+'A View of the Famous City of Jerusalem, in which are represented Jerusalem,
+the Temple of Solomon, his Royal Throne, the noted Towers, and Hills, likewise
+the Suffering of Our Saviour from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on the
+Hill of Golgotha; an artful piece of Statuary, Worthy to be seen by the Curious.'
+
+It was on this occasion that the listener, who had crept close to the window of the
+front room whence the speaking proceeded, gave a start which roused the old
+Indian pair and caused them to loose the dogs on him. After that no more
+conversations were ever heard in the house, and Weeden and Smith concluded
+that Curwen had transferred his field of action to regions below.
+
+That such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many things. Faint
+cries and groans unmistakably came up now and then from what appeared to be
+the solid earth in places far from any structure; whilst hidden in the bushes along
+the river-bank in the rear, where the high ground sloped steeply down to the
+valley of the Pawtuxet, there was found an arched oaken door in a frame of
+heavy masonry, which was obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill.
+When or how these catacombs could have been constructed, Weeden was unable
+to say; but he frequently pointed out how easily the place might have been
+reached by bands of unseen workmen from the river. Joseph Curwen put his
+mongrel seamen to diverse uses indeed! During the heavy spring rains of 1769
+
+
+
+
+the two watchers kept a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any
+subterrene secrets might be washed to hght, and were rewarded by the sight of a
+profusion of both human and animal bones in places where deep gullies had
+been worn in the banks. Naturally there might be many explanations of such
+things in the rear of a stock farm, and a locality where old Indian bury-grounds
+were common, but Weeden and Smith drew their own inferences.
+
+It was in January 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating vainly on
+what, if anything, to think or do about the whole bewildering business, that the
+incident of the Fortaleza occurred. Exasperated by the burning of the revenue
+sloop Liberty at Newport during the previous summer, the customs fleet under
+Admiral Wallace had adopted an increased vigilance concerning strange vessels;
+and on this occasion His Majesty's armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles
+Leslie, captured after a short pursuit one early morning the scow Fortaleza of
+Barcelona, Spain, under Capt. Manuel Arruda, bound according to its log from
+Grand Cairo, Egypt, to Providence. When searched for contraband material, this
+ship revealed the astonishing fact that its cargo consisted exclusively of Egyptian
+mummies, consigned to "Sailor A. B. C", who would come to remove his goods
+in a lighter just off Namquit Point and whose identity Capt. Arruda felt himself
+in honour bound not to reveal. The Vice-Admiralty at Newport, at a loss what to
+do in view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the one hand and of the
+unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand, compromised on Collector
+Robinson's recommendation by freeing the ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode
+Island waters. There were later rumours of its having been seen in Boston
+Harbour, though it never openly entered the Port of Boston.
+
+This extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence, and there
+were not many who doubted the existence of some connexion between the cargo
+of mummies and the sinister Joseph Curwen. His exotic studies and his curious
+chemical importations being common knowledge, and his fondness for
+graveyards being common suspicion; it did not take much imagination to link
+him with a freakish importation which could not conceivably have been destined
+for anyone else in the town. As if conscious of this natural belief, Curwen took
+care to speak casually on several occasions of the chemical value of the balsams
+found in mummies; thinking perhaps that he might make the affair seem less
+unnatural, yet stopping just short of admitting his participation. Weeden and
+Smith, of course, felt no doubt whatsoever of the significance of the thing; and
+indulged in the wildest theories concerning Curwen and his monstrous labours.
+
+The following spring, like that of the year before, had heavy rains; and the
+watchers kept careful track of the river-bank behind the Curwen farm. Large
+sections were washed away, and a certain number of bones discovered; but no
+glimpse was afforded of any actual subterranean chambers or burrows.
+
+
+
+
+Something was rumoured, however, at the village of Pawtuxet about a mile
+below, where the river flows in falls over a rocky terrace to join the placed
+landlocked cove. There, where quaint old cottages climbed the hill from the
+rustic bridge, and fishing-smacks lay anchored at their sleepy docks, a vague
+report went round of things that were floating down the river and flashing into
+sight for a minute as they went over the falls. Of course the Pawtuxet in a long
+river which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards, and
+of course the spring rains had been very heavy; but the fisherfolk about the
+bridge did not like the wild way that one of the things stared as it shot down to
+the still waters below, or the way that another half cried out although its
+condition had greatly departed from that of objects which normally cried out.
+That rumour sent Smith - for Weeden was just then at sea - in haste to the river-
+bank behind the farm; where surely enough there remained the evidence of an
+extensive cave-in. There was, however, no trace of a passage into the steep bank;
+for the miniature avalanche had left behind a solid wall of mixed earth and
+shrubbery from aloft. Smith went to the extent of some experimental digging, but
+was deterred by lack of success - or perhaps by fear of possible success. It is
+interesting to speculate on what the persistent and revengeful Weeden would
+have done had he been ashore at the time.
+
+
+
+By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell others of his
+discoveries; for he had a large number of facts to link together, and a second eye-
+witness to refute the possible charge that jealousy and vindictiveness had
+spurred his fancy. As his first confidant he selected Capt. James Mathewson of
+the Enterprise, who on the one hand knew him well enough not to doubt his
+veracity, and on the other hand was sufficiently influential in the town to be
+heard in turn with respect. The colloquy took place in an upper room of Sabin's
+Tavern near the docks, with Smith present to corroborate virtually every
+statement; and it could be seen that Capt. Mathewson was tremendously
+impressed. Like nearly everyone else in the town, he had had black suspicions of
+his own anent Joseph Curwen; hence it needed only this confirmation and
+enlargement of data to convince him absolutely. At the end of the conference he
+was very grave, and enjoined strict silence upon the two younger men. He
+would, he said, transmit the information separately to some ten or so of the most
+learned and prominent citizens of Providence; ascertaining their views and
+following whatever advice they might have to offer. Secrecy would probably be
+essential in any case, for this was no matter that the town constables or militia
+could cope with; and above all else the excitable crowd must be kept in
+ignorance, lest there be enacted in these already troublous times a repetition of
+that frightful Salem panic of less than a century before which had first brought
+Curwen hither.
+
+
+
+
+The right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West, whose
+pamphlet on the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar and keen thinker;
+Rev. James Manning, President of the College which had just moved up from
+Warren and was temporarily housed in the new King Street schoolhouse
+awaiting the completion of its building on the hill above Presbyterian-Lane; ex-
+Governor Stephen Hopkins, who had been a member of the Philosophical
+Society at Newport, and was a man of very broad perceptions; John Carter,
+publisher of the Gazette; all four of the Brown brothers, John, Joseph, Nicholas,
+and Moses, who formed the recognised local magnates, and of whom Joseph was
+an amateur scientist of parts; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition was
+considerable, and who had much first-hand knowledge of Curwen's odd
+purchases; and Capt. Abraham Whipple, a privateersman of phenomenal
+boldness and energy who could be counted on to lead in any active measures
+needed. These men, if favourable, might eventually be brought together for
+collective deliberation; and with them would rest the responsibility of deciding
+whether or not to inform the Governor of the Colony, Joseph Wanton of
+Newport, before taking action.
+
+The mission of Capt. Mathewson prospered beyond his highest expectations; for
+whilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants somewhat sceptical of the
+possible ghastly side of Weeden's tale, there was not one who did not think it
+necessary to take some sort of secret and coordinated action. Curwen, it was
+clear, formed a vague potential menace to the welfare of the town and Colony;
+and must be eliminated at any cost. Late in December 1770 a group of eminent
+townsmen met at the home of Stephen Hopkins and debated tentative measures.
+Weeden's notes, which he had given to Capt. Mathewson, were carefully read;
+and he and Smith were summoned to give testimony anent details. Something
+very like fear seized the whole assemblage before the meeting was over, though
+there ran through that fear a grim determination which Capt. Whipple's bluff
+and resonant profanity best expressed. They would not notify the Governor,
+because a more than legal course seemed necessary. With hidden powers of
+uncertain extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could
+safely be warned to leave town. Nameless reprisals might ensue, and even if the
+sinister creature complied, the removal would be no more than the shifting of an
+unclean burden to another place. The times were lawless, and men who had
+flouted the King's revenue forces for years were not the ones to balk at sterner
+things when duty impelled. Curwen must be surprised at his Pawtuxet farm by a
+large raiding-party of seasoned privateersmen and given one decisive chance to
+explain himself. If he proved a madman, amusing himself with shrieks and
+imaginary conversations in different voices, he would be properly confined. If
+something graver appeared, and if the underground horrors indeed turned out
+to be real, he and all with him must die. It could be done quietly, and even the
+widow and her father need not be told how it came about.
+
+
+
+
+While these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the town an
+incident so terrible and inexplicable that for a time little else was mentioned for
+miles around. In the middle of a moon-light January night with heavy snow
+underfoot there resounded over the river and up the hill a shocking series of
+cries which brought sleepy heads to every window; and people around
+Weybosset Point saw a great white thing plunging frantically along the badly
+cleared space in front of the Turk's Head. There was a baying of dogs in the
+distance, but this subsided as soon as the clamour of the awakened town became
+audible. Parties of men with lanterns and muskets hurried out to see what was
+happening, but nothing rewarded their search. The next morning, however, a
+giant, muscular body, stark naked, was found on the jams of ice around the
+southern piers of the Great Bridge, where the Long Dock stretched out beside
+Abbott's distil-house, and the identity of this object became a theme for endless
+speculation and whispering. It was not so much the younger as the older folk
+who whispered, for only in the patriarchs did that rigid face with horror-bulging
+eyes strike any chord of memory. They, shaking as they did so, exchanged
+furtive murmurs of wonder and fear; for in those stiff, hideous features lay a
+resemblance so marvellous as to be almost an identity - and that identity was
+with a man who had died full fifty years before.
+
+Ezra Weeden was present at the finding; and remembering the baying of the
+night before, set out along Weybosset Street and across Muddy Dock Bridge
+whence the sound had come. He had a curious expectancy, and was not
+surprised when, reaching the edge of the settled district where the street merged
+into the Pawtuxet Road, he came upon some very curious tracks in the snow. The
+naked giant had been pursued by dogs and many booted men, and the returning
+tracks of the hounds and their masters could be easily traced. They had given up
+the chase upon coming too near the town. Weeden smiled grimly, and as a
+perfunctory detail traced the footprints back to their source. It was the Pawtuxet
+farm of Joseph Curwen, as he well knew it would be; and he would have given
+much had the yard been less confusingly trampled. As it was, he dared not seem
+too interested in full daylight. Dr. Bowen, to whom Weeden went at once with
+his report, performed an autopsy on the strange corpse, and discovered
+peculiarities which baffled him utterly. The digestive tracts of the huge man
+seemed never to have been in use, whilst the whole skin had a coarse, loosely
+knit texture impossible to account for. Impressed by what the old men whispered
+of this body's likeness to the long-dead blacksmith Daniel Green, whose great-
+grandson Aaron Hoppin was a supercargo in Curwen's employ, Weeden asked
+casual questions till he found where Green was buried. That night a party of ten
+visited the old North Burying Ground opposite Herrenden's Lane and opened a
+grave. They found it vacant, precisely as they had expected.
+
+
+
+
+Meanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept Joseph
+Curwen's mail, and shortly before the incident of the naked body there was
+found a letter from one Jedediah Orne of Salem which made the cooperating
+citizens think deeply. Parts of it, copied and preserved in the private archives of
+the Smith family where Charles Ward found it, ran as follows.
+
+I delight that you continue in ye Gett'g at Olde Matters in your Way, and doe not
+think better was done at Mr. Hutchinson's in Salem- Village. Certainely, there
+was Noth'g but ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from What he
+cou'd gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of
+Any Thing miss'g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak'g or yr
+Copy'g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to foUowe Borellus, and
+owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you
+recommende. But I wou'd have you Observe what was told to us aboute tak'g
+Care whom to calle upp, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye
+
+Magnalia of , and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I
+
+say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which
+I meane. Any that can in Turne call up Somewhat against you, whereby your
+PowerfuUest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shal
+not wish to Answer, and shal commande more than you. I was frighted when I
+read of your know'g what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his ebony Boxe, for I was
+conscious who must have tolde you. And againe I ask that you shalle write me as
+Jedediah and not Simon. In this Community a Man may not live too long, and
+you knowe my Plan by which I came back as my Son. I am desirous you will
+Acquaint me with what ye Black Man learnt from Sylvanus Cocidius in ye Vault,
+under ye Roman Wall, and will be oblig'd for ye lend'g of ye MS. you speak of.
+
+Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought,
+especially for the following passage:
+
+I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only by yr
+Vessels, but can not always be certain when to expect them. In the Matter spoke
+of, I require onlie one more thing; but wish to be sure I apprehend you exactly.
+You inform me, that no Part must be missing if the finest Effects are to be had,
+but you can not but know how hard it is to be sure. It seems a great Hazard and
+Burthen to take away the whole Box, and in Town (i.e. St. Peter's, St. Paul's, St.
+Mary's or Christ Church) it can scarce be done at all. But I know what
+Imperfections were in the one I rais'd up October last, and how many live
+Specimens you were forc'd to imploy before you hit upon the right Mode in the
+year 1766; so will be guided by you in all Matters. I am impatient for yr Brig, and
+inquire daily at Mr. Biddle's Wharf.
+
+
+
+
+A third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an unknown
+alphabet. In the Smith diary found by Charles Ward a single oft-repeated
+combination of characters is clumsily copied; and authorities at Brown
+University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic or Abyssinian, although they
+do not recognise the word. None of these epistles was ever delivered to Curwen,
+though the disappearance of Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly
+afterward shewed that the Providence men took certain quiet steps. The
+Pennsylvania Historical Society also has some curious letters received by Dr.
+Shippen regarding the presence of an unwholesome character in Philadelphia.
+But more decisive steps were in the air, and it is in the secret assemblages of
+sworn and tested sailors and faithful old privateersmen in the Brown
+warehouses by night that we must look for the main fruits of Weeden's
+disclosures. Slowly and surely a plan of campaign was under development
+which would leave no trace of Joseph Curwen's noxious mysteries.
+
+Curwen, despite all precautions, apparently felt that something was in the wind;
+for he was now remarked to wear an unusually worried look. His coach was seen
+at all hours in the town and on the Pawtuxet Road, and he dropped little by little
+the air of forced geniality with which he had latterly sought to combat the town's
+prejudice. The nearest neighbours to his farm, the Fenners, one night remarked a
+great shaft of light shooting into the sky from some aperture in the roof of that
+cryptical stone building with the high, excessively narrow windows; an event
+which they quickly communicated to John Brown in Providence. Mr. Brown had
+become the executive leader of the select group bent on Curwen's extirpation,
+and had informed the Fenners that some action was about to be taken. This he
+deemed needful because of the impossibility of their not witnessing the final
+raid; and he explained his course by saying that Curwen was known to be a spy
+of the customs officers at Newport, against whom the hand of every Providence
+skipper, merchant, and farmer was openly or clandestinely raised. Whether the
+ruse was wholly believed by neighbours who had seen so many queer things is
+not certain; but at any rate the Fenners were willing to connect any evil with a
+man of such queer ways. To them Mr. Brown had entrusted the duty of watching
+the Curwen farmhouse, and of regularly reporting every incident which took
+place there.
+
+
+
+The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things, as
+suggested by the odd shaft of light, precipitated at last the action so carefully
+devised by the band of serious citizens. According to the Smith diary a company
+of about 100 men met at 10 p.m. on Friday, April 12th, 1771, in the great room of
+Thurston's Tavern at the Sign of the Golden Lion on Weybosset Point across the
+Bridge. Of the guiding group of prominent men in addition to the leader John
+
+
+
+
+Brown there were present Dr. Bowen, with his case of surgical instruments.
+President Manning without the great periwig (the largest in the Colonies) for
+which he was noted. Governor Hopkins, wrapped in his dark cloak and
+accompanied by his seafaring brother Esek, whom he had initiated at the last
+moment with the permission of the rest, John Carter, Capt. Mathewson, and
+Capt. Whipple, who was to lead the actual raiding party. These chiefs conferred
+apart in a rear chamber, after which Capt. Whipple emerged to the great room
+and gave the gathered seamen their last oaths and instructions. Eleazar Smith
+was with the leaders as they sat in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival of Ezra
+Weeden, whose duty was to keep track of Curwen and report the departure of
+his coach for the farm.
+
+About 10:30 a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge, followed by the
+sound of a coach in the street outside; and at that hour there was no need of
+waiting for Weeden in order to know that the doomed man had set out for his
+last night of unhallowed wizardry. A moment later, as the receding coach
+clattered faintly over the Muddy Dock Bridge, Weeden appeared; and the raiders
+fell silently into military order in the street, shouldering the firelocks, fowling-
+pieces, or whaling harpoons which they had with them. Weeden and Smith were
+with the party, and of the deliberating citizens there were present for active
+service Capt. Whipple, the leader, Capt. Esek Hopkins, John Carter, President
+Manning, Capt. Mathewson, and Dr. Bowen; together with Moses Brown, who
+had come up at the eleventh hour though absent from the preliminary session in
+the tavern. All these freemen and their hundred sailors began the long march
+without delay, grim and a trifle apprehensive as they left the Muddy Dock
+behind and mounted the gentle rise of Broad Street toward the Pawtuxet Road.
+Just beyond Elder Snow's church some of the men turned back to take a parting
+look at Providence lying outspread under the early spring stars. Steeples and
+gables rose dark and shapely, and salt breezes swept up gently from the cove
+north of the Bridge. Vega was climbing above the great hill across the water,
+whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line of the unfinished College edifice.
+At the foot of that hill, and along the narrow mounting lanes of its side, the old
+town dreamed; Old Providence, for whose safety and sanity so monstrous and
+colossal a blasphemy was about to be wiped out.
+
+An hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived, as previously agreed, at the
+Fenner farmhouse; where they heard a final report on their intended victim. He
+had reached his farm over half an hour before, and the strange light had soon
+afterward shot once more into the sky, but there were no lights in any visible
+windows. This was always the case of late. Even as this news was given another
+great glare arose toward the south, and the party realised that they had indeed
+come close to the scene of awesome and unnatural wonders. Capt. Whipple now
+ordered his force to separate into three divisions; one of twenty men under
+
+
+
+
+Eleazar Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-place against
+possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for
+desperate service, a second of twenty men under Capt. Esek Hopkins to steal
+down into the river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish with axes or
+gunpowder the oaken door in the high, steep bank, and the third to close in on
+the house and adjacent buildings themselves. Of this division one third was to be
+led by Capt. Mathewson to the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow
+windows, another third to follow Capt. Whipple himself to the main farmhouse,
+and the remaining third to preserve a circle around the whole group of buildings
+until summoned by a final emergency signal.
+
+The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a single
+whistle-blast, then wait and capture anything which might issue from the regions
+within. At the sound of two whistle-blasts it would advance through the
+aperture to oppose the enemy or join the rest of the raiding contingent. The party
+at the stone building would accept these respective signals in an analogous
+manner; forcing an entrance at the first, and at the second descending whatever
+passage into the ground might be discovered, and joining the general or focal
+warfare expected to take place within the caverns. A third or emergency signal of
+three blasts would summon the immediate reserve from its general guard duty;
+its twenty men dividing equally and entering the unknown depths through both
+farmhouse and stone building. Capt. Whipple's belief in the existence of
+catacombs was absolute, and he took no alternative into consideration when
+making his plans. He had with him a whistle of great power and shrillness, and
+did not fear any upsetting or misunderstanding of signals. The final reserve at
+the landing, of course, was nearly out of the whistle's range; hence would require
+a special messenger if needed for help. Moses Brown and John Carter went with
+Capt. Hopkins to the river-bank, while President Manning was detailed with
+Capt. Mathewson to the stone building. Dr. Bowen, with Ezra Weeden, remained
+in Capt. Whipple's party which was to storm the farmhouse itself. The attack was
+to begin as soon as a messenger from Capt. Hopkins had joined Capt. Whipple to
+notify him of the river party's readiness. The leader would then deliver the loud
+single blast, and the various advance parties would commence their
+simultaneous attack on three points. Shortly before 1 a.m. the three divisions left
+the Fenner farmhouse; one to guard the landing, another to seek the river valley
+and the hillside door, and the third to subdivide and attend to teh actual
+buildings of the Curwen farm.
+
+Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in his diary
+an uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay; broken once by
+what seemed to be the distant sound of the signal whistle and again by a peculiar
+muffled blend of roaring and crying and a powder blast which seemed to come
+from the same direction. Later on one man thought he caught some distant
+
+
+
+
+gunshots, and still later Smith himself felt the throb of titanic and thunderous
+words resounding in upper air. It was just before dawn that a single haggard
+messenger with wild eyes and a hideous unknown odour about his clothing
+appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes and never
+again think or speak of the night's doings or of him who had been Joseph
+Curwen. Something about the bearing of the messenger carried a conviction
+which his mere words could never have conveyed; for though he was a seaman
+well known to many of them, there was something obscurely lost or gained in his
+soul which set him for evermore apart. It was the same later on when they met
+other old companions who had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had
+lost or gained something imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or
+heard or felt something which was not for human creatures, and could not forget
+it. From them there was never any gossip, for to even the commonest of mortal
+instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from that single messenger the party
+at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost sealed their own lips. Very few
+are the rumours which ever came from any of them, and Eleazar Smith's diary is
+the only written record which has survived from that whole expedition which set
+forth from the Sign of the Golden Lion under the stars.
+
+Charles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some Fenner
+correspondence which he found in New London, where he knew another branch
+of the family had lived. It seems that the Fenners, from whose house the doomed
+farm was distantly visible, had watched the departing columns of raiders; and
+had heard very clearly the angry barking of the Curwen dogs, followed by the
+first shrill blast which precipitated the attack. This blast had been followed by a
+repetition of the great shaft of light from the stone building, and in another
+moment, after a quick sounding of the second signal ordering a general invasion,
+there had come a subdued prattle of musketry followed by a horrible roaring cry
+which the correspondent Luke Fenner had represented in his epistle by the
+characters 'Waaaahrrrrr-R'waaahrrr.'
+
+This cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing could convey,
+and the correspondent mentions that his mother fainted completely at the sound.
+It was later repeated less loudly, and further but more muffled evidences of
+gunfire ensued; together with a loud explosion of powder from the direction of
+the river. About an hour afterward all the dogs began to bark frightfully, and
+there were vague ground rumblings so marked that the candlesticks tottered on
+the mantelpiece. A strong smell of sulphur was noted; and Luke Tenner's father
+declared that he heard the third or emergency whistle signal, though the others
+failed to detect it. Muffled musketry sounded again, followed by a deep scream
+less piercing but even more horrible than the those which had preceded it; a kind
+of throaty, nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have
+
+
+
+
+come more from its continuity and psychological import than from its actual
+acoustic value.
+
+Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen farm ought
+to lie, and the human cries of desperate and frightened men were heard. Muskets
+flashed and cracked, and the flaming thing fell to the ground. A second flaming
+thing appeared, and a shriek of human origin was plainly distinguished. Fenner
+wrote that he could even gather a few words belched in frenzy: Almighty,
+protect thy lamb! Then there were more shots, and the second flaming thing fell.
+After that came silence for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end of which
+time little Arthur Fenner, Luke's brother, exclaimed that he saw "a red fog"
+going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the distance. No one but the child
+can testify to this, but Luke admits the significant coincidence implied by the
+panic of almost convulsive fright which at the same moment arched the backs
+and stiffened the fur of the three cats then within the room.
+
+Five minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused with an
+intolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented
+its being notice by the shore party or by any wakeful souls in the Pawtuxet
+village. This stench was nothing which any of the Tenners had ever encountered
+before, and produced a kind of clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the
+tomb or the charnel-house. Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless
+hearer will ever be able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and
+windows rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a
+bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it said no man can
+tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is the writing Luke Fenner set
+down to portray the daemoniac intonations: 'DEESMEES JESHET BONE
+DOSEFE DUVEMA ENITEMOSS.' Not till the year 1919 did any soul link this
+crude transcript with anything else in mortal knowledge, but Charles Ward
+paled as he recognised what Mirandola had denounced in shudders as the
+ultimate horror among black magic's incantations.
+
+An unmistakable human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer this
+malign wonder from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown stench grew
+complex with an added odour equally intolerable. A wailing distinctly different
+from the scream now burst out, and was protracted ululantly in rising and falling
+paroxysms. At times it became almost articulate, though no auditor could trace
+any definite words; and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of
+diabolic and hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark
+madness wrenched from scores of human throats - a yell which came strong and
+clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after which darkness and
+silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended to blot out the stars.
+
+
+
+
+though no flames appeared and no buildings were observed to be gone or
+injured on the following day.
+
+Toward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable
+odours saturating their clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested a keg
+of rum, for which they paid very well indeed. One of them told the family that
+the affair of Joseph Curwen was over, and that the events of the night were not to
+be mentioned again. Arrogant as the order seemed, the aspect of him who gave it
+took away all resentment and lent it a fearsome authority; so that only these
+furtive letters of Luke Fenner, which he urged his Connecticut relative to
+destroy, remain to tell what was seen and heard. The non-compliance of that
+relative, whereby the letters were saved after all, has alone kept the matter from
+a merciful oblivion. Charles Ward had one detail to add as a result of a long
+canvass of Pawtuxet residents for ancestral traditions. Old Charles Slocum of that
+village said that there was known to his grandfather a queer rumour concerning
+a charred, distorted body found in the fields a week after the death of Joseph
+Curwen was announced. What kept the talk alive was the notion that this body,
+so far as could be seen in its burnt and twisted condition, was neither thoroughly
+human nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or
+read about.
+
+
+
+Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be induced to say a
+word concerning it, and every fragment of the vague data which survives comes
+from those outside the final fighting party. There is something frightful in the
+care with which these actual raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least
+allusion to the matter. Eight sailors had been killed, but although their bodies
+were not produced their families were satisfied with the statement that a clash
+with customs officers had occurred. The same statement also covered the
+numerous cases of wounds, all of which were extensively bandaged and treated
+only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who had accompanied the party. Hardest to explain
+was the nameless odour clinging to all the raiders, a thing which was discussed
+for weeks. Of the citizen leaders, Capt. Whipple and Moses Brown were most
+severely hurt, and letters of their wives testify the bewilderment which their
+reticence and close guarding of their bandages produced. Psychologically every
+participant was aged, sobered, and shaken. It is fortunate that they were all
+strong men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle
+introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed.
+President Manning was the most disturbed; but even he outgrew the darkest
+shadow, and smothered memories in prayers. Every man of those leaders had a
+stirring part to play in later years, and it is perhaps fortunate that this is so. Little
+more than a twelvemonth afterward Capt. Whipple led the mob who burnt the
+
+
+
+
+revenue ship Gaspee, and in this bold act we may trace one step in the blotting
+out of unwholesome images.
+
+There was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden coffin of
+curious design, obviously found ready on the spot when needed, in which she
+was told her husband's body lay. He had, it was explained, been killed in a
+customs battle about which it was not politic to give details. More than this no
+tongue ever uttered of Joseph Curwen's end, and Charles Ward had only a single
+hint wherewith to construct a theory. This hint was the merest thread - a shaky
+underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Orne's confiscated letter to Curwen, as
+partly copied in Ezra Weeden's handwriting. The copy was found in the
+possession of Smith's descendants; and we are left to decide whether Weeden
+gave it to his companion after the end, as a mute clue to the abnormality which
+had occurred, or whether, as is more probable. Smith had it before, and added
+the underscoring himself from what he had managed to extract from his friend
+by shrewd guessing and adroit cross-questioning. The underlined passage is
+merely this:
+
+I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the
+Which I meane. Any that can in Turne call up Somewhat against you, whereby
+your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater
+shal not wish to Answer, and shal commande more than you.
+
+In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable allies a
+beaten man might try to summon in his direst extremity, Charles Ward may well
+have wondered whether any citizen of Providence killed Joseph Curwen.
+
+The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from Providence life
+and annals was vastly aided by the influence of the raiding leaders. They had not
+at first meant to be so thorough, and had allowed the widow and her father and
+child to remain in ignorance of the true conditions; but Capt. Tillinghast was an
+astute man, and soon uncovered enough rumours to whet his horror and cause
+him to demand that the daughter and granddaughter change their name, burn
+the library and all remaining papers, and chisel the inscription from the slate slab
+above Joseph Curwen's grave. He knew Capt. Whipple well, and probably
+extracted more hints from that bluff mariner and anyone else ever gained
+repecting the end of the accursed sorcerer.
+
+From that time on the obliteration of Curwen's memory became increasingly
+rigid, extending at last by common consent even to the town records and files of
+the Gazette. It can be compared in spirit only to the hush that lay on Oscar
+Wilde's name for a decade after his disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that
+
+
+
+
+sinful King of Runazar in Lord Dunsany's tale, whom the Gods decided must not
+only cease to be, but must cease ever to have been.
+
+Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the house in Olney
+Court and resided with her father in Power's Lane till her death in 1817. The
+farm at Pawtuxet, shunned by every living soul, remained to moulder through
+the years; and seemed to decay with unaccountable rapidity. By 1780 only the
+stone and brickwork were standing, and by 1800 even these had fallen to
+shapeless heaps. None ventured to pierce the tangled shrubbery on the river-
+bank behind which the hillside door may have lain, nor did any try to frame a
+definite image of the scenes amidst which Joseph Curwen departed from the
+horrors he had wrought.
+
+Only robust old Capt. Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter once in a
+
+while to himself, "Pox on that , but he had no business to laugh while he
+
+screamed. 'Twas as though the damn'd had some'at up his sleeve. For half a
+
+crown I'd burn his home.'
+
+III. A Search and an Evocation
+
+
+
+Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent from Joseph
+Curwen. That he at once took an intense interest in everything pertaining to the
+bygone mystery is not to be wondered at; for every vague rumour that he had
+heard of Curwen now became something vital to himself, in whom flowed
+Curwen's blood. No spirited and imaginative genealogist could have done
+otherwise than begin forthwith an avid and systematic collection of Curwen
+data.
+
+In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy; so that even
+Dr. Lyman hesitates to date the youth's madness from any period before the
+close of 1919. He talked freely with his family - though his mother was not
+particularly pleased to own an ancestor like Curwen - and with the officials of
+the various museums and libraries he visited. In applying to private families for
+records thought to be in their possession he made no concealment of his object,
+and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with which the accounts of the old
+diarists and letter-writers were regarded. He often expressed a keen wonder as
+to what really had taken place a century and a half before at the Pawtuxet
+farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find, and what Joseph Curwen really had
+been.
+
+
+
+
+When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter
+from Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwen's early
+activities and connexions there, which he did during the Easter vacation of 1919.
+At the Essex Institute, which was well known to him from former sojourns in the
+glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he
+was very kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen
+data. He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven
+miles from town, on the eighteenth of February (O.S.) 1662-3; and that he had run
+away to sea at the age of fifteen, not appearing again for nine years, when he
+returned with the speech, dress, and manners of a native Englishman and settled
+in Salem proper. At that time he had little to do with his family, but spent most
+of his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe, and the strange
+chemicals which came for him on ships from England, France, and Holland.
+Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of much local
+inquisitiveness, and were whisperingly associated with vague rumours of fires
+on the hills at night.
+
+Curwen's only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village
+and one Simon Orne of Salem. With these men he was often seen in conference
+about the Common, and visits among them were by no means infrequent.
+Hutchinson had a house well out toward the woods, and it was not altogether
+liked by sensitive people because of the sounds heard there at night. He was said
+to entertain strange visitors, and the lights seen from his windows were not
+always of the same colour. The knowledge he displayed concerning long-dead
+persons and long-forgotten events was considered distinctly unwholesome, and
+he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic began, never to be heard
+from again. At that time Joseph Curwen also departed, but his settlement in
+Providence was soon learned of. Simon Orne lived in Salem until 1720, when his
+failure to grow visibly old began to excite attention. He thereafter disappeared,
+though thirty years later his precise counterpart and self-styled son turned up to
+claim his property. The claim was allowed on the strength of documents in
+Simon Orne's known hand, and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell in Salem till
+1771, when certain letters from Providence citizens to the Rev. Thomas Barnard
+and others brought about his quiet removal to parts unknown.
+
+Certain documents by and about all of the strange characters were available at
+teh Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included
+both harmless commonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale, and furtive
+fragments of a more provocative nature. There were four or five unmistakable
+allusions to them on the witchcraft trial records; as when one Hepzibah Lawson
+swore on July 10, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge
+Hathorne, that: 'fortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the
+Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinson's house', and one Amity How declared at a
+
+
+
+
+session of August 8th before Judge Gedney that:'Mr. G. B. (Rev. George
+Burroughs) on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A.,
+Simon O., Dehverance W., Joseph C, Susan P., Mehitable C, and Deborah B.'
+
+Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinson's uncanny Hbrary as found after his
+disappearance, and an unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a
+cipher none could read. Ward had a photostatic copy of this manuscript made,
+and began to work casually on the cipher as soon as it was delivered to him.
+After the following August his labours on the cipher became intense and
+feverish, and there is reason to believe from his speech and conduct that he hit
+upon the key before October or November. He never stated, though, whether or
+not he had succeeded.
+
+But of greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took Ward only a
+short time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing he had already
+considered established from the text of the letter to Curwen; namely, that Simon
+Orne and his supposed son were one and the same person. As Orne had said to
+his correspondent, it was hardly safe to live too long in Salem, hence he resorted
+to a thirty -year sojourn abroad, and did not return to claim his lands except as a
+representative of a new generation. Orne had apparently been careful to destroy
+most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took action in 1771 found and
+preserved a few letters and papers which excited their wonder. There were
+cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands which Ward now either
+copied with care or had photographed, and one extremely mysterious letter in a
+chirography that the searcher recognised from items in the Registry of Deeds as
+positively Joseph Curwen's.
+
+This Curwen letter, though undated as to the year, was evidently not the one in
+answer to which Orne had written the confiscated missive; and from internal
+evidence Ward placed it not much later than 1750. It may not be amiss to give the
+text in full, as a sample of the style of one whose history was so dark and terrible.
+The recipient is addressed as "Simon", but a line (whether drawn by Curwen or
+Orne Ward could not tell) is run through the word.
+
+Providence, 1. May
+
+Brother:-
+
+My honour'd Antient Friende, due Respects and earnest Wishes to Him whom
+we serue for yr eternall Power. I am just come upon That which you ought to
+knowe, concern'g the Matter of the Laste Extremitie and what to doe regard'g yt.
+I am not dispos'd to foUowe you in go'g Away on acct. of my Yeares, for
+Prouidence hath not ye Sharpeness of ye Bay in hunt'g oute uncommon Things
+
+
+
+
+and bringinge to Tryall. I am ty'd up in Shippes and Goodes, and cou'd not doe
+as you did, besides the Whiche my Farme at Patuxet hath under it What you
+Knowe, and wou'd not waite for my com'g Backe as an Other.
+
+But I am unreadie for harde Fortunes, as I haue tolde you, and haue longe
+work'd upon ye Way of get'g Backe after ye Laste. I laste Night strucke on ye
+Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for ye first Time that
+
+Face spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye . And IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye
+
+Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine,
+drawe ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate
+eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eue; and ye Thing will breede in ye Outside
+Spheres.
+
+And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, tho' know'g
+not what he seekes.
+
+Yett will this auaile Nothing if there be no Heir, and if the Saltes, or the Way to
+make the Saltes, bee not Readie for his Hande; and here I will owne, I haue not
+taken needed Stepps nor founde Much. Ye Process is plaguy harde to come
+neare; and it used up such a Store of Specimens, I am harde putte to it to get
+Enough, notwithstand'g the Sailors I haue from ye Indies. Ye People aboute are
+become curious, but I can stande them off. Ye Gentry are worse that the
+Populace, be'g more Circumstantiall in their Accts. and more belieu'd in what
+they tell. That Parson and Mr. Merritt haue talk'd Some, I am fearfuU, but no
+Thing soe far is Dangerous. Ye Chymical Substances are easie of get'g, there be'g
+II. goode Chymists in Towne, Dr, Bowen and Sam: Carew. I am foll'g oute what
+Borellus saith, and haue Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke. Whateuer I
+gette, you shal haue. And in ye meane while, do not neglect to make use of ye
+Wordes I haue here giuen. I haue them Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM,
+
+imploy the Writings on ye Piece of that I am putt'g in this Packet. Saye ye
+
+Uerses euery Roodmas and Hallow's Eue; and if ye Line runn out not, one shal
+bee in yeares to come that shal looke backe and use what Saltes or Stuff for Saltes
+you shal leaue him. Job XIV. XIV.
+
+I rejoice you are again at Salem, and hope I may see you not longe hence. I haue a
+goode Stallion, and am think'g of get'g a Coach, there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in
+Prouidence already, tho' ye Roades are bad. If you are dispos'd to Trauel, doe
+not pass me bye. From Boston take ye Post Rd. thro' Dedham, Wrentham, and
+Attleborough, goode Tauerns be'g at all these Townes. Stop at Mr. Balcom's in
+Wrentham, where ye Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatch's, but eate at ye other
+House for their Cooke is better. Turne into Prou. by Patucket Falls, and ye Rd.
+past Mr. Sayles's Tauern. My House opp. Mr. Epenetus Olney's Tauern off ye
+
+
+
+
+Towne Street, 1st on ye N. side of Olney's Court. Distance from Boston Stone abt.
+XLIV Miles.
+
+Sir, I am ye olde and true Friend and Serut. in Almonsin-Metraton.
+
+Josephus C.
+
+To Mr. Simon Orne,
+
+William 's-Lane, in Salem.
+
+This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location of
+Curwen's Providence home; for none of the records encountered up to that time
+had been at all specific. The discovery was doubly striking because it indicated as
+the newer Curwen house, built in 1761 on the site of the old, a dilapidated
+building still standing in Olney Court and well known to Ward in his
+antiquarian rambles over Stampers' Hill. The place was indeed only a few
+squares from his own home on the great hill's higher ground, and was now the
+abode of a negro family much esteemed for occasional washing, housecleaning,
+and furnace-tending services. To find, in distant Salem, such sudden proof of the
+significance of this familiar rookery in his own family history, was a highly
+impressive thing to Ward; and he resolved to explore the place immediately
+upon his return. The more mystical phases of the letter, which he took to be some
+extravagant kind of symbolism, frankly baffled him; though he noted with a
+thrill of curiousity that the Biblical passage referred to - Job 14,14 - was the
+familiar verse, 'If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed
+time will I wait, until my change come.'
+
+
+
+Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent the
+following Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney Court.
+The place, now crumbling with age, had never been a mansion; but was a modest
+two-and-a-half story wooden town house of the familiar Providence colonial
+type, with plain peaked roof, large central chimney, and artistically carved
+doorway with rayed fanlight, triangular pediment, and trim Doric pilasters. It
+had suffered but little alteration externally, and Ward felt he was gazing on
+something very close to the sinister matters of his quest.
+
+The present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously
+shewn about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah. Here there was
+more change than the outside indicated, and Ward saw with regret that fully half
+of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantels and shell-carved cupboard linings were
+gone, whilst most of the fine wainscotting and bolection moulding was marked.
+
+
+
+
+hacked, and gouged, or covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper. In general,
+the survey did not yield as much as Ward had somehow expected; but it was at
+least exciting to stand within the ancestral walls which had housed such a man of
+horror as Joseph Curwen. He saw with a thrill that a monogram had been very
+carefully effaced from the ancient brass knocker.
+
+From then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the photostatic
+copy of the Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local Curwen data. The
+former still proved unyielding; but of the latter he obtained so much, and so
+many clues to similar data elsewhere, that he was ready by July to make a trip to
+New London and New York to consult old letters whose presence in those places
+was indicated. This trip was very fruitful, for it brought him the Tenner letters
+with their terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and the
+Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he learned of the portrait painted on a panel
+of the Curwen library. This matter of the portrait interested him particularly,
+since he would have given much to know just what Joseph Curwen looked like;
+and he decided to make a second search of the house in Olney Court to see if
+there might not be some trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of
+later paint or layers of mouldy wall-paper.
+
+Early in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully over the walls
+of every room sizeable enough to have been by any possibility the library of the
+evil builder. He paid especial attention to the large panels of such overmantels as
+still remained; and was keenly excited after about an hour, when on a broad area
+above the fireplace in a spacious ground-floor room he became certain that the
+surface brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint was sensibly darker
+than any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it was likely to have been.
+A few more careful tests with a thin knife, and he knew that he had come upon
+an oil portrait of great extent. With truly scholarly restraint the youth did not risk
+the damage which an immediate attempt to uncover the hidden picture with the
+knife might have been, but just retired from the scene of his discovery to enlist
+expert help. In three days he returned with an artist of long experience, Mr.
+Walter C. Dwight, whose studio is near the foot of College Hill; and that
+accomplished restorer of paintings set to work at once with proper methods and
+chemical substances. Old Asa and his wife were duly excited over their strange
+visitors, and were properly reimbursed for this invasion of their domestic hearth.
+
+As day by the day the work of restoration progressed, Charles Ward looked on
+with growing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled after their long
+oblivion. Dwight had begun at the bottom; hence since the picture was a three-
+quarter-length one, the face did not come out for some time. It was meanwhile
+seen that the subject was a spare, well-shaped man with dark-blue coat,
+embroidered waistcoat, black satin small-clothes, and white silk stockings, seated
+
+
+
+
+in a carved chair against the background of a window with wharves and ships
+beyond. When the head came out it was observed to bear a neat Albemarle wig,
+and to possess a thin, calm, undistinguished face which seemed somehow
+familiar to both Ward and the artist. Only at the very last, though, did the
+restorer and his client begin to grasp with astonishment at the details of that lean,
+pallid visage, and to recognise with a touch of awe the dramatic trick which
+heredity had played. For it took the final bath of oil and the final stroke of the
+delicate scraper to bring out fully the expression which centuries had hidden;
+and to confront the bewildered Charles Dexter Ward, dweller in the past, with
+his own living features in the countenance of his horrible great-great-great-
+grandfather.
+
+Ward brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered, and his father at
+once determined to purchase the picture despite its execution on stationary
+panelling. The resemblance to the boy, despite an appearance of rather great age,
+was marvellous; and it could be seen that through some trick of atavism the
+physical contours of Joseph Curwen had found precise duplication after a
+century and a half. Mrs. Ward's resemblance to her ancestor was not at all
+marked, though she could recall relatives who had some of the facial
+characteristics shared by her son and by the bygone Curwen. She did not relish
+the discovery, and told her husband that he had better burn the picture instead
+of bringing it home. There was, she averred, something unwholesome about it;
+not only intrinsically, but in its very resemblance to Charles. Mr. Ward, however,
+was a practical man of power and affairs - a cotton manufacturer with extensive
+mills at Riverpoint in the Pawtuxet Valley - and not one to listen to feminine
+scruples. The picture impressed him mightily with its likeness to his son, and he
+believed the boy deserved it as a present. In this opinion, it is needless to say,
+Charles most heartily concurred; and a few days later Mr. Ward located the
+owner of the house - a small rodent-featured person with a guttural accent - and
+obtained the whole mantel and overmantel bearing the picture at a curtly fixed
+price which cut short the impending torrent of unctuous haggling.
+
+It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward home,
+where provisions were made for its thorough restoration and installation with an
+electric mock-fireplace in Charles's third-floor study or library. To Charles was
+left the task of superintending this removal, and on the twenty -eighth of August
+he accompanied two expert workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the
+house in Olney Court, where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were
+detached with great care and precision for transportation in the company's
+motor truck. There was left a space of exposed brickwork marking the chimney's
+course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess about a foot square,
+which must have lain directly behind the head of the portrait. Curious as to what
+such a space might mean or contain, the youth approached and looked within;
+
+
+
+
+finding beneath the deep coatings of dust and soot some loose yellowed papers,
+a crude, thick copybook, and a few mouldering textile shreds which may have
+formed the ribbon binding the rest together. Blowing away the bulk of the dirt
+and cinders, he took up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its cover.
+It was in a hand which he had learned to recognise at the Essex Institute, and
+proclaimed the volume as the 'Journall and Notes of Jos: Curwen, Gent, of
+Prouidence-Plantations, Late of Salem.'
+
+Excited beyond measure by his discovery. Ward shewed the book to the two
+curious workmen beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to the nature and
+genuineness of the finding, and Dr. Willett relies on them to help establish his
+theory that the youth was not mad when he began his major eccentricities. All
+the other papers were likewise in Curwen's handwriting, and one of them
+seemed especially portentous because of its inscription: 'To Him Who Shal Come
+After, & How He May Gett Beyonde Time & Ye Spheres.'
+
+Another was in a cipher; the same. Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher which
+had hitherto baffled him. A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a
+key to the cipher; whilst the fourth and fifth were addressed respectively
+to:'Edw: Hutchinson, Armiger' and Jedediah Orne, esq.', 'or Their Heir or Heirs,
+or Those Represent'g Them.' The sixth and last was inscribed: 'Joseph Curwen
+his Life and Travells Bet'n ye yeares 1678 and 1687: Of Whither He Voyag'd,
+Where He Stay'd, Whom He Sawe, and What He Learnt.'
+
+
+
+We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of
+alienists date Charles Ward's madness. Upon his discovery the youth had looked
+immediately at a few of the inner pages of the book and manuscripts, and had
+evidently seen something which impressed him tremendously. Indeed, in
+shewing the titles to the workmen, he appeared to guard the text itself with
+peculiar care, and to labour under a perturbation for which even the antiquarian
+and genealogical significance of the find could hardly account. Upon returning
+home he broke the news with an almost embarrassed air, as if he wished to
+convey an idea of its supreme importance without having to exhibit the evidence
+itself. He did not even shew the titles to his parents, but simply told them that he
+had found some documents in Joseph Curwen's handwriting, 'mostly in cipher',
+which would have to be studied very carefully before yielding up their true
+meaning. It is unlikely that he would have shewn what he did to the workmen,
+had it not been for their unconcealed curiousity. As it was he doubtless wished to
+avoid any display of peculiar reticence which would increase their discussion of
+the matter.
+
+
+
+
+That night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book and
+papers, and when day came he did not desist. His meals, on his urgent request
+when his mother called to see what was amiss, were sent up to him; and in the
+afternoon he appeared only briefly when the men came to install the Curwen
+picture and mantelpiece in his study. The next night he slept in snatches in his
+clothes, meanwhile wrestling feverishly with the unravelling of the cipher
+manuscript. In the morning his mother saw that he was at work on the
+photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher, which he had frequently shewn her
+before; but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be
+applied to it. That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the men
+fascinatedly as they finished their installation of the picture with its woodwork
+above a cleverly realistic electric log, setting the mock-fireplace and overmantel a
+little out from the north wall as if a chimney existed, and boxing in the sides with
+panelling to match the room's. The front panel holding the picture was sawn and
+hinged to allow cupboard space behind it. After the workmen went he moved his
+work into the study and sat down before it with his eyes half on the cipher and
+half on the portrait which stared back at him like a year-adding and century-
+recalling mirror.
+
+His parents, subsequently recalling his conduct at this period, give interesting
+details anent the policy of concealment which he practised. Before servants he
+seldom hid any paper which he might by studying, since he rightly assumed that
+Curwen's intricate and archaic chirography would be too much for them. With
+his parents, however, he was more circumspect; and unless the manuscript in
+question were a cipher, or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknown
+ideographs (as that entitled 'To Him Who Shal Come After, etc' seemed to be),
+he would cover it with some convenient paper until his caller had departed. At
+night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of his, where
+he also placed them whenever he left the room. He soon resumed fairly regular
+hours and habits, except that his long walks and other outside interests seemed
+to cease. The opening of school, where he now began his senior year, seemed a
+great bore to him; and he frequently asserted his determination never to bother
+with college. He had, he said, important special investigations to make, which
+would provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the humanities
+than any university which the world could boast.
+
+Naturally, only one who had always been more or less studious, eccentric, and
+solitary could have pursued this course for many days without attracting notice.
+Ward, however, was constitutionally a scholar and a hermit; hence his parents
+were less surprised than regretful at the close confinement and secrecy he
+adopted. At the same time, both his father and mother thought it odd that he
+would shew them no scrap of his treasure-trove, nor give any connected account
+of such data as he had deciphered. This reticence he explained away as due to a
+
+
+
+
+wish to wait until he might announce some connected revelation, but as the
+weeks passed without further disclosures there began to grow up between the
+youth and his family a kind of constraint; intensified in his mother's case by her
+manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings.
+
+During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer for the
+antiquarian matter of his former days. Witchcraft and magic, occultism and
+daemonology, were what he sought now; and when Providence sources proved
+unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap the wealth of the great
+library in Copley Square, the Widener Library at Harvard, or the Zion Research
+Library in Brookline, where certain rare works on Biblical subjects are available.
+He bought extensively, and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his
+study for newly acquired works on uncanny subjects; while during the
+Christmas holidays he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem
+to consult certain records at the Essex Institute.
+
+About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward's bearing an element of
+triumph which he did not explain, and he was no more found at work upon the
+Hutchinson cipher. Instead, he inaugurated a dual policy of chemical research
+and record-scanning; fitting up for the one a laboratory in the unused attic of the
+house, and for the latter haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence.
+Local dealers in drugs and scientific supplies, later questioned, gave
+astonishingly queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and
+instruments he purchased; but clerks at the State House, the City Hall, and the
+various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second interest. He was
+searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of Joseph Curwen, from whose
+slate slab an older generation had so wisely blotted the name.
+
+Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that something
+was wrong. Charles had had freaks and changes of minor interests before, but
+this growing secrecy and absorption in strange pursuits was unlike even him.
+His school work was the merest pretence; and although he failed in no test, it
+could be seen that the older application had all vanished. He had other
+concernments now; and when not in his new laboratory with a score of obsolete
+alchemical books, could be found either poring over old burial records down
+town or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his study, where the startlingly -
+one almost fancied increasingly - similar features of Joseph Curwen stared
+blandly at him from the great overmantel on the North wall.
+
+Late in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of rambles
+about the various ancient cemeteries of the city. The cause appeared later, when
+it was learned from City Hall clerks that he had probably found an important
+clue. His quest had suddenly shifted from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of
+
+
+
+
+one Naphthali Field; and this shift was explained when, upon going over the files
+that he had been over, the investigators actually found a fragmentary record of
+Curwen's burial which had escaped the general obliteration, and which stated
+that the curious leaden coffin had been interred '10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of Naphthali
+Field's grave in y-.' The lack of a specified burying-ground in the surviving entry
+greatly complicated the search, and Naphthali Field's grave seemed as elusive as
+that of Curwen; but here no systematic effacement had existed, and one might
+reasonably be expected to stumble on the stone itself even if its record had
+perished. Hence the rambles - from which St. John's (the former King's)
+Churchyard and the ancient Congregational burying-ground in the midst of
+Swan Point Cemetery were excluded, since other statistics had shewn that the
+only Naphthali Field (obiit 1729) whose grave could have been meant had been a
+Baptist.
+
+
+
+It was toward May when Dr. Willett, at the request of the senior Ward, and
+fortified with all the Curwen data which the family had gleaned from Charles in
+his non-secretive days, talked with the young man. The interview was of little
+value or conclusiveness, for Willett felt at every moment that Charles was
+thorough master of himself and in touch with matters of real importance; but it
+at least force the secretive youth to offer some rational explanation of his recent
+demeanour. Of a pallid, impassive type not easily shewing embarrassment.
+Ward seemed quite ready to discuss his pursuits, though not to reveal their
+object. He stated that the papers of his ancestor had contained some remarkable
+secrets of early scientific knowledge, for the most part in cipher, of an apparent
+scope comparable only to the discoveries of Friar Bacon and perhaps surpassing
+even those. They were, however, meaningless except when correlated with a
+body of learning now wholly obsolete; so that their immediate presentation to a
+world equipped only with modern science would rob them of all impressiveness
+and dramatic significance. To take their vivid place in the history of human
+thought they must first be correlated by one familiar with the background out of
+which they evolved, and to this task of correlation Ward was now devoting
+himself. He was seeking to acquire as fast as possible those neglected arts of old
+which a true interpreter of the Curwen data must possess, and hoped in time to
+made a full announcement and presentation of the utmost interest to mankind
+and to the world of thought. Not even Einstein, he declared, could more
+profoundly revolutionise the current conception of things.
+
+As to his graveyard search, whose object he freely admitted, but the details of
+whose progress he did not relate, he said he had reason to think that Joseph
+Curwen's mutilated headstone bore certain mystic symbols - carved from
+directions in his will and ignorantly spared by those who had effaced the name -
+
+
+
+
+which were absolutely essential to the final solution of his cryptic system.
+Curwen, he believed, had wish to guard his secret with care; and had
+consequently distributed the data in an exceedingly curious fashion. When Dr.
+Willett asked to see the mystic documents. Ward displayed much reluctance and
+tried to put him off with such things as photostatic copies of the Hutchinson
+cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams; but finally shewed him the exteriors of
+some of the real Curwen finds - the 'Journall and Notes', the cipher (title in
+cipher also), and the formula-filled message 'To Him Who Shal Come After' -
+and let him glance inside such as were in obscure characters.
+
+He also opened the diary at a page carefully selected for its innocuousness and
+gave Willett a glimpse of Curwen's connected handwriting in English. The
+doctor noted very closely the crabbed and complicated letters, and the general
+aura of the seventeenth century which clung round both penmanship and style
+despite the writer's survival into the eighteenth century, and became quickly
+certain that the document was genuine. The text itself was relatively trivial, and
+Willett recalled only a fragment:
+
+'Wedn. 16 Octr. 1754. My Sloope the Wakeful this Day putt in from London with
+XX newe Men pick'd up in ye Indies, Spaniards from Martineco and 2 Dutch
+Men from Surinam. Ye Dutch Men are like to Desert from have'g hearde
+Somewhat ill of these Ventures, but I will see to ye Inducing of them to Staye. For
+Mr. Knight Dexter of ye Bay and Book 120 Pieces Camblets, 100 Pieces Assrtd.
+Cambleteens, 20 Pieces blue Duffles, 100 Pieces Shalloons, 50 Pieces
+Calamancoes, 300 Pieces each, Shendsoy and Humhums. For Mr. Green at ye
+Elephant 50 Gallon Cyttles, 20 Warm'g Pannes, 15 Bake Cyttles, 10 pr. Smoke'g
+Tonges. For Mr. Perrigo 1 Sett of Awles. For Mr. Nightingale 50 Reames prime
+Foolscap. Say'd ye SABAOTH thrice last Nighte but None appear'd. I must heare
+more from Mr. H. in Transylvania, tho' it is Harde reach'g him and exceeding
+strange he can not give me the Use of What he hath so well us'd these hundred
+Yeares. Simon hath not writ these V. Weekes, but I expecte soon hear'g from
+Him.'
+
+When upon reaching this point Dr. Willett turned the leaf he was quickly
+checked by Ward, who almost snatched the book from his grasp. All that the
+doctor had a chance to see on the newly opened page was a brief pair of
+sentences; but these, strangely enough, lingered tenacious in his memory. They
+ran: 'Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus be'g spoke V Roodmasses and IV Hallows-
+Eves, I am Hopeful ye Thing is breed'g Outside ye Spheres. It will drawe One
+who is to Come, if I can make sure he shal Bee, and he shal think on Past Thinges
+and look back thro' all ye Yeares, against ye Which I must have ready ye Saltes or
+That to make 'em with.'
+
+
+
+
+Willett saw no more, but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and vague
+terror to the painted features of Joseph Curwen which stared blandly down from
+the overmantel. Even after that he entertained the odd fancy - which his medical
+skill of course assured him was only a fancy - that the eyes of the portrait had a
+sort of wish, if not an actual tendency, to follow young Charles Ward as he move
+about the room. He stopped before leaving to study the picture closely,
+marvelling at its resemblance to Charles and memorising every minute detail of
+the cryptical, colourless face, even down to a slight scar or pit in the smooth
+brow above the right eye. Cosmo Alexander, he decided, was a painter worthy of
+the Scotland that produced Raeburn, and a teacher worthy of his illustrious pupil
+Gilbert Stuart.
+
+Assured by the doctor that Charles's mental health was in no danger, but that on
+the other hand he was engaged in researches which might prove of real
+importance, the Wards were more lenient than they might otherwise have been
+when during the following June the youth made positive his refusal to attend
+college. He had, he declared, studies of much more vital importance to pursue;
+and intimated a wish to go abroad the following year in order to avail himself of
+certain sources of data not existing in America. The senior Ward, while denying
+this latter wish as absurd for a boy of only eighteen, acquiesced regarding the
+university; so that after a none too brilliant graduation from the Moses Brown
+School there ensued for Charles a three-year period of intensive occult study and
+graveyard searching. He became recognised as an eccentric, and dropped even
+more completely from the sight of his family's friends than he had been before;
+keeping close to his work and only occasionally making trips to other cities to
+consult obscure records. Once he went south to talk to a strange mulatto who
+dwelt in a swamp and about whom a newspaper hand printed a curious article.
+Again he sought a small village in the Adirondacks whence reports of certain
+odd ceremonial practices had come. But still his parents forbade him the trip to
+the Old World which he desired.
+
+Coming of age in April, 1923, and having previously inherited a small
+competence from his maternal grandfather. Ward determined at last to take the
+European trip hitherto denied him. Of his proposed itinerary he would say
+nothing save that the needs of his studies would carry him to many places, but
+he promised to write his parents fully and faithfully. When they saw he could
+not be dissuaded, they ceased all opposition and helped as best they could; so
+that in June the young man sailed for Liverpool with the farewell blessings of his
+father and mother, who accompanied him to Boston and waved him out of sight
+from the White Star pier in Charlestown. Letters soon told of his safe arrival, and
+of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street, London; where he proposed
+to stay, shunning all family friends, till he had exhausted the resources of the
+British Museum in a certain direction. Of his daily life he wrote by little, for there
+
+
+
+
+was little to write. Study and experiment consumed all his time, and he
+mentioned a laboratory which he had established in one of his rooms. That he
+said nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its luring
+skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads and alleys whose
+mystic convolutions and sudden vistas alternately beckon and surprise, was
+taken by his parents as a good index of the degree to which his new interests had
+engrossed his mind.
+
+In June, 1924, a brief note told of his departure for Paris, to which he had before
+made one or two flying trips for material in the Bibliotheque Nationale. For three
+months thereafter he sent only postal cards, giving an address in the Rue St.
+Jacques and referring to a special search among rare manuscripts in the library of
+an unnamed private collector. He avoided acquaintances, and no tourists
+brought back reports of having seen him. Then came a silence, and in October the
+Wards received a picture card from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating that
+Charles was in that ancient town for the purpose of conferring with a certain
+very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor of some very curious
+mediaeval information. He gave an address in the Neustadt, and announced no
+move till the following January; when he dropped several cards from Vienna
+telling of his passage through that city on the way toward a more easterly region
+whither one of his correspondents and fellow-delvers into the occult had invited
+him.
+
+The next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania, and told of Ward's
+progress toward his destination. He was going to visit a Baron Ferenczy, whose
+estate lay in the mountains east of Rakus; and was to be addressed at Rakus in
+the care of that nobleman. Another card from Rakus a week later, saying that his
+host's carriage had met him and that he was leaving the village for the
+mountains, was his last message for a considerable time; indeed, he did reply to
+his parents' frequent letters until May, when he wrote to discourage the plan of
+his mother for a meeting in London, Paris, or Rome during the summer, when
+the elder Wards were planning to travel to Europe. His researches, he said, were
+such that he could not leave his present quarters; while the situation of Baron
+Ferenczy's castle did not favour visits. It was on a crag in the dark wooded
+mountains, and the region was so shunned by the country folk that normal
+people could not help feeling ill at ease. Moreover, the Baron was not a person
+likely to appeal to correct and conservative New England gentlefolk. His aspect
+and manners had idiosyncrasies, and his age was so great as to be disquieting. It
+would be better, Charles said, if his parents would wait for his return to
+Providence; which could scarcely be far distant.
+
+That return did not, however, take place until May 1926, when after a few
+heralding cards the young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on the
+
+
+
+
+Homeric and traversed the long miles to Providence by motor-coach, eagerly
+drinking in the green rolling hills, and fragrant, blossoming orchards, and the
+white steepled towns of vernal Connecticut; his first taste of ancient New
+England in nearly four years. When the coach crossed the Pawcatuck and
+entered Rhode Island amidst the faery goldenness of a late spring afternoon his
+heart beat with quickened force, and the entry to Providence along Reservoir and
+Elmwood Avenues was a breathless and wonderful thing despite the depths of
+forbidden lore to which he had delved. At the high square where Broad,
+Weybosset, and Empire Streets join, he saw before and below him in the fire of
+sunset the pleasant, remembered houses and domes and steeples of the old town;
+and his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down to the terminal behind
+the Biltmore, bringing into view the great dome and soft, roof-pierced greenery
+of the ancient hill across the river, and the tall colonial spire of the First Baptist
+Church limned pink in the magic evening against the fresh springtime verdure of
+its precipitous background.
+
+Old Providence! It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long,
+continuous history which had brought him into being, and which had drawn
+him back toward marvels and secrets whose boundaries no prophet might fix.
+Here lay the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as the case may be, for which all his
+years of travel and application had been preparing him. A taxicab whirled him
+through Post Office Square with its glimpse of the river, the old Market House,
+and the head of the bay, and up the steep curved slope of Waterman Street to
+Prospect, where the vast gleaming dome and sunset-flushed Ionic columns of the
+Christian Science Church beckoned northward. Then eight squares past the fine
+old estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint brick sidewalks so often
+trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little white overtaken farmhouse on
+the right, on the left the classic Adam porch and stately facade of the great brick
+house where he was born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come
+home.
+
+
+
+A school of alienists slightly less academic than Dr. Lyman's assign to Ward's
+European trip the beginning of his true madness. Admitting that he was sane
+when he started, they believe that his conduct upon returning implies a
+disastrous change. But even to this claim Dr. Willett refuses to concede. There
+was, he insists, something later; and the queerness of the youth at this stage he
+attributes to the practice of rituals learned abroad - odd enough things, to be
+sure, but by no means implying mental aberration on the part of their celebrant.
+Ward himself, though visibly aged and hardened, was still normal in his general
+reactions; and in several talks with Dr. Willett displayed a balance which no
+madman - even an incipient one - could feign continuously for long. What
+
+
+
+
+elicited the notion of insanity at this period were the sounds heard at all hours
+from Ward's attic laboratory, in which he kept himself most of the time. There
+were chantings and repetitions, and thunderous declamations in uncanny
+rhythms; and although these sounds were always in Ward's own voice, there
+was something in the quality of that voice, and in the accents of the formulae it
+pronounced, which could not by chill the blood of every hearer. It was noticed
+that Nig, the venerable and beloved black cat of the household, bristled and
+arched his back perceptibly when certain of the tones were heard.
+
+The odours occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise exceedingly
+strange. Sometimes they were very noxious, but more often they were aromatic,
+with a haunting, elusive quality which seemed to have the power of inducing
+fantastic images. People who smelled them had a tendency to glimpse
+momentary mirages of enormous vistas, with strange hills or endless avenues of
+sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching off into infinite distance. Ward did not
+resume his old-time rambles, but applied himself diligently to the strange books
+he had brought home, and to equally strange delvings within his quarters;
+explaining that European sources had greatly enlarged the possibilities of his
+work, and promising great revelations in the years to come. His older aspect
+increased to a startling degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his
+library; and Dr. Willett would often pause by the latter after a call, marvelling at
+the virtual identity, and reflecting that only the small pit above the picture's right
+eye now remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard from the living youth.
+These calls of Willett' s, undertaken at the request of teh senior Wards, were
+curious affairs. Ward at no time repulsed the doctor, but the latter saw that he
+could never reach the young man's inner psychology. Frequently he noted
+peculiar things about; little wax images of grotesque design on the shelves or
+tables, and the half-erased remnants of circles, triangles, and pentagrams in chalk
+or charcoal on the cleared central space of the large room. And always in the
+night those rhythms and incantations thundered, till it became very difficult to
+keep servants or suppress furtive talk of Charles's madness.
+
+In January, 1927, a peculiar incident occurred. One night about midnight, as
+Charles was chanting a ritual whose weird cadence echoed unpleasantly through
+the house below, there came a sudden gust of chill wind from the bay, and a
+faint, obscure trembling of the earth which everyone in the neighbourhood
+noted. At the same time the cat exhibited phenomenal traces of fright, while dogs
+bayed for as much as a mile around. This was the prelude to a sharp
+thunderstorm, anomalous for the season, which brought with it such a crash that
+Mr. and Mrs. Ward believed the house had been struck. They rushed upstairs to
+see what damage had been done, but Charles met them at the door to the attic;
+pale, resolute, and portentous, with an almost fearsome combination of triumph
+and seriousness on his face. He assured them that the house had not really been
+
+
+
+
+struck, and that the storm would soon be over. They paused, and looking
+through a window saw that he was indeed right; for the lightning flashed farther
+and farther off, whilst the trees ceased to bend in the strange frigid gust from the
+water. The thunder sank to a sort of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died
+away. Stars came out, and the stamp of triumph on Charles Ward's face
+crystallised into a very singular expression.
+
+For two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined than usual to
+his laboratory. He exhibited a curious interest in the weather, and made odd
+inquires about the date of the spring thawing of the ground. One night late in
+March he left the house after midnight, and did not return till almost morning;
+when his mother, being wakeful, heard a rumbling motor draw up to the
+carriage entrance. Muffled oaths could be distinguished, and Mrs. Ward, rising
+and going to the window, saw four dark figures removing a long, heavy box
+from a truck at Charles's direction and carrying it within by the side door. She
+heard laboured breathing and ponderous footfalls on the stairs, and finally a dull
+thumping in the attic; after which the footfalls descended again, and the four
+reappeared outside and drove off in their truck.
+
+The next day Charles resumed his strict attic seclusion, drawing down the dark
+shades of his laboratory windows and appearing to be working on some metal
+substance. He would open the door to no one, and steadfastly refused all
+proffered food. About noon a wrenching sound followed by a terrible cry and a
+fall were heard, but when Mrs. Ward rapped at the door her son at length
+answered faintly, and told her that nothing had gone amiss. The hideous and
+indescribable stench now welling out was absolutely harmless and unfortunately
+necessary. Solitude was the one prime essential, and he would appear later for
+dinner. That afternoon, after the conclusion of some odd hissing sounds which
+came from behind the locked portal, he did finally appear; wearing an extremely
+haggard aspect and forbidding anyone to enter the laboratory upon any pretext.
+This, indeed, proved the beginning of a new policy of secrecy; for never
+afterward was any other person permitted to visit either the mysterious garret
+workroom or the adjacent storeroom which he cleaned out, furnished roughly,
+and added to his inviolable private domain as a sleeping apartment. Here he
+lived, with books brought up from his library beneath, till the time he purchased
+the Pawtuxet bungalow and moved to it all his scientific effects.
+
+In the evening Charles secured the paper before the rest of the family and
+damaged part of it through an apparent accident. Later on Dr. Willett, having
+fixed the date from statements by various members of the household, looked up
+an intact copy at the Journal office and found that in the destroyed section the
+following small item had occurred:
+
+
+
+
+Nocturnal Diggers Surprised in North Burial Ground
+
+Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, this morning
+discovered a party of several men with a motor truck in the oldest part of the
+cemetery, but apparently frightened them off before they had accomplished
+whatever their object may have been.
+
+The discovery took place at about four o'clock, when Hart's attention was
+attracted by the sound of a motor outside his shelter. Investigating, he saw a
+large truck on the main drive several rods away; but could not reach it before the
+noise of his feet on the gravel had revealed his approach. The men hastily placed
+a large box in the truck and drove away toward the street before they could be
+overtaken; and since no known grave was disturbed. Hart believes that this box
+was an object which they wished to bury.
+
+The diggers must have been at work for a long while before detection, for Hart
+found an enormous hold dug at a considerable distance back from the roadway
+in the lot of Amasa Field, where most of the old stones have long ago
+disappeared. The hole, a place as large and deep as a grave, was empty; and did
+not coincide with any interment mentioned in the cemetery records.
+
+Sergt. Riley of the Second Station viewed the spot and gave the opinion that the
+hole was dug by bootleggers rather gruesomely and ingeniously seeking a safe
+cache for liquor in a place not likely to be disturbed. In reply to questions Hart
+said he though the escaping truck had headed up Rochambeau Avenue, though
+he could not be sure.
+
+During the next few days Charles Ward was seldom seen by his family. Having
+added sleeping quarters to his attic realm, he kept closely to himself there,
+ordering food brought to the door and not taking it in until after the servant had
+gone away. The droning of monotonous formulae and the chanting of bizarre
+rhythms recurred at intervals, while at other times occasional listeners could
+detect the sound of tinkling glass, hissing chemicals, running water, or roaring
+gas flames. Odours of the most unplaceable quality, wholly unlike any before
+noted, hung at times around the door; and the air of tension observable in the
+young recluse whenever he did venture briefly forth was such as to excite the
+keenest speculation. Once he made a hasty trip to the Athenaeum for a book he
+required, and again he hired a messenger to fetch him a highly obscure volume
+from Boston. Suspense was written portentously over the whole situation, and
+both the family and Dr. Willett confessed themselves wholly at a loss what to do
+or think about it.
+
+
+
+
+Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred. While nothing
+appeared to grow different in kind, there was certainly a very terrible difference
+in degree; and Dr. Willett somehow attaches great significance to the change. The
+day was Good Friday, a circumstance of which the servants made much, but
+which others quite naturally dismiss as an irrelevant coincidence. Late in the
+afternoon young Ward began repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud
+voice, at the same time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes
+escaped over the entire house. The formula was so plainly audible in the hall
+outside the locked door that Mrs. Ward could not help memorising it as she
+waited and listened anxiously, and later on she was able to write it down at Dr.
+Willett's request. It ran as follows, and experts have told Dr. Willett that its very
+close analogue can be found in the mystic writings of "Eliphas Levi", that cryptic
+soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and glimpsed the frightful
+vistas of the void beyond:
+
+'Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova,
+
+Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton On Agla Mathon,
+
+verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae,
+
+conventus sylvorum, antra gnomorum,
+
+daemonia Coeli God, Almonsin, Gibor, Jehosua,
+Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.'
+
+This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over
+all the neighbourhood a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in. The extent of this
+howling can be judged from the space it received in the papers the next day, but
+to those in the Ward household it was overshadowed by the odour which
+instantly followed it; a hideous, all-pervasive odour which non of them had ever
+smelt before or have ever smelt since. In the midst of this mephitic flood there
+came a very perceptible flash like that of lightning, which would have been
+blinding and impressive but for the daylight around; and then was heard the
+voice that no listener can ever forget because of its thunderous remoteness, its
+incredible depth, and its eldritch dissimilarity to Charles Ward's voice. It shook
+the house, and was clearly heard by at least two neighbours above the howling
+of the dogs. Mrs. Ward, who had been listening in despair outside her son's
+locked laboratory, shivered as she recognised its hellish imports; for Charles had
+told of its evil fame in dark books, and of the manner in which it had thundered,
+according to the Tenner letter, above the doomed Pawtuxet farmhouse on the
+night of Joseph Curwen's annihilation. There was no mistaking that nightmare
+phrase, for Charles had described it too vividly in the old days when he had
+talked frankly of his Curwen investigations. And yet it was only this fragment of
+an archaic and forgotten language: 'DIES MIES JESCHET BOENE DOESEF
+DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS.'
+
+
+
+
+Close upon this thundering there came a momentary darkening of the dayhght,
+though sunset was still an hour distant, and then a puff of added odour different
+from the first but equally unknown and intolerable. Charles was chanting again
+now and his mother could hear syllables that sounded like 'Yi nash Yog Sothoth
+he Igeb throdag' - ending in a 'Yah!' whose maniacal force mounted in an ear-
+splitting crescendo. A second later all previous memories were effaced by the
+wailing scream which burst out with frantic explosiveness and gradually
+changed form to a paroxysm of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Mrs. Ward, with
+the mingled fear and blind courage of maternity, advanced and knocked
+affrightedly at the concealing panels, but obtained no sign of recognition. She
+knocked again, but paused nervelessly as a second shriek arose, this one
+unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son, and sounding concurrently with
+the still bursting cachinnations of that other voice. Presently she fainted,
+although she is still unable to recall the precise and immediate cause. Memory
+sometimes makes merciful deletions.
+
+Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six; and not
+finding his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened servants that she was
+probably watching at Charles's door, from which the sounds had been far
+stranger than ever before. Mounting the stairs at once, he saw Mrs. Ward
+stretched out at full length on the floor of the corridor outside the laboratory; and
+realising that she had fainted, hastened to fetch a glass of water from a set bowl
+in a neighbouring alcove. Dashing the cold fluid in her face, he was heartened to
+observe an immediate response on her part, and was watching the bewildered
+opening of her eyes when a chill shot through him and threatened to reduce him
+to the very state from which she was emerging. For the seemingly silent
+laboratory was not as silent as it had appeared to be, but held the murmurs of a
+tense, muffled conversation in tones too low for comprehension, yet of a quality
+profoundly disturbing to the soul.
+
+It was not, of course, new for Charles to mutter formulae; but this muttering was
+definitely different. It was so palpably a dialogue, or imitation of a dialogue, with
+the regular alteration of inflections suggesting question and answer, statement
+and response. One voice was undisguisedly that of Charles, but the other had a
+depth and hoUowness which the youth's best powers of ceremonial mimicry had
+scarcely approached before. There was something hideous, blasphemous, and
+abnormal about it, and but for a cry from his recovering wife which cleared his
+mind by arousing his protective instincts it is not likely that Theodore Rowland
+Ward could have maintained for nearly a year more his old boast that he had
+never fainted. As it was, he seized his wife in his arms and bore her quickly
+downstairs before she could notice the voices which had so horribly disturbed
+him. Even so, however, he was not quick enough to escape catching something
+himself which caused him to stagger dangerously with his burden. For Mrs.
+
+
+
+
+Ward's cry had evidently been heard by others than he, and there had come in
+response to it from behind the locked door the first distinguishable words which
+that masked and terrible colloquy had yielded. They were merely an excited
+caution in Charles's own voice, but somehow their implications held a nameless
+fright for the father who overheard them. The phrase was just this: 'Sshh!-write!'
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Ward conferred at some length after dinner, and the former
+resolved to have a firm and serious talk with Charles that very night. No matter
+how important the object, such conduct could no longer be permitted; for these
+latest developments transcended every limit of sanity and formed a menace to
+the order and nervous well-being of the entire household. The youth must
+indeed have taken complete leave of his senses, since only downright madness
+could have prompted the wild screams and imaginary conversations in assumed
+voices which the present day had brought forth. All this must be stopped, or
+Mrs. Ward would be made ill and the keeping of servants become an
+impossibility.
+
+Mr. Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for Charles's
+laboratory. On the third floor, however, he paused at the sounds which he heard
+proceeding from the now disused library of his son. Books were apparently
+being flung about and papers wildly rustled, and upon stepping to the door Mr.
+Ward beheld the youth within, excitedly assembling a vast armful of literary
+matter of every size and shape. Charles's aspect was very drawn and haggard,
+and he dropped his entire load with a start at the sound of his father's voice. At
+the elder man's command he sat down, and for some time listened to the
+admonitions he had so long deserved. There was no scene. At the end of the
+lecture he agreed that his father was right, and that his noises, mutterings,
+incantations, and chemical odours were indeed inexcusable nuisances. He agreed
+to a policy of great quiet, though insisting on a prolongation of his extreme
+privacy. Much of his future work, he said, was in any case purely book research;
+and he could obtain quarters elsewhere for any such vocal rituals as might be
+necessary at a later stage. For the fright and fainting of his mother he expressed
+the keenest contrition, and explained that the conversation later heard was part
+of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a certain mental atmosphere. His
+use of abstruse technical terms somewhat bewildered Mr. Ward, but the parting
+impression was one of undeniable sanity and poise despite a mysterious tension
+of the utmost gravity. The interview was really quite inconclusive, and as
+Charles picked up his armful and left the room Mr. Ward hardly knew what to
+make of the entire business. It was as mysterious as the death of poor old Nig,
+whose stiffening form had been found an hour before in the basement, with
+staring eyes and fear-distorted mouth.
+
+
+
+
+Driven by some vague detective instinct, the bewildered parent now glanced
+curiously at the vacant shelves to see what his son had taken up to the attic. The
+youth's library was plainly and rigidly classified, so that one might tell at a
+glance the books or at least the kind of books which had been withdrawn. On
+this occasion Mr. Ward was astonished to find that nothing of the occult or the
+antiquarian, beyond what had been previously removed, was missing. These
+new withdrawals were all modern items; histories, scientific treatises,
+geographies, manuals of literature, philosophic works, and certain contemporary
+newspapers and magazines. It was a very curious shift from Charles Ward's
+recent run of reading, and the father paused in a growing vortex of perplexity
+and an engulfing sense of strangeness. The strangeness was a very poignant
+sensation, and almost clawed at his chest as he strove to see just what was wrong
+around him. Something was indeed wrong, and tangibly as well as spiritually so.
+Ever since he had been in this room he had known that something was amiss,
+and at last it dawned upon him what it was.
+
+On the north wall rose still the ancient carved overmantel from the house in
+Olney Court, but to the cracked and precariously restored oils of the large
+Curwen portrait disaster had come. Time and unequal heating had done their
+work at last, and at some time since the room's last cleaning the worst had
+happened. Peeling clear of the wood, curling tighter and tighter, and finally
+crumbling into small bits with what must have been malignly silent suddenness,
+the portrait of Joseph Curwen had resigned forever its staring surveillance of the
+youth it so strangely resembled, and now lay scattered on the floor as a thin
+coating of fine blue-grey dust.
+
+IV. A Mutation and a Madness
+
+
+
+In the week following that memorable Good Friday Charles Ward was seen more
+often than usual, and was continually carrying books between his library and the
+attic laboratory. His actions were quiet and rational, but he had a furtive, hunted
+look which his mother did not like, and developed an incredibly ravenous
+appetite as gauged by his demands upon the cook. Dr. Willett had been told of
+those Friday noises and happenings, and on the following Tuesday had a long
+conversation with the youth in the library where the picture stared no more. The
+interview was, as always, inconclusive; but Willett is still ready to swear that the
+youth was sane and himself at the time. He held out promises of an early
+revelation, and spoke of the need of securing a laboratory elsewhere. At the loss
+of the portrait he grieved singularly little considering his first enthusiasm over it,
+but seemed to find something of positive humour in its sudden crumbling.
+
+
+
+
+About the second week Charles began to be absent from the house for long
+periods, and one day when good old black Hannah came to help with the spring
+cleaning she mentioned his frequent visits to the old house in Olney Court,
+where he would come with a large valise and perform curious delvings in the
+cellar. He was always very liberal to her and to old Asa, but seemed more
+worried than he used to be; which grieved her very much, since she had watched
+him grow up from birth. Another report of his doings came from Pawtuxet,
+where some friends of the family saw him at a distance a surprising number of
+times. He seemed to haunt the resort and canoe-house of Rhodes-on-the-
+Pawtuxet, and subsequent inquiries by Dr. Willett at that place brought out the
+fact that his purpose was always to secure access to the rather hedged-in river-
+bank, along which he would walk toward the north, usually not reappearing for
+a very long while.
+
+Late in May came a momentary revival of ritualistic sounds in the attic
+laboratory which brought a stern reproof from Mr. Ward and a somewhat
+distracted promise of amendment from Charles. It occurred one morning, and
+seemed to form a resumption of the imaginary conversation noted on that
+turbulent Good Friday. The youth was arguing or remonstrating hotly with
+himself, for there suddenly burst forth a perfectly distinguishable series of
+clashing shouts in differentiated tones like alternate demands and denials which
+caused Mrs. Ward to run upstairs and listen at the door. She could hear no more
+than a fragment whose only plain words were 'must have it red for three
+months', and upon her knocking all sounds ceased at once. When Charles was
+later questioned by his father he said that there were certain conflicts of spheres
+of consciousness which only great skill could avoid, but which he would try to
+transfer to other realms.
+
+About the middle of June a queer nocturnal incident occurred. In the early
+evening there had been some noise and thumping in the laboratory upstairs, and
+Mr. Ward was on the point of investigating when it suddenly quieted down.
+That midnight, after the family had retired, the butler was nightlocking the front
+door when according to his statement Charles appeared somewhat blunderingly
+and uncertainly at the foot of the stairs with a large suitcase and made signs that
+he wished egress. The youth spoke no word, but the worthy Yorkshireman
+caught one sight of his fevered eyes and trembled causelessly. He opened the
+door and young Ward went out, but in the morning he presented his resignation
+to Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the glance Charles had
+fixed on him. It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an honest person,
+and he could not possibly stay another night. Mrs. Ward allowed the man to
+depart, but she did not value his statement highly. To fancy Charles in a savage
+state that night was quite ridiculous, for as long as she had remained awake she
+had heard faint sounds from the laboratory above; sounds as if of sobbing and
+
+
+
+
+pacing, and of a sighing which told only of despair's profoundest depths. Mrs.
+Ward had grown used to listening for sounds in the night, for the mystery of her
+son was fast driving all else from her mind.
+
+The next evening, much as on another evening nearly three months before,
+Charles Ward seized the newspaper very early and accidentally lost the main
+section. This matter was not recalled till later, when Dr. Willett began checking
+up loose ends and searching out missing links here and there. In the Journal
+office he found the section which Charles had lost, and marked two items as of
+possible significance. They were as follows:
+
+More Cemetery Delving
+
+It was this morning discovered by Robert Hart, night watchman at the North
+Burial Ground, that ghouls were again at work in the ancient portion of the
+cemetery. The grave of Ezra Weeden, who was born in 1740 and died in 1824
+according to his uprooted and savagely splintered slate headstone, was found
+excavated and rifled, the work being evidently done with a spade stolen from an
+adjacent tool-shed.
+
+Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of burial, all was
+gone except a few slivers of decayed wood. There were no wheel tracks, but the
+police have measured a single set of footprints which they found in the vicinity,
+and which indicate the boots of a man of refinement.
+
+Hart is inclined to link this incident with the digging discovered last March,
+when a party in a motor truck were frightened away after making a deep
+excavation; but Sergt. Riley of the Second Station discounts this theory and
+points to vital differences in the two cases. In March the digging had been in a
+spot where no grave was known; but this time a well-marked and cared-for
+grave had been rifled with every evidence of deliberate purpose, and with a
+conscious malignity expressed in the splintering of the slab which had been
+intact up to the day before.
+
+Members of the Weeden family, notified of the happening, expressed their
+astonishment and regret; and were wholly unable to think of any enemy who
+would care to violate the grave of their ancestor. Hazard Weeden of 598 Angell
+Street recalls a family legend according to which Ezra Weeden was involved in
+some very peculiar circumstances, not dishonourable to himself, shortly before
+the Revolution; but of any modern feud or mystery he is frankly ignorant.
+Inspector Cunningham has been assigned to the case, and hopes to uncover some
+valuable clues in the near future.
+
+
+
+
+Dogs Noisy in Pawtuxet
+
+Residents of Pawtuxet were aroused about 3 a.m. today by a phenomenal baying
+of dogs which seemed to centre near the river just north of Rhodes-on-the-
+Pawtuxet. The volume and quality of the howling were unusually odd,
+according to most who heart it; and Fred Lemdin, night watchman at Rhodes,
+declares it was mixed with something very like the shrieks of a man in mortal
+terror and agony. A sharp and very brief thunderstorm, which seemed to strike
+somewhere near the bank of the river, put an end to the disturbance. Strange and
+unpleasant odours, probably from the oil tanks along the bay, are popularly
+linked with this incident; and may have had their share in exciting the dogs.
+
+The aspect of Charles now became very haggard and hunted, and all agreed in
+retrospect that he may have wished at this period to make some statement or
+confession from which sheer terror withheld him. The morbid listening of his
+mother in the night brought out the fact that he made frequent sallies abroad
+under cover of darkness, and most of the more academic alienists unite at
+present in charging him with the revolting cases of vampirism which the press so
+sensationally reported about this time, but which have not yet been definitely
+traced to any known perpetrator. These cases, too recent and celebrated to need
+detailed mention, involved victims of every age and type and seemed to cluster
+around two distinct localities; the residential hill and the North End, near the
+Ward home, and the suburban districts across the Cranston line near Pawtuxet.
+Both late wayfarers and sleepers with open windows were attacked, and those
+who lived to tell the tale spoke unanimously of a lean, lithe, leaping monster
+with burning eyes which fastened its teeth in the throat or upper arm and feasted
+ravenously.
+
+Dr. Willett, who refuses to date the madness of Charles Ward as far back as even
+this, is cautious in attempting to explain these horrors. He has, he declares,
+certain theories of his own; and limits his positive statements to a peculiar kind
+of negation: 'I will not,' he says, 'state who or what I believe perpetrated these
+attacks and murders, but I will declare that Charles Ward was innocent of them. I
+have reason to be sure he was ignorant of the taste of blood, as indeed his
+continued anaemic decline and increasing pallor prove better than any verbal
+argument. Ward meddled with terrible things, but he has paid for it, and he was
+never a monster or a villain. As for now - I don't like to think. A change came,
+and I'm content to believe that the old Charles Ward died with it. His soul did,
+anyhow, for that mad flesh that vanished from Waite's hospital had another.'
+
+Willett speaks with authority, for he was often at the Ward home attending Mrs.
+Ward, whose nerves had begun to snap under the strain. Her nocturnal listening
+had bred some morbid hallucinations which she confided to the doctor with
+
+
+
+
+hesitancy, and which he ridiculed in talking to her, although they made him
+ponder deeply when alone. These delusions always concerning the faint sounds
+which she fancied she heard in the attic laboratory and bedroom, and
+emphasised the occurrence of muffled sighs and sobbings at the most impossible
+times. Early in July Willett ordered Mrs. Ward to Atlantic City for an indefinite
+recuperative sojourn, and cautioned both Mr. Ward and the haggard and elusive
+Charles to write her only cheering letters. It is probably to this enforced and
+reluctant escape that she owes her life and continued sanity.
+
+
+
+Not long after his mother's departure, Charles Ward began negotiating for the
+Pawtuxet bungalow. It was a squalid little wooden edifice with a concrete
+garage, perched high on the sparsely settled bank of the river slightly above
+Rhodes, but for some odd reason the youth would have nothing else. He gave
+the real-estate agencies no peace till one of them secured it for him at an
+exorbitant price from a somewhat reluctant owner, and as soon as it was vacant
+he took possession under cover of darkness,, transporting in a great closed van
+the entire contents of his attic laboratory, including the books both weird and
+modern which he had borrowed from his study. He had this van loaded in the
+black small hours, and his father recalls only a drowsy realisation of stifled oaths
+and stamping feet on the night the goods were taken away. After that Charles
+moved back to his own old quarters on the third floor, and never haunted the
+attic again.
+
+To the Pawtuxet bungalow Charles transferred all the secrecy with which he had
+surrounded his attic realm, save that he now appeared to have two sharers of his
+mysteries; a villainous-looking Portuguese half-caste from the South Main St.
+waterfront who acted as a servant, and a thin, scholarly stranger with dark
+glasses and a stubbly full beard of dyed aspect whose status was evidently that
+of a colleague. Neighbours vainly tried to engage these odd persons in
+conversation. The mulatto Gomes spoke very little English, and the bearded
+man, who gave his name as Dr. Allen, voluntarily followed his example. Ward
+himself tried to be more affable, but succeeded only in provoking curiousity with
+his rambling accounts of chemical research. Before long queer tales began to
+circulate regarding the all-night burning of lights; and somewhat later, after this
+burning had suddenly ceased, there rose still queerer tales of disproportionate
+orders of meat from the butcher's and of the muffled shouting, declamation,
+rhythmic chanting, and screaming supposed to come from some very cellar
+below the place. Most distinctly the new and strange household was bitterly
+disliked by the honest bourgeoisie of the vicinity, and it is not remarkable that
+dark hints were advanced connecting the hated establishment with the current
+epidemic of vampiristic attacks and murders; especially since the radius of that
+
+
+
+
+plague seemed now confined wholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent streets of
+Edgewood.
+
+Ward spent most of his time at the bungalow, but slept occasionally at home and
+was still reckoned a dweller beneath his father's roof. Twice he was absent from
+the city on week-long trips, whose destinations have not yet been discovered. He
+grew steadily paler and more emaciated even than before, and lacked some of his
+former assurance when repeating to Dr. Willett his old, old story of vital research
+and future revelations. Willett often waylaid him at his father's house, for the
+elder Ward was deeply worried and perplexed, and wished his son to get as
+much sound oversight as could be managed in the case of so secretive and
+independent an adult. The doctor still insists that the youth was sane even as late
+as this, and adduces many a conversation to prove his point.
+
+About September the vampirism declined, but in the following January almost
+became involved in serious trouble. For some time the nocturnal arrival and
+departure of motor trucks at the Pawtuxet bungalow had been commented upon,
+and at this juncture an unforeseen hitch exposed the nature of at least one item of
+their contents. In a lonely spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the
+frequent sordid waylaying of trucks by "hi-jackers" in quest of liquor shipments,
+but this time the robbers had been destined to receive the greater shock. For the
+long cases they seized proved upon opening to contain some exceedingly
+gruesome things; so gruesome, in fact, that the matter could not be kept quiet
+amongst the denizens of the underworld. The thieves had hastily buried what
+they discovered, but when the State Police got wind of the matter a careful search
+was made. A recently arrived vagrant, under promise of immunity from
+prosecution on any additional charge, at last consented to guide a party of
+troopers to the spot; and there was found in that hasty cache a very hideous and
+shameful thing. It would not be well for the national - or even the international -
+sense of decorum if the public were ever to know what was uncovered by that
+awestruck party. There was no mistaking it, even by those far from studious
+officers; and telegrams to Washington ensued with feverish rapidity.
+
+The cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow, and State
+and Federal officials at once paid him a very forceful and serious call. They
+found him pallid and worried with his two odd companions, and received from
+him what seemed to be a valid explanation and evidence of innocence. He had
+needed certain anatomical specimens as part of a programme of research whose
+depth and genuineness anyone who had known him in the last decade could
+prove, and had ordered the required kind and number from agencies which he
+had thought as reasonably legitimate as such things can be. Of the identity of the
+specimens he had known absolutely nothing, and was properly shocked when
+the inspectors hinted at the monstrous effect on public sentiment and national
+
+
+
+
+dignity which a knowledge of the matter would produce. In this statement he
+was firmly sustained by his bearded colleague Dr. Allen, whose oddly hollow
+voice carried even more conviction than his own nervous tones; so that in the
+end the officials took no action, but carefully set down the New York name and
+address which Ward gave them a basis for a search which came to nothing. It is
+only fair to add that the specimens were quickly and quietly restored to their
+proper places, and that the general public will never know of their blasphemous
+disturbance.
+
+On February 9, 1928, Dr. Willett received a letter from Charles Ward which he
+considers of extraordinary importance, and about which he has frequently
+quarrelled with Dr. Lyman. Lyman believes that this note contains positive proof
+of a well-developed case of dementia praecox, but Willett on the other hand
+regards it as the last perfectly sane utterance of the hapless youth. He calls
+especial attention to the normal character of the penmanship; which though
+shewing traces of shattered nerves, is nevertheless distinctly Ward's own. The
+text in full is as follows:
+
+100 Prospect St.
+
+Providence, R.I.,
+
+February 8, 1928.
+
+Dear Dr. Willett:-
+
+I feel that at last the time has come for me to make the disclosures which I have
+so long promised you, and for which you have pressed me so often. The patience
+you have shewn in waiting, and the confidence you have shewn in my mind and
+integrity, are things I shall never cease to appreciate.
+
+And now that I am ready to speak, I must own with humiliation that no triumph
+such as I dreamed of can ever by mine. Instead of triumph I have found terror,
+and my talk with you will not be a boast of victory but a plea for help and advice
+in saving both myself and the world from a horror beyond all human conception
+or calculation. You recall what those Fenner letters said of the old raiding party
+at Pawtuxet. That must all be done again, and quickly. Upon us depends more
+than can be put into words - all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate
+of the solar system and the universe. I have brought to light a monstrous
+abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the sake of all life
+and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again.
+
+I have left that Pawtuxet place forever, and we must extirpate everything
+existing there, alive or dead. I shall not go there again, and you must not believe
+it if you ever hear that I am there. I will tell you why I say this when I see you. I
+
+
+
+
+have come home for good, and wish you would call on me at the very first
+moment that you can spare five or six hours continuously to hear what I have to
+say. It will take that long - and believe me when I tell you that you never had a
+more genuine professional duty than this. My life and reason are the very least
+things which hang in the balance.
+
+I dare not tell my father, for he could not grasp the whole thing. But I have told
+him of my danger, and he has four men from a detective agency watching the
+house. I don't know how much good they can do, for they have against them
+forces which even you could scarcely envisage or acknowledge. So come quickly
+if you wish to see me alive and hear how you may help to save the cosmos from
+stark hell.
+
+Any time will do - I shall not be out of the house. Don't telephone ahead, for
+there is no telling who or what may try to intercept you. And let us pray to
+whatever gods there be that nothing may prevent this meeting.
+
+In utmost gravity and desperation,
+
+Charles Dexter Ward.
+
+P.S. Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.
+
+Dr. Willett received this note about 10:30 a.m., and immediately arranged to
+spare the whole late afternoon and evening for the momentous talk, letting it
+extend on into the night as long as might be necessary. He planned to arrive
+about four o'clock, and through all the intervening hours was so engulfed in
+every sort of wild speculation that most of his tasks were very mechanically
+performed. Maniacal as the letter would have sounded to a stranger, Willett had
+seen too much of Charles Ward's oddities to dismiss it as sheer raving. That
+something very subtle, ancient, and horrible was hovering about he felt quite
+sure, and the reference to Dr. Allen could almost be comprehended in view of
+what Pawtuxet gossip said of Ward's enigmatical colleague. Willett had never
+seen the man, but had heard much of his aspect and bearing, and could not but
+wonder what sort of eyes those much-discussed dark glasses might conceal.
+
+Promptly at four Dr. Willett presented himself at the Ward residence, but found
+to his annoyance that Charles had not adhered to his determination to remain
+indoors. The guards were there, but said that the young man seemed to have lost
+part of his timidity. He had that morning done much apparently frightened
+arguing and protesting over the telephone, one of the detectives said, replying to
+some unknown voice with phrases such as 'I am very tired and must rest a
+while', 'I can't receive anyone for some time', 'you'll have to excuse me', 'Please
+
+
+
+
+postpone decisive action till we can arrange some sort of compromise', or 'I am
+very sorry, but I must take a complete vacation from everything; I'll talk with
+you later.' Then, apparently gaining boldness through meditation, he had
+slipped out so quietly that no one had seen him depart or knew that he had gone
+until he returned about one o'clock and entered the house without a word. He
+had gone upstairs, where a bit of his fear must have surged back; for he was
+heard to cry out in a highly terrified fashion upon entering his library, afterward
+trailing off into a kind of choking gasp. When, however, the butler had gone to
+inquire what the trouble was, he had appeared at the door with a great show of
+boldness, and had silently gestured the man away in a manner that terrified him
+unaccountably. Then he had evidently done some rearranging of his shelves, for
+a great clattering and thumping and creaking ensued; after which he had
+reappeared and left at once. Willett inquired whether or not any message had
+been left, but was told that there was no none. The butler seemed queerly
+disturbed about something in Charles's appearance and manner, and asked
+solicitously if there was much hope for a cure of his disordered nerves.
+
+For almost two hours Dr. Willett waited vainly in Charles Ward's library,
+watching the dusty shelves with their wide gaps where books had been
+removed, and smiling grimly at the panelled overmantel on the north wall,
+whence a year before the suave features of old Joseph Curwen had looked mildly
+down. After a time the shadows began to gather, and the sunset cheer gave place
+to a vague growing terror which flew shadow-like before the night. Mr. Ward
+finally arrived, and shewed much surprise and anger at his son's absence after all
+the pains which had been taken to guard him. He had not known of Charles's
+appointment, and promised to notify Willett when the youth returned. In
+bidding the doctor goodnight he expressed his utter perplexity at his son's
+condition, and urged his caller to do all he could to restore the boy to normal
+poise. Willett was glad to escape from that library, for something frightful and
+unholy seemed to haunt it; as if the vanished picture had left behind a legacy of
+evil. He had never liked that picture; and even now, strong-nerved though he
+was, there lurked a quality in its vacant panel which made him feel an urgent
+need to get out into the pure air as soon as possible.
+
+
+
+The next morning Willett received a message from the senior Ward, saying that
+Charles was still absent. Mr. Ward mentioned that Dr. Allen had telephoned him
+to say that Charles would remain at Pawtuxet for some time, and that he must
+not be disturbed. This was necessary because Allen himself was suddenly called
+away for an indefinite period, leaving the researches in need of Charles's
+constant oversight. Charles sent his best wishes, and regretted any bother his
+abrupt change of plans might have caused. It listening to this message Mr. Ward
+
+
+
+
+heard Dr. Allen's voice for the first time, and it seemed to excite some vague and
+elusive memory which could not be actually placed, but which was disturbing to
+the point of tearfulness.
+
+Faced by these baffling and contradictory reports. Dr. Willett was frankly at a
+loss what to do. The frantic earnestness of Charles's note was not to be denied,
+yet what could one think of its writer's immediate violation of his own expressed
+policy? Young Ward had written that his delvings had become blasphemous and
+menacing, that they and his bearded colleague must be extirpated at any cost,
+and that he himself would never return to their final scene; yet according to latest
+advices he had forgotten all this and was back in the thick of the mystery.
+Common sense bade one leave the youth alone with his freakishness, yet some
+deeper instinct would not permit the impression of that frenzied letter to
+subside. Willett read it over again, and could not make its essence sound as
+empty and insane as both its bombastic verbiage and its lack of fulfilment would
+seem to imply. Its terror was too profound and real, and in conjunction with
+what the doctor already knew evoked too vivid hints of monstrosities from
+beyond time and space to permit of any cynical explanation. There were
+nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at
+them, one ought to stand prepared for any sort of action at any time.
+
+For over a week Dr. Willett pondered on the dilemma which seemed thrust upon
+him, and became more and more inclined to pay Charles a call at the Pawtuxet
+bungalow. No friend of the youth had ever ventured to storm this forbidden
+retreat, and even his father knew of its interior only from such descriptions as he
+chose to give; but Willett felt that some direct conversation with his patient was
+necessary. Mr. Ward had been receiving brief and non-committal typed notes
+from his son, and said that Mrs. Ward in her Atlantic City retirement had had no
+better word. So at length the doctor resolved to act; and despite a curious
+sensation inspired by old legends of Joseph Curwen, and by more recent
+revelations and warnings from Charles Ward, set boldly out for the bungalow on
+the bluff above the river.
+
+Willett had visited the spot before through sheer curiousity, though of course
+never entering the house or proclaiming his presence; hence knew exactly the
+route to take. Driving out Broad Street one early afternoon toward the end of
+February in his small motor, he thought oddly of the grim party which had taken
+that selfsame road a hundred and fifty-seven years before on a terrible errand
+which none might ever comprehend.
+
+The ride through the city's decaying fringe was short, and trim Edgewood and
+sleepy Pawtuxet presently spread out ahead. Willett turned to the right down
+Lockwood Street and drove his car as far along that rural road as he could, then
+
+
+
+
+alighted and walked north to where the bluff towered above the lovely bends of
+the river and the sweep of misty downlands beyond. Houses were still few here,
+and there was no mistaking the isolated bungalow with its concrete garage on a
+high point of land at his left. Stepping briskly up the neglected gravel walk he
+rapped at the door with a firm hand, and spoke without a tremor to the evil
+Portuguese mulatto who opened it to the width of a crack.
+
+He must, he said, see Charles Ward at once on vitally important business. No
+excuse would be accepted, and a repulse would mean only a full report of the
+matter to the elder Ward. The mulatto still hesitated, and pushed against the
+door when Willett attempted to open it; but the doctor merely raised his voice
+and renewed his demands. Then there came from the dark interior a husky
+whisper which somehow chilled the hearer through and through though he did
+not know why he feared it. 'Let him in, Tony,' it said, 'we may as well talk now
+as ever.' But disturbing as was the whisper, the greater fear was that which
+immediately followed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in sight - and the
+owner of those strange and resonant tones was seen to be no other than Charles
+Dexter Ward.
+
+The minuteness with which Dr. Willett recalled and recorded his conversation of
+that afternoon is due to the importance he assigns to this particular period. For at
+last he concedes a vital change in Charles Dexter Ward's mentality, and believes
+that the youth now spoke from a brain hopelessly alien to the brain whose
+growth he had watched for six and twenty years. Controversy with Dr. Lyman
+has compelled him to be very specific, and he definitely dates the madness of
+Charles Ward from the time the typewritten notes began to reach his parents.
+Those notes are not in Ward's normal style; not even in the style of that last
+frantic letter to Willett. Instead, they are strange and archaic, as if the snapping of
+the writer's mind had released a flood of tendencies and impressions picked up
+unconsciously through boyhood antiquarianism. There is an obvious effort to be
+modern, but the spirit and occasionally the language are those of the past.
+
+The past, too, was evident in Ward's every tone and gesture as he received the
+doctor in that shadowy bungalow. He bowed, motioned Willett to a seat, and
+began to speak abruptly in that strange whisper which he sought to explain at
+the very outset.
+
+'I am grown phthisical,' he began, 'from this cursed river air. You must excuse
+my speech. I suppose you are come from my father to see what ails me, and I
+hope you will say nothing to alarm him.'
+
+Willett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care, but studying even
+more closely the face of the speaker. Something, he felt, was wrong; and he
+
+
+
+
+thought of what the family had told him about the fright of that Yorkshire butler
+one night. He wished it were not so dark, but did not request that the blind be
+opened. Instead, he merely asked Ward why he had so belied the frantic note of
+little more than a week before.
+
+'I was coming to that,' the host replied. 'You must know, I am in a very bad state
+of nerves, and do and say queer things I cannot account for. As I have told you
+often, I am on the edge of great matters; and the bigness of them has a way of
+making me light-headed. Any man might well be frighted of what I have found,
+but I am not to be put off for long. I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at
+home; for having gone this far, my place is here. I am not well spoke of my
+prying neighbours, and perhaps I was led by weakness to believe myself what
+they say of me. There is no evil to any in what I do, so long as I do it rightly.
+Have the goodness to wait six months, and I'll shew you what will pay your
+patience well.'
+
+'You may as well know I have a way of learning old matters from things surer
+than books, and I'll leave you to judge the importance of what I can give to
+history, philosophy, and the arts by reason of the doors I have access to. My
+ancestor had all this when those witless peeping Toms came and murdered him.
+I now have it again, or am coming very imperfectly to have a part of it. This time
+nothing must happen, and least of all though any idiot fears of my own. Pray
+forget all I writ you. Sir, and have no fear of this place or any in it. Dr. Allen is a
+man of fine parts, and I own him an apology for anything ill I have said of him. I
+wish I had no need to spare him, but there were things he had to do elsewhere.
+His zeal is equal to mine in all those matters, and I suppose that when I feared
+the work I feared him too as my greatest helper in it.'
+
+Ward paused, and the doctor hardly knew what to say or think. He felt almost
+foolish in the face of this calm repudiation of the letter; and yet there clung to
+him the fact that while the present discourse was strange and alien and
+indubitably mad, the note itself had been tragic in its naturalness and likeness to
+the Charles Ward he knew. Willett now tried to turn the talk on early matters,
+and recall to the youth some past events which would restore a familiar mood;
+but in this process he obtained only the most grotesque results. It was the same
+with all the alienists later on. Important sections of Charles Ward's store of
+mental images, mainly those touching modern times and his own personal life,
+had been unaccountably expunged; whilst all the massed antiquarianism of his
+youth had welled up from some profound subconsciousness to engulf the
+contemporary and the individual. The youth's intimate knowledge of elder
+things was abnormal and unholy, and he tried his best to hide it. When Willett
+would mention some favourite object of his boyhood archaistic studies he often
+
+
+
+
+shed by pure accident such a hght as no normal mortal could conceivably be
+expected to possess, and the doctor shuddered as the glib allusion glided by.
+
+It was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriff's wig fell off
+as he leaned over at the play in Mr. Douglass's Histrionick Academy in King
+Street on the eleventh of February, 1762, which fell on a Thursday; or about how
+the actors cut the text of Steele's Conscious Lover so badly that one was almost
+glad the Baptist-ridden legislature closed the theatre a fortnight later. That
+Thomas Sabin's Boston coach was "damn'd uncomfortable" old letters may well
+have told; but what healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of
+Epenetus Olney's new signboard (the gaudy crown he set up after he took to
+calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the first few notes of
+the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?
+
+Ward, however, would not be quizzed long in this vein. Modern and personal
+topics he waved aside quite summarily, whilst regarding antique affairs he soon
+shewed the plainest boredom. What he wished clearly enough was only to
+satisfy his visitor enough to make him depart without the intention of returning.
+To this end he offered to shew Willett the entire house, and at once proceeded to
+lead the doctor through every room from cellar to attic. Willett looked sharply,
+but noted that the visible books were far too few and trivial to have ever filled
+the wide gaps on Ward's shelves at home, and that the meagre so-called
+"laboratory" was the flimsiest sort of a blind. Clearly, there were a library and a
+laboratory elsewhere; but just where, it was impossible to say. Essentially
+defeated in his quest for something he could not name, Willett returned to town
+before evening and told the senior Ward everything which had occurred. They
+agreed that the youth must be definitely out of his mind, but decided that
+nothing drastic need be done just then. Above all, Mrs. Ward must be kept in as
+complete an ignorance as her son's own strange typed notes would permit.
+
+Mr. Ward now determined to call in person upon his son, making it wholly a
+surprise visit. Dr. Willett took him in his car one evening, guiding him to within
+sight of the bungalow and waiting patiently for his return. The session was a
+long one, and the father emerged in a very saddened and perplexed state. His
+reception had developed much like Willett's, save that Charles had been an
+excessively long time in appearing after the visitor had forced his way into the
+hall and sent the Portuguese away with an imperative demand; and in the
+bearing of the altered son there was no trace of filial affection. The lights had
+been dim, yet even so the youth had complained that they dazzled him
+outrageously. He had not spoken out loud at all, averring that his throat was in
+very poor condition; but in his hoarse whisper there was a quality so vaguely
+disturbing that Mr. Ward could not banish it from his mind.
+
+
+
+
+Now definitely leagued together to do all they could toward the youth's mental
+salvation, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett set about collecting every scrap of data
+which the case might afford. Pawtuxet gossip was the first item they studied, and
+this was relatively easy to glean since both had friends in that region. Dr. Willett
+obtained the most rumours because people talked more frankly to him than to a
+parent of the central figure, and from all he heard he could tell that young
+Ward's life had become indeed a strange one. Common tongues would not
+dissociate his household from the vampirism of the previous summer, while the
+nocturnal comings and goings of the motor trucks provided their share of dark
+speculations. Local tradesmen spoke of the queerness of the orders brought them
+by the evil-looking mulatto, and in particular of the inordinate amounts of mean
+and fresh blood secured from the two butcher shops in the immediate
+neighbourhood. For a household of only three, these quantities were quite
+absurd.
+
+Then there was the matter of the sounds beneath the earth. Reports of these
+things were harder to point down, but all the vague hints tallied in certain basic
+essentials. Noises of a ritual nature positively existed, and at times when the
+bungalow was dark. They might, of course, have come from the known cellar;
+but rumour insisted that there were deeper and more spreading crypts. Recalling
+the ancient tales of Joseph Curwen's catacombs, and assuming for granted that
+the present bungalow had been selected because of its situation on the old
+Curwen site as revealed in one of another of the documents found behind the
+picture, Willett and Mr. Ward gave this phase of the gossip much attention; and
+searched many times without success for the door in the river-bank which old
+manuscripts mentioned. As to popular opinions of the bungalow's various
+inhabitants, it was soon plain that the Brava Portuguese was loathed, the
+bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen feared, and the pallid young scholar disliked to
+a profound degree. During the last week or two Ward had obviously changed
+much, abandoning his attempts at affability and speaking only in hoarse but
+oddly repellent whispers on the few occasions that he ventured forth.
+
+Such were the shreds and fragments gathered here and there; and over these Mr.
+Ward and Dr. Willett held many long and serious conferences. They strove to
+exercise deduction, induction, and constructive imagination to their utmost
+extent; and to correlate every known fact of Charles's later life, including the
+frantic letter which the doctor now shewed the father, with the meagre
+documentary evidence available concerning old Joseph Curwen. They would
+have given much for a glimpse of the papers Charles had found, for very clearly
+the key to the youth's madness lay in what he had learned of the ancient wizard
+and his doings.
+
+
+
+
+And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr. Ward's or Dr. Willett's that the next
+move in this singular case proceeded. The father and the physician, rebuffed and
+confused by a shadow too shapeless and intangible to combat, had rested
+uneasily on their oars while the typed notes of young Ward to his parents grew
+fewer and fewer. Then came the first of the month with its customary financial
+adjustments, and the clerks at certain banks began a peculiar shaking of heads
+and telephoning from one to the other. Officials who knew Charles Ward by
+sight went down to the bungalow to ask why every cheque of his appearing at
+this juncture was a clumsy forgery, and were reassured less than they ought to
+have been when the youth hoarsely explained that he hand had lately been so
+much affected by a nervous shock as to make normal writing impossible. He
+could, he said, from no written characters at all except with great difficulty; and
+could prove it by the fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters,
+even those to his father and mother, who would bear out the assertion.
+
+What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this circumstance alone,
+for that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally suspicious, nor even the
+Pawtuxet gossip, of which one or two of them had caught echoes. It was the
+muddled discourse of the young man which nonplussed them, implying as it did
+a virtually total loss of memory concerning important monetary matters which
+he had had at his fingertips only a month or two before. Something was wrong;
+for despite the apparent coherence and rationality of his speech, there could be
+no normal reason for this ill-concealed blankness on vital points. Moreover,
+although none of these men knew Ward well, they could not help observing the
+change in his language and manner. They had heard he was an antiquarian, but
+even the most hopeless antiquarians do not make daily use of obsolete
+phraseology and gestures. Altogether, this combination of hoarseness, palsied
+hands, bad memory, and altered speech and bearing must represent some
+disturbance or malady of genuine gravity, which no doubt formed the basis of
+the prevailing odd rumours; and after their departure the party of officials
+decided that a talk with the senior Ward was imperative.
+
+So on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious conference in Mr.
+Ward's office, after which the utterly bewildered father summoned Dr. Willett in
+a kind of helpless resignation. Willett looked over the strained and awkward
+signatures of the cheque, and compared them in his mind with the penmanship
+of that last frantic note. Certainly, the change was radical and profound, and yet
+there was something damnably familiar about the new writing. It had crabbed
+and archaic tendencies of a very curious sort, and seemed to result from a type of
+stroke utterly different from that which the youth had always used. It was
+strange - but where had he seen it before? On the whole, it was obvious that
+Charles was insane. Of that there could be no doubt. And since it appeared
+unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal with the outside
+
+
+
+
+world much longer, something must quickly be done toward his oversight and
+possible cure. It was then that the alienists were called in, Drs. Peck and Waite of
+Providence and Dr. Lyman of Boston, to whom Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett gave
+the most exhaustive possible history of the case, and who conferred at length in
+the now unused library of their young patient, examining what books and
+papers of his were left in order to gain some further notion of his habitual mental
+cast. After scanning this material and examining the ominous note to Willett they
+all agreed that Charles Ward's studies had been enough to unseat or at least to
+warp any ordinary intellect, and wished most heartily that they could see his
+more intimate volumes and documents; but this latter they knew they could do,
+if at all, only after a scene at the bungalow itself. Willett now reviewed the whole
+case with febrile energy; it being at this time that he obtained the statements of
+the workmen who had seen Charles find the Curwen documents, and that he
+collated the incidents of the destroyed newspaper items, looking up the latter at
+the Journal office.
+
+On Thursday, the eighth of March, Drs. Willett, Peck, Lyman, and Waite,
+accompanied by Mr. Ward, paid the youth their momentous call; making no
+concealment of their object and questioning the now acknowledged patient with
+extreme minuteness. Charles, although he was inordinately long in answering
+the summons and was still redolent of strange and noxious laboratory odours
+when he did finally make his agitated appearance, proved a far from recalcitrant
+subject; and admitted freely that his memory and balance had suffered
+somewhat from close application to abstruse studies. He offered no resistance
+when his removal to other quarters was insisted upon; and seemed, indeed, to
+display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere memory. His conduct
+would have sent his interviewers away in bafflement had not the persistently
+archaic trend of his speech and unmistakable replacement of modern by ancient
+ideas in his consciousness marked him out as one definitely removed from the
+normal. Of his work he would say no more to the group of doctors than he had
+formerly said to his family and to Dr. Willett, and his frantic note of the previous
+month he dismissed as mere nerves and hysteria. He insisted that this shadowy
+bungalow possessed no library possessed no library or laboratory beyond the
+visible ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from the house of
+such odours as now saturated all his clothing. Neighbourhood gossip he
+attributed to nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled curiousity. Of
+the whereabouts of Dr. Allen he said he did not feel at liberty to speak definitely,
+but assured his inquisitors that the bearded and spectacled man would return
+when needed. In paying off the stolid Brava who resisted all questioning by the
+visitors, and in closing the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted
+secrets. Ward shewed no signs of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to
+pause as though listening for something very faint. He was apparently animated
+by a calmly philosophic resignation, as if he removal were the merest transient
+
+
+
+
+incident which would cause the least trouble if facilitated and disposed of once
+and for all. It was clear that he trusted to his obviously unimpaired keenness of
+absolute mentality to overcome all the embarrassments into which his twisted
+memory, his lost voice and handwriting, and his secretive and eccentric
+behaviour had led him. His mother, it was agreed, was not to be told of the
+change; his father supplying typed notes in his name. Ward was taken to the
+restfuUy and picturesquely situated private hospital maintained by Dr. Waite on
+Conanicut Island in the bay, and subjected to the closest scrutiny and
+questioning by all the physicians connected with the case. It was then that the
+physical oddities were noticed; the slackened metabolism, the altered skin, and
+the disproportionate neural reactions. Dr. Willett was the most perturbed of the
+various examiners, for he had attended Ward all his life and could appreciate
+with terrible keenness the extent of his physical disorganisation. Even the
+familiar olive mark on his hip was gone, while on his chest was a great black
+mole or cicatrice which had never been there before, and which made Willett
+wonder whether the youth had ever submitted to any of the witch markings
+reputed to be inflicted at certain unwholesome nocturnal meetings in wild and
+lonely places. The doctor could not keep his mind off a certain transcribed witch-
+trial record from Salem which Charles had shewn him in the old non-secretive
+days, and which read: 'Mr. G. B. on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon
+Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C, Susan P., Mehitable
+C, and Deborah B.' Ward's face, too, troubled him horribly, till at length he
+suddenly discovered why he was horrified. For above the young man's right eye
+was something which he had never previously noticed - a small scar or pit
+precisely like that in the crumbled painting of old Joseph Curwen, and perhaps
+attesting some hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both had submitted at a
+certain stage of their occult careers.
+
+While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very strict
+watch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr. Allen, which Mr.
+Ward had ordered delivered at the family home. Willett had predicted that very
+little would be found, since any communications of a vital nature would
+probably have been exchanged by messenger; but in the latter part of March
+there did come a letter from Prague for Dr. Allen which gave both the doctor and
+the father deep thought. It was in a very crabbed and archaic hand; and though
+clearly not the effort of a foreigner, shewed almost as singular a departure from
+modern English as the speech of young Ward himself. It read:
+
+Kleinstrasse 11,
+
+Altstadt, Prague,
+
+11th Feby. 1928.
+
+Brother in Almonsin-Metraton:-
+
+
+
+
+I this day receiv'd yr mention of what came up from the Sahes I sent you. It was
+wrong, and meanes clearly that ye Headstones had been chang'd when Barnabas
+gott me the Specimen. It is often so, as you must be sensible of from the Thing
+you gott from ye Kings Chapell ground in 1769 and what H. gott from Olde
+Bury'g Point in 1690, that was like to ende him. I gott such a Thing in Aegypt 7b
+yeares gone, from the which came that Scar ye Boy saw on me here in 1924. As I
+told you longe ago, do not calle up That which you can not put downe; either
+from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres beyond. Have ye Wordes for laying at all
+times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you
+have. Stones are all chang'd now in Nine groundes out of 10. You are never sure
+till you question. I this day heard from H., who has had Trouble with the
+Soldiers. He is like to be sorry Transylvania is pass't from Hungary to Roumania,
+and wou'd change his Seat if the Castel weren't so fulle of What we Knowe. But
+of this he hath doubtless writ you. In my next Send'g there will be Somewhat
+from a Hill tomb from ye East that will delight you greatly. Meanwhile forget not
+I am desirous of B. F. if you can possibly get him for me. You know G. in Philada.
+better than I. Have him upp firste if you will, but doe not use him soe hard he
+will be Difficult, for I must speake to him in ye End.
+
+Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin
+
+Simon O.
+
+To Mr. J. C. in
+
+Providence.
+
+Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent bit of
+unrelieved insanity. Only by degrees did they absorb what it seemed to imply.
+So the absent Dr. Allen, and not Charles Ward, had come to be the leading spirit
+at Pawtuxet? That must explain the wild reference and denunciation in the
+youth's last frantic letter. And what of this addressing of the bearded and
+spectacled stranger as "Mr. J. C"? There was no escaping the inference, but there
+are limits to possible monstrosity. Who was "Simon O."; the old man Ward had
+visited in Prague four years previously? Perhaps, but in the centuries behind
+there had been another Simon O. - Simon Orne, alias Jedediah, of Salem, who
+vanished in 1771, and whose peculiar handwriting Dr. Willett now unmistakably
+recognised from the photostatic copies of the Orne formulae which Charles had
+once shown him. What horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and
+contraventions of Nature, had come back after a century and a half to harass Old
+Providence with her clustered spires and domes?
+
+The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or think, went to
+see Charles at the hospital and questioned him as delicately as they could about
+Dr. Allen, about the Prague visit, and about what he had learned of Simon or
+
+
+
+
+Jedediah Orne of Salem. To all these enquiries the youth was politely non-
+committal, merely barking in his hoarse whisper that he had found Dr. Allen to
+have a remarkable spiritual rapport with certain souls from the past, and that
+any correspondent the bearded man might have in Prague would probably be
+similarly gifted. When they left, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett realised to their
+chagrin that they had really been the ones under catechism; and that without
+imparting anything vital himself, the confined youth had adroitly pumped them
+of everything the Prague letter had contained.
+
+Drs. Peck, Waite, and Lyman were not inclined to attach much importance to the
+strange correspondence of young Ward's companion; for they knew the
+tendency of kindred eccentrics and monomaniacs to band together, and believed
+that Charles or Allen had merely unearthed an expatriated counterpart - perhaps
+one who had seen Orne's handwriting and copied it in an attempt to pose as the
+bygone character's reincarnation. Allen himself was perhaps a similar case, and
+may have persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead
+Curwen. Such things had been known before, and on the same basis the hard-
+headed doctors disposed of Willett's growing disquiet about Charles Ward's
+present handwriting, as studied from unpremeditated specimens obtained by
+various ruses. Willett thought he had placed its odd familiarity at last, and that
+what it vaguely resembled was the bygone penmanship of old Joseph Curwen
+himself; but this the other physicians regarded as a phase of imitativeness only to
+be expected in a mania of this sort, and refused to grant it any importance either
+favourable or unfavourable. Recognising this prosaic attitude in his colleagues,
+Willett advised Mr. Ward to keep to himself the letter which arrived for Dr. Allen
+on the second of April from Rakus, Transylvania, in a handwriting so intensely
+and fundamentally like that of the Hutchinson cipher that both father and
+physician paused in awe before breaking the seal. This read as follows:
+
+Castle Ferenczy
+
+7 March 1928.
+
+Dear C.:-
+
+Hadd a Squad of 20 Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk say. Must
+digg deeper and have less Hearde. These Roumanians plague me damnably,
+being officious and particular where you cou'd buy a Magyar off with a Drinke
+and Food.
+
+Last monthe M. got me ye Sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis
+where He whome I call'd up say'd it wou'd be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes with
+What was therein inhum'd. It will go to S. O. in Prague directly, and thence to
+you. It is stubborn but you know ye Way with Such.
+
+
+
+
+You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before; for there was no Neede to
+keep the Guards in Shape and eat'g off their Heads, and it made Much to be
+founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle knowe. You can now move and
+worke elsewhere with no Kill'g Trouble if needful, tho' I hope no Thing will soon
+force you to so Bothersome a Course.
+
+I rejoice that you traffick not so much with Those Outside; for there was ever a
+Mortall Peril in it, and you are sensible what it did when you ask'd Protection of
+One not dispos'd to give it.
+
+You excel me in gett'g ye Formulae so another may saye them with Success, but
+Borellus fancy'd it wou'd be so if just ye right Wordes were hadd. Does ye Boy
+use 'em often? I regret that he growes squeamish, as I fear'd he wou'd when I
+hadde him here nigh 15 Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how to deal with
+him. You can't saye him down with ye Formula, for that will Worke only upon
+such as ye other Formula hath call'd up from Saltes; but you still have strong
+Handes and Knife and Pistol, and Graves are not harde to digg, nor Acids loth to
+burne.
+
+O. sayes you have promis'd him B. F. I must have him after. B. goes to you soone,
+and may he give you what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis.
+Imploy care in what you calle up, and beware of ye Boy.
+
+It will be ripe in a yeare's time to have up ye Legions from Underneath, and then
+there are no Boundes to what shal be oures. Have Confidence in what I saye, for
+you knowe O. and I have hadd these 150 yeares more than you to consulte these
+Matters in.
+
+Nephreu - Ka nai Hadoth
+
+Edw. H.
+
+For J Curwen, Esq.
+
+Providence.
+
+But if Willett and Mr. Ward refrained from shewing this letter to the alienists,
+they did not refrain from acting upon it themselves. No amount of learned
+sophistry could controvert the fact that the strangely bearded and spectacled Dr.
+Allen, of whom Charles's frantic letter had spoken as such a monstrous menace,
+was in close and sinister correspondence with two inexplicable creatures whom
+Ward had visited in his travels and who plainly claimed to be survivals or
+avatars of Curwen's old Salem colleagues; that he was regarding himself as the
+reincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he entertained - or was at least advised
+to entertain - murderous designs against a "boy" who could scarcely be other
+
+
+
+
+than Charles Ward. There was organised horror afoot; and no matter who had
+started it, the missing Allen was by this time at the bottom of it. Therefore,
+thanking heaven that Charles was now safe in the hospital, Mr. Ward lost no
+time in engaging detectives to learn all they could of the cryptic, bearded doctor;
+finding whence he had come and what Pawtuxet knew of him, and if possible
+discovering his present whereabouts. Supplying the men with one of the
+bungalow keys which Charles yielded up, he urged them to explore Allen's
+vacant room which had been identified when the patient's belongings had been
+packed; obtaining what clues they could from any effects he might have left
+about. Mr. Ward talked with the detectives in his son's old library, and they felt a
+marked relief when they left it at last; for there seemed to hover about the place a
+vague aura of evil. Perhaps it was what they had heard of the infamous old
+wizard whose picture had once stared from the panelled overmantel, and
+perhaps it was something different and irrelevant; but in any case they all half
+sensed an intangible miasma which centred in that carven vestige of an older
+dwelling and which at times almost rose to the intensity of a material emanation.
+
+V. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm
+
+
+
+And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its indelible
+mark of fear on the soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and has added a decade to
+the visible age of one whose youth was even then far behind. Dr. Willett had
+conferred at length with Mr. Ward, and had come to an agreement with him on
+several points which both felt the alienists would ridicule. There was, they
+conceded, a terrible movement alive in the world, whose direct connexion with a
+necromancy even older than the Salem witchcraft could not be doubted. That at
+least two living men - and one other of whom they dared not think - were in
+absolute possession of minds or personalities which had functioned as early as
+1690 or before was likewise almost unassailably proved even in the face of all
+known natural laws. What these horrible creatures - and Charles Ward as well -
+were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every
+bit of light both old and new which had filtered in upon the case. They were
+robbing the tombs of all the ages, including those of the world's wisest and
+greatest men, in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of
+the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them.
+
+A hideous traffic was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby
+illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys
+swapping books; and from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was
+anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever
+seen concentred in one man or group. They had found unholy ways to keep their
+
+
+
+
+brains alive, either in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently
+achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered
+together. There had, it seems, been some truth in chimerical old Borellus when he
+wrote of preparing from even the most antique remains certain "Essential Saltes"
+from which the shade of a long-dead living thing might be raised up. There was
+a formula for evoking such a shade, and another for putting it down; and it had
+now been so perfected that it could be taught successfully. One must be careful
+about evocations, for the markers of old graves are not always accurate.
+
+Willett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to conclusion.
+Things - presences or voices of some sort - could be drawn down from unknown
+places as well as from the grave, and in this process also one must be careful.
+Joseph Curwen had indubitably evoked many forbidden things, and as for
+Charles - what might one think of him? What forces "outside the spheres" had
+reached him from Joseph Curwen's day and turned his mind on forgotten
+things? He had been led to find certain directions, and he had used them. He had
+talked with the man of horror in Prague and stayed long with the creature in the
+mountains of Transylvania. And he must have found the grave of Joseph
+Curwen at last. That newspaper item and what his mother had heard in the night
+were too significant to overlook. Then he had summoned something, and it must
+have come. That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday, and those different tones in
+the locked attic laboratory. What were they like, with their depth and
+hoUowness? Was there not here some awful foreshadowing of the dreaded
+stranger Dr. Allen with his spectral bass? Yes, that was what Mr. Ward had felt
+with vague horror in his single talk with the man - if man it were - over the
+telephone!
+
+What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence, had come
+to answer Charles Ward's secret rites behind that locked door? Those voices
+heard in argument - "must have it red for three months" - Good God! Was not
+that just before the vampirism broke out? The rifling of Ezra Weeden's ancient
+grave, and the cries later at Pawtuxet - whose mind had planned the vengeance
+and rediscovered the shunned seat of elder blasphemies? And then the
+bungalow and the bearded stranger, and the gossip, and the fear. The final
+madness of Charles neither father nor doctor could attempt to explain, but they
+did feel sure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again and was
+following its ancient morbidities. Was daemoniac possession in truth a
+possibility? Allen had something to do with it, and the detectives must find out
+more about one whose existence menaced the young man's life. In the meantime,
+since the existence of some vast crypt beneath the bungalow seemed virtually
+beyond dispute, some effort must be made to find it. Willett and Mr. Ward,
+conscious of the sceptical attitude of the alienists, resolved during their final
+conference to undertake a joint secret exploration of unparalleled thoroughness;
+
+
+
+
+and agreed to meet at the bungalow on the following morning with valises and
+with certain tools and accessories suited to architectural search and underground
+exploration.
+
+The morning of April 6th dawned clear, and both explorers were at the
+bungalow by ten o'clock. Mr. Ward had the key, and an entry and cursory
+survey were made. From the disordered condition of Dr. Allen's room it was
+obvious that the detectives had been there before, and the later searchers hoped
+that they had found some clue which might prove of value. Of course the main
+business lay in the cellar; so thither they descended without much delay, again
+making the circuit which each had vainly made before in the presence of the mad
+young owner. For a time everything seemed baffling, each inch of the earthen
+floor and stone walls having so solid and innocuous an aspect that the thought of
+a yearning aperture was scarcely to be entertained. Willett reflected that since the
+original cellar was dug without knowledge of any catacombs beneath, the
+beginning of the passage would represent the strictly modern delving of young
+Ward and his associates, where they had probed for the ancient vaults whose
+rumour could have reached them by no wholesome means.
+
+The doctor tried to put himself in Charles's place to see how a delver would be
+likely to start, but could not gain much inspiration from this method. Then he
+decided on elimination as a policy, and went carefully over the whole
+subterranean surface both vertical and horizontal, trying to account for every
+inch separately. He was soon substantially narrowed down, and at last had
+nothing left but the small platform before the washtubs, which he tried once
+before in vain. Now experimenting in every possible way, and exerting a double
+strength, he finally found that the top did indeed turn and slide horizontally on a
+corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trim concrete surface with an iron manhole, to
+which Mr. Ward at once rushed with excited zeal. The cover was not hard to lift,
+and the father had quite removed it when Willett noticed the queerness of his
+aspect. He was swaying and nodding dizzily, and in the gust of noxious air
+which swept up from the black pit beneath the doctor soon recognised ample
+cause.
+
+In a moment Dr. Willett had his fainting companion on the floor above and was
+reviving him with cold water. Mr. Ward responded feebly, but it could be seen
+that the mephitic blast from the crypt had in some way gravely sickened him.
+Wishing to take no chances, Willett hastened out to Broad Street for a taxicab and
+had soon dispatched the sufferer home despite his weak-voiced protests; after
+which he produced an electric torch, covered his nostrils with a band of sterile
+gauze, and descended once more to peer into the new-found depths. The foul air
+had now slightly abated, and Willett was able to send a beam of light down the
+Stygian hold. For about ten feet, he saw, it was a sheer cylindrical drop with
+
+
+
+
+concrete walls and an iron ladder; after which the hole appeared to strike a flight
+of old stone steps which must originally have emerged to earth somewhat
+southwest of the present building.
+
+
+
+Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old Curwen legends
+kept him from climbing down alone into that malodorous gulf. He could not
+help thinking of what Like Fenner had reported on that last monstrous night.
+Then duty asserted itself and he made the plunge, carrying a great valise for the
+removal of whatever papers might prove of supreme importance. Slowly, as
+befitted one of his years, he descended the ladder and reached the slimy steps
+below. This was ancient masonry, his torch told him; and upon the dripping
+walls he saw the unwholesome moss of centuries. Down, down, ran the steps;
+not spirally, but in three abrupt turns; and with such narrowness that two men
+could have passed only with difficulty. He had counted about thirty when a
+sound reached him very faintly; and after that he did not feel disposed to count
+any more.
+
+It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature
+which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a
+hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to
+miss its quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones. Was it for
+this that Ward had seemed to listen on that day he was removed? It was the most
+shocking thing that Willett had ever heard, and it continued from no determinate
+point as the doctor reached the bottom of the steps and cast his torchlight around
+on lofty corridor walls surmounted by Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by
+numberless black archways. The hall in which he stood was perhaps fourteen
+feet high in the middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad. Its pavement
+was of large chipped flagstone, and its walls and roof were of dressed masonry.
+Its length he could not imagine, for it stretched ahead indefinitely into the
+blackness. Of the archways, some had doors of the old six-panelled colonial type,
+whilst others had none.
+
+Overcoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling, Willett began to
+explore these archways one by one; finding beyond them rooms with groined
+stone ceilings, each of medium size and apparently of bizarre used. Most of them
+had fireplaces, the upper courses of whose chimneys would have formed an
+interesting study in engineering. Never before or since had he seen such
+instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand
+through the burying dust and cobwebs of a century and a half, in many cases
+evidently shattered as if by the ancient raiders. For many of the chambers
+seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet, and must have represented the
+
+
+
+
+earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwen's experimentation. Finally
+there came a room of obvious modernity, or at least of recent occupancy. There
+were oil heaters, bookshelves and tables, chairs and cabinets, and a desk piled
+high with papers of varying antiquity and contemporaneousness. Candlesticks
+and oil lamps stood about in several places; and finding a match-safe handy,
+Willett lighted such as were ready for use.
+
+In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less than the
+latest study or library of Charles Ward. Of the books the doctor had seen many
+before, and a good part of the furniture had plainly come from the Prospect
+Street mansion. Here and there was a piece well known to Willett, and the sense
+of familiarity became so great that he half forgot the noisomness and the wailing,
+both of which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of the steps. His
+first duty, as planned long ahead, was to find and seize any papers which might
+seem of vital importance; especially those portentous documents found by
+Charles so long ago behind the picture in Olney Court. As he search he perceived
+how stupendous a task the final unravelling would be; for file on file was stuffed
+with papers in curious hands and bearing curious designs, so that months or
+even years might be needed for a thorough deciphering and editing. Once he
+found three large packets of letters with Prague and Rakus postmarks, and in
+writing clearly recognisable as Orne's and Hutchinson's; all of which he took
+with him as part of the bundle to be removed in his valise.
+
+At last, in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home, Willett
+found the batch of old Curwen papers; recognising them from the reluctant
+glimpse Charles had granted him so many years ago. The youth had evidently
+kept them together very much as they had been when first he found them, since
+all the titles recalled by the workmen were present except the papers addressed
+to Orne and Hutchinson, and the cipher with its key. Willett placed the entire lot
+in his valise and continued his examination of the files. Since young Ward's
+immediate condition was the greatest matter at stake, the closest searching was
+done among the most obviously recent matter; and in this abundance of
+contemporary manuscript one very baffling oddity was noted. The oddity was
+the slight amount in Charles's normal writing, which indeed included nothing
+more recent than two months before. On the other hand, there were literally
+reams of symbols and formulae, historical notes and philosophical comment, in a
+crabbed penmanship absolutely identical with the ancient script of Joseph
+Curwen, though of undeniably modern dating. Plainly, a part of the latter-day
+programme had been a sedulous imitation of the old wizard's writing, which
+Charles seemed to have carried to a marvellous state of perfection. Of any third
+hand which might have been Allen's there was not a trace. If he had indeed come
+to be the leader, he must have forced young Ward to act as his amanuensis.
+
+
+
+
+In this new material one mystic formula, or rather pair of formulae, recurred so
+often that Willett had it by heart before he had half finished his quest. It
+consisted of two parallel columns, the left-hand one surmounted by the archaic
+symbol called "Dragon's Head" and used in almanacs to indicate the ascending
+node, and the right-hand one headed by a corresponding sign of "Dragon's Tail"
+or descending node. The appearance of the whole was something like this, and
+almost unconsciously the doctor realised that the second half was no more than
+the first written syllabically backward with the exception of the final
+monosyllables and of the odd name Yog-Sothoth, which he had come to
+recognise under various spellings from other things he had seen in connexion
+with this horrible matter. The formulae were as follows - exactly so, as Willett is
+abundantly able to testify - and the first one struck an odd note of uncomfortable
+latent memory in his brain, which he recognised later when reviewing the events
+of that horrible Good Friday of the previous year.
+
+Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,
+
+YOG-SOTHOTH
+
+H'EE-L'GEB
+
+F'AI THRODOG
+
+UAAAH
+
+OGTHROD AI'F
+
+GEB'L-EE'H
+
+YOG-SOTHOTH
+
+'NGAH'NG AI'Y
+
+ZHRO
+
+So haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come upon them, that
+before the doctor knew it he was repeating them under his breath. Eventually,
+however, he felt he had secured all the papers he could digest to advantage for
+the present; hence resolved to examine no more till he could bring the sceptical
+alienists en masse for an ampler and more systematic raid. He had still to find
+the hidden laboratory, so leaving his valise in the lighted room he emerged again
+into the black noisome corridor whose vaulting echoed ceaseless with that dull
+and hideous whine.
+
+The next few rooms he tried were all abandoned, or filled only with crumbling
+boxes and ominous-looking leaden coffins; but impressed him deeply with the
+magnitude of Joseph Curwen's original operations. He thought of the slaves and
+seamen who had disappeared, of the graves which had been violated in every
+part of the world, and of what that final raiding party must have seen; and then
+he decided it was better not to think any more. Once a great stone staircase
+mounted at his right, and he deduced that this must have reached to one of the
+
+
+
+
+Curwen outbuildings - perhaps the famous stone edifice with the high sht-Hke
+windows - provided the steps he had descended had led from the steep-roofed
+farmhouse. Suddenly the walls seemed to fall away ahead, and the stench and
+the wailing grew stronger. Willett saw that he had come upon a vast open space,
+so great that his torchlight would not carry across it; and as he advanced he
+encountered occasional stout pillars supporting the arches of the roof.
+
+After a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths of
+Stonehenge, with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in the centre; and
+so curious were the carvings on that altar that he approached to study them with
+his electric light. But when he saw what they were he shrank away shuddering,
+and did not stop to investigate the dark stains which discoloured the upper
+surface and had spread down the sides in occasional thin lines. Instead, he found
+the distant wall and traced it as it swept round in a gigantic circle perforated by
+occasional black doorways and indented by a myriad of shallow cells with iron
+gratings and wrist and ankle bonds on chains fastened to the stone of the
+concave rear masonry. These cells were empty, but still the horrible odour and
+the dismal moaning continued, more insistent now than ever, and seemingly
+varied at time by a sort of slippery thumping.
+
+
+
+From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett's attention could no
+longer be diverted. Both were plainer and more hideous in the great pillared hall
+than anywhere else, and carried a vague impression of being far below, even in
+this dark nether world of subterrene mystery. Before trying any of the black
+archways for steps leading further down, the doctor cast his beam of light about
+the stone-flagged floor. It was very loosely paved, and at irregular intervals there
+would occur a slab curiously pierced by small holes in no definite arrangement,
+while at one point there lay a very long ladder carelessly flung down. To this
+ladder, singularly enough, appeared to cling a particularly large amount of the
+frightful odour which encompassed everything. As he walked slowly about it
+suddenly occurred to Willett that both the noise and the odour seemed strongest
+above the oddly pierced slabs, as if they might be crude trap-doors leading down
+to some still deeper region of horror. Kneeling by one, he worked at it with his
+hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge it. At his touch the
+moaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only with vast trepidation did he
+persevere in the lifting of the heavy stone. A stench unnameable now rose up
+from below, and the doctor's head reeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and
+turned his torch upon the exposed square yard of gaping blackness.
+
+If he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate abomination,
+Willett was destined to be disappointed; for amidst that foetor and cracked
+
+
+
+
+whining he discerned only the brick-faced top of a cyhndrical well perhaps a
+yard and a half in diameter and devoid of any ladder or other means of descent.
+As the light shone down, the wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible
+yelps; in conjunction with which there came again that sound of blind, futile
+scrambling and slippery thumping. The explorer trembled, unwilling even to
+imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in that abyss, but in a moment
+mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink; lying at full length
+and holding the torch downward at arm's length to see what might lie below.
+For a second he could distinguish nothing but the slimy, moss-grown brick walls
+sinking illimitably into that half-tangible miasma of murk and foulness and
+anguished frenzy; and then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily
+and frantically up and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which must have
+been from twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floor where he lay. The
+torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see what manner of living
+creature might be immured there in the darkness of that unnatural well; left
+starving by young Ward through all the long month since the doctors had taken
+him away, and clearly only one of a vast number prisoned in the kindred wells
+whose pierced stone covers so thickly studded the floor of the great vaulted
+cavern. Whatever the things were, they could not lie down in their cramped
+spaces; but must have crouched and whined and waited and feebly leaped all
+those hideous weeks since their master had abandoned them unheeded.
+
+But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again; for surgeon and
+veteran of the dissecting-room though he was, he has not been the same since. It
+is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable
+dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is
+about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which
+acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of
+obscure cosmic relationships and unnameable realities behind the protective
+illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett saw such an outline or
+entity, for during the next few instants he was undoubtedly as stark raving mad
+as any inmate of Dr. Waite's private hospital. He dropped the electric torch from
+a hand drained of muscular power or nervous coordination, nor heeded the
+sound of crunching teeth which told of its fate at the bottom of the pit. He
+screamed and screamed and screamed in a voice whose falsetto panic no
+acquaintance of his would ever have recognised; and though he could not rise to
+his feet he crawled and rolled desperately away from the damp pavement where
+dozens of Tartarean wells poured forth their exhausted whining and yelping to
+answer his own insane cries. He tore his hands on the rough, loose stones, and
+many times bruised his head against the frequent pillars, but still he kept on.
+Then at last he slowly came to himself in the utter blackness and stench, and
+stopped his ears against the droning wail into which the burst of yelping had
+subsided. He was drenched with perspiration and without means of producing a
+
+
+
+
+light; stricken and unnerved in the abysmal blackness and horror, and crushed
+with a memory he never could efface. Beneath him dozens of those things still
+lived, and from one of those shafts the cover was removed. He knew that what
+he had seen could never climb up the slippery walls, yet shuddered at the
+thought that some obscure foot-hold might exist.
+
+What the thing was, he would never tell. It was like some of the carvings on the
+hellish altar, but it was alive. Nature had never made it in this form, for it was
+too palpably unfinished. The deficiencies were of the most surprising sort, and
+the abnormalities of proportion could not be described. Willett consents only to
+say that this type of thing must have represented entities which Ward called up
+from imperfect salts, and which he kept for servile or ritualistic purposes. If it
+had not had a certain significance, its image would not have been carved on that
+damnable stone. It was not the worst thing depicted on that stone - but Willett
+never opened the other pits. At the time, the first connected idea in his mind was
+an idle paragraph from some of the old Curwen data he had digested long
+before; a phrase used by Simon or Jedediah Orne in that portentous confiscated
+letter to the bygone sorcerer:
+
+'Certainely, there was Noth'g but ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd
+upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part of.'
+
+Then, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there came a
+recollection of those ancient lingering rumours anent the burned, twisted thing
+found in the fields a week after the Curwen raid. Charles Ward had once told the
+doctor what old Slocum said of that object; that it was neither thoroughly human,
+nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read
+about.
+
+These words hummed in the doctor's mind as he rocked to and fro, squatting on
+the nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lord's
+Prayer to himself; eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the
+modernistic Waste Land of Mr. T. S. Eliot, and finally reverting to the oft-
+repeated dual formula he had lately found in Ward's underground library: 'Y'ai
+'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth' and so on till the final underlined Zhro.
+
+It seemed to soothe him, and he staggered to his feet after a time; lamenting
+bitterly his fright-lost torch and looking wildly about for any gleam of light in the
+clutching inkiness of the chilly air. Think he would not; but he strained his eyes
+in every direction for some faint glint or reflection of the bright illumination he
+had left in the library. After a while he thought he detected a suspicion of a glow
+infinitely far away, and toward this he crawled in agonised caution on hands and
+
+
+
+
+knees amidst the stench and howHng, always feeHng ahead lest he collide with
+the numerous great pillars or stumble into the abominable pit he had uncovered.
+
+Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the steps
+leading to the hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled in loathing. At another
+time he encountered the pierced slab he had removed, and here his caution
+became almost pitiful. But he did not come upon the dread aperture after all, nor
+did anything issue from that aperture to detain him. What had been down there
+made no sound nor stir. Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had
+not been good for it. Each time Willett's fingers felt a perforated slab he
+trembled. His passage over it would sometimes increase the groaning below, but
+generally it would produce no effect at all, since he moved very noiselessly.
+Several times during his progress the glow ahead diminished perceptibly, and he
+realised that the various candles and lamps he had left must be expiring one by
+one. The thought of being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst this
+underground world of nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his feet and
+run, which he could safely do now that he had passed the open pit; for he knew
+that once the light failed, his only hope of rescue and survival would lie in
+whatever relief party Mr. Ward might send after missing him for a sufficient
+period. Presently, however, he emerged from the open space into the narrower
+corridor and definitely located the glow as coming from a door on his right. In a
+moment he had reached it and was standing once more in young Ward's secret
+library, trembling with relief, and watching the sputterings of that last lamp
+which had brought him to safety.
+
+
+
+In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from an oil
+supply he had previously noticed, and when the room was bright again he
+looked about to see if he might find a lantern for further exploration. For racked
+though he was with horror, his sense of grim purpose was still uppermost; and
+he was firmly determined to leave no stone unturned in his search for the
+hideous facts behind Charles Ward's bizarre madness. Failing to find a lantern,
+he chose the smallest of the lamps to carry; also filling his pockets with candles
+and matches, and taking with him a gallon can of oil, which he proposed to keep
+for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory he might uncover beyond the
+terrible open space with its unclean altar and nameless covered wells. To traverse
+that space again would require his utmost fortitude, but he knew it must be
+done. Fortunately neither the frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the
+vast cell-indented wall which bounded the cavern area, and whose black
+mysterious archways would form the next goals of a logical search.
+
+
+
+
+So Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and anguished howling;
+turning down his lamp to avoid any distant glimpse of the hellish altar, or of the
+uncovered pit with the pierced stone slab beside it. Most of the black doorways
+led merely to small chambers, some vacant and some evidently used as
+storerooms; and in several of the latter he saw some very curious accumulations
+of various objects. One was packed with rotting and dust-draped bales of spare
+clothing, and the explorer thrilled when he saw that it was unmistakably the
+clothing of a century and a half before. In another room he found numerous odds
+and ends of modern clothing, as if gradual provisions were being made to equip
+a large body of men. But what he disliked most of all were the huge copper vats
+which occasionally appeared; these, and the sinister incrustations upon them. He
+liked them even less than the weirdly figured leaden bowls whose rims retained
+such obnoxious deposits and around which clung repellent odours perceptible
+above even the general noisomness of the crypt. When he had completed about
+half the entire circuit of the wall he found another corridor like that from which
+he had come, and out of which many doors opened. This he proceeded to
+investigate; and after entering three rooms of medium size and of no significant
+contents, he came at last to a large oblong apartment whose business-like tanks
+and tables, furnaces and modern instruments, occasional books and endless
+shelves of jars and bottles proclaimed it indeed the long-sought laboratory of
+Charles Ward - and no doubt of old Joseph Curwen before him.
+
+After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready. Dr. Willett
+examined the place and all the appurtenances with the keenest interest; noting
+from the relative quantities of various reagents on the shelves that young Ward's
+dominant concern must have been with some branch of organic chemistry. On
+the whole, little could be learned from the scientific ensemble, which included a
+gruesome-looking dissecting-table; so that the room was really rather a
+disappointment. Among the books was a tattered old copy of Borellus in black-
+letter, and it was weirdly interesting to note that Ward had underlined the same
+passage whose marking had so perturbed good Mr. Merritt in Curwen's
+farmhouse more than a century and half before. That old copy, of course, must
+have perished along with the rest of Curwen's occult library in the final raid.
+Three archways opened off the laboratory, and these the doctor proceeded to
+sample in turn. From his cursory survey he saw that two led merely to small
+storerooms; but these he canvassed with care, remarking the piles of coffins in
+various stages of damage and shuddering violently at two or three of the few
+coffin-plates he could decipher. There was much clothing also stored in these
+rooms, and several new and tightly nailed boxes which he did not stop to
+investigate. Most interesting of all, perhaps, were some odd bits which he judged
+to be fragments of old Joseph Curwen's laboratory appliances. These had
+suffered damage at the hands of the raiders, but were still partly recognisable as
+the chemical paraphernalia of the Georgian period.
+
+
+
+
+The third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with shelves and
+having in the centre a table bearing two lamps. These lamps Willett lighted, and
+in their brilliant glow studied the endless shelving which surrounded him. Some
+of the upper levels were wholly vacant, but most of the space was filled with
+small odd-looking leaden jars of two general types; one tall and without handles
+like a Grecian lekythos or oil-jug, and the other with a single handle and
+proportioned like a Phaleron jug. All had metal stoppers, and were covered with
+peculiar-looking symbols moulded in low relief. In a moment the doctor noticed
+that these jugs were classified with great rigidity; all the lekythoi being on one
+side of the room with a large wooden sign reading 'Custodes' above them, and
+all the Phalerons on the other, correspondingly labelled with a sign reading
+'Materia'.
+
+Each of the jars of jugs, except some on the upper shelves that turned out to be
+vacant, bore a cardboard tag with a number apparently referring to a catalogue;
+and Willett resolved to look for the latter presently. For the moment, however, he
+was more interested in the nature of the array as a whole, and experimentally
+opened several of the lekythoi and Phalerons at random with a view to a rough
+generalisation. The result was invariable. Both types of jar contained a small
+quantity of a single kind of substance; a fine dusty powder of very light weight
+and of many shades of dull, neutral colour. To the colours which formed the only
+point of variation there was no apparent method of disposal; and no distinction
+between what occurred in the lekythoi and what occurred in the Phalerons. A
+bluish-grey powder might be by the side of a pinkish-white one, and any one in a
+Phaleron might have its exact counterpart in a lekythos. The most individual
+feature about the powders was their non-adhesiveness. Willett would pour one
+into his hand, and upon returning it to its jug would find that no residue
+whatever remained on his palm.
+
+The meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why this battery of
+chemicals was separated so radically from those in glass jars on the shelves of the
+laboratory proper. "Custodes", "Materia"; that was the Latin for "Guards" and
+"Materials", respectively - and then there came a flash of memory as to where he
+had seen that word "Guards" before in connexion with this dreadful mystery. It
+was, of course, in the recent letter to Dr. Allen purporting to be from old Edwin
+Hutchinson; and the phrase had read: 'There was no Neede to keep the Guards
+in Shape and eat'g off their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of
+Trouble, as you too welle knowe.' What did this signify? But wait - was there not
+still another reference to "guards" in this matter which he had failed wholly to
+recall when reading the Hutchinson letter? Back in the old non-secretive days
+Ward had told him of the Eleazar Smith diary recording the spying of Smith and
+Weeden on the Curwen farm, and in that dreadful chronicle there had been a
+mention of conversations overheard before the old wizard betook himself wholly
+
+
+
+
+beneath the earth. There had been. Smith and Weeden insisted, terrible
+colloquies wherein figured Curwen, certain captives of his, and the guards of
+those captives. Those guards, according to Hutchinson or his avatar, had "eaten
+their heads off", so that now Dr. Allen did not keep them in shape. And if not in
+shape, how save as the "salts" to which it appears this wizard band was engaged
+in reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could?
+
+So that was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit of unhallowed
+rites and deeds, presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help, when
+called up by some hellish incantation, in the defence of their blasphemous master
+or the questioning of those who were not so willing? Willett shuddered at the
+thought of what he had been pouring in and out of his hands, and for a moment
+felt an impulse to flee in panic from that cavern of hideous shelves with their
+silent and perhaps watching sentinels. Then he thought of the "Materia" - in the
+myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room. Salts too - and if not the salts
+of "guards", then the salts of what? God! Could it be possible that here lay the
+mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched by supreme ghouls
+from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call
+of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose
+ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, "all
+civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the
+universe"? And Marinus Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust through his hands!
+
+Then he noticed a small door at the further end of the room, and calmed himself
+enough to approach it and examine the crude sign chiselled above. It was only a
+symbol, but it filled him with vague spiritual dread; for a morbid, dreaming
+friend of his had once drawn it on paper and told him a few of the things it
+means in the dark abyss of sleep. It was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed
+above the archway of a certain black tower standing alone in twilight - and
+Willett did not like what his friend Randolph Carter had said of its powers. But a
+moment later he forgot the sign as he recognised a new acrid odour in the
+stench-filled air. This was a chemical rather than animal smell, and came clearly
+from the room beyond the door. And it was, unmistakably, the same odour
+which had saturated Charles Ward's clothing on the day the doctors had taken
+him away. So it was here that the youth had been interrupted by the final
+summons? He was wiser that old Joseph Curwen, for he had not resisted. Willett,
+boldly determined to penetrate every wonder and nightmare this nether realm
+might contain, seized the small lamp and crossed the threshold. A wave of
+nameless fright rolled out to meet him, but he yielded to no whim and deferred
+to no intuition. There was nothing alive here to harm him, and he would not be
+stayed in his piercing of the eldritch cloud which engulfed his patient.
+
+
+
+
+The room beyond the door was of medium size, and had no furniture save a
+table, a single chair, and two groups of curious machines with clamps and
+wheels, which Willett recognised after a moment as mediaeval instruments of
+torture. On one side of the door stood a rack of savage whips, above which were
+some shelves bearing empty rows of shallow pedestalled cups of lead shaped
+like Grecian kylikes. On the other side was the table; with a powerful Argand
+lamp, a pad and pencil, and two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves
+outside set down at irregular places as if temporarily or in haste. Willett lighted
+the lamp and looked carefully at the pad, to see what notes Ward might have
+been jotting down when interrupted; but found nothing more intelligible than
+the following disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which
+shed no light on the case as a whole:
+
+'B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.'
+'Sawe olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt yee Way.'
+'Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.'
+'F. soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from Outside.'
+
+As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wall
+opposite the door, between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners,
+was covered with pegs from which hung a set of shapeless-looking robes of a
+rather dismal yellowish-white. But far more interesting were the two vacant
+walls, both of which were thickly covered with mystic symbols and formulae
+roughly chiselled in the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks
+of carving; and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a huge pentagram in
+the centre, with a plain circle about three feet wide half way between this and
+each corner. In one of these four circles, near where a yellowish robe had been
+flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow kylix of the sort found on the
+shelves above the whip-rack; and just outside the periphery was one of the
+Phaleron jugs from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This was
+unstoppered, and proved upon inspection to be empty; but the explorer saw
+with a shiver that the kylix was not. Within its shallow area, and saved from
+scattering only by the absence of wind in this sequestered cavern, lay a small
+amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have belonged in
+the jug; and Willett almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over
+him as he correlated little by little the several elements and antecedents of the
+scene. The whips and the instruments of torture, the dust or salts from the jug of
+"Materia", the two lekythoi from the "Custodes" shelf, the robes, the formulae
+on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the
+thousand glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the
+friends and parents of Charles Ward - all these engulfed the doctor in a tidal
+wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the
+pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor.
+
+
+
+
+With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying the
+formulae chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it was
+obvious that they were carved in Joseph Curwen's time, and their text was such
+as to be vaguely familiar to one who had read much Curwen material or delved
+extensively into the history of magic. One the doctor clearly recognised as what
+Mrs. Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before,
+and what an authority had told him was a very terrible invocation addressed to
+secret gods outside the normal spheres. It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs.
+Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as the authority had shewn it to him
+in the forbidden pages of "Eliphas Levi"; but its identity was unmistakable, and
+such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almonsin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of
+fright through the search who had seen and felt so much of cosmic abomination
+just around the corner.
+
+This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand wall was
+no less thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition when he came up
+the pair of formulae so frequently occurring in the recent notes in the library.
+They were, roughly speaking, the same; with the ancient symbols of "Dragon's
+Head" and "Dragon's Tail" heading them as in Ward's scribblings. But the
+spelling differed quite widely from that of the modern versions, as if old Curwen
+had had a different way of recording sound, or as if later study had evolved
+more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in question. The doctor
+tried to reconcile the chiselled version with the one which still ran persistently in
+his head, and found it hard to do. Where the script he had memorised began
+"Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth", this epigraph started out as "Aye, engengah,
+Yogge-Sothotha"; which to his mind would seriously interfere with the
+syllabification of the second word.
+
+Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy disturbed
+him; and he found himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to
+square the sound he conceived with the letters he found carved. Weird and
+menacing in that abyss of antique blasphemy rang his voice; its accents keyed to
+a droning sing-song either through the spell of the past and the unknown, or
+through the hellish example of that dull, godless wail from the pits whose
+inhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in the distance through the stench
+and the darkness.
+
+Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,
+
+YOG-SOTHOTH
+
+H'EE-L'GEB
+
+F'AI THRODOG
+
+UAAAH!
+
+
+
+
+But what was this cold wind which had sprung into hfe at the very outset of the
+chant? The lamps were sputtering woefully, and the gloom grew so dense that
+the letters on the wall nearly faded from sight. There was smoke, too, and an
+acrid odour which quite drowned out the stench from the far-away wells; an
+odour like that he had smelt before, yet infinitely stronger and more pungent. He
+turned from the inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents, and saw
+that the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous efflorescent powder had lain,
+was giving forth a cloud of thick, greenish-black vapour of surprising volume
+and opacity. That powder - Great God! it had come from the shelf of "Materia" -
+what was it doing now, and what had started it? The formula he had been
+chanting - the first of the pair - Dragon's Head, ascending node - Blessed Saviour,
+could it be ...
+
+The doctor reeled, and through his head raced wildly disjointed scraps from all
+he had seen, heard, and read of the frightful case of Joseph Curwen and Charles
+Dexter Ward. "I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put
+downe . . . Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure
+when there is any Doubte of Whom you have ... 3 Talkes with What was therein
+inhum'd ..." Mercy of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke?
+
+
+
+Marinus Bicknell Willett has not hope that any part of his tale will be believed
+except by certain sympathetic friends, hence he has made no attempt to tell it
+beyond his most intimate circle. Only a few outsiders have ever heard it
+repeated, and of these the majority laugh and remark that the doctor surely is
+getting old. He has been advised to take a long vacation and to shun future cases
+dealing with mental disturbance. But Mr. Ward knows that the veteran physician
+speaks only a horrible truth. Did not he himself see the noisome aperture in the
+bungalow cellar? Did not Willett send him home overcome and ill at eleven
+o'clock that portentous morning? Did he not telephone the doctor in vain that
+evening, and again the next day, and had he not driven to the bungalow itself on
+that following noon, finding his friend unconscious but unharmed on one of the
+beds upstairs? Willett had been breathing stertorously, and opened his eyes
+slowly when Mr. Ward gave him some brandy fetched from the car. Then he
+shuddered and screamed, crying out, 'That beard... those eyes... God, who are
+you?' A very strange thing to say to a trim, blue-eyed, clean-shaven gentleman
+whom he had known from the latter's boyhood.
+
+In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the previous
+morning. Willett's clothing bore no disarrangement beyond certain smudges and
+worn places at the knees, and only a faint acrid odour reminded Mr. Ward of
+what he had smelt on his son that day he was taken to the hospital. The doctor's
+
+
+
+
+flashlight was missing, but his valise was safely there, as empty as when he had
+brought it. Before indulging in any explanations, and obviously with great moral
+effort, Willett staggered dizzily down to the cellar and tried the fateful platform
+before the tubs. It was unyielding. Crossing to where he had left his yet unused
+tool satchel the day before, he obtained a chisel and began to pry up the stubborn
+planks one by one. Underneath the smooth concrete was still visible, but of any
+opening or perforation there was no longer a trace. Nothing yawned this time to
+sicken the mystified father who had followed the doctor downstairs; only the
+smooth concrete underneath the planks - no noisome well, no world of
+subterrene horrors, no secret library, no Curwen papers, no nightmare pits of
+stench and howling, no laboratory or shelves or chiselled formulae, no... Dr.
+Willett turned pale, and clutched at the younger man. 'Yesterday,' he asked
+softly, 'did you see it here ... and smell it?' And when Mr. Ward, himself
+transfixed with dread and wonder, found strength to nod an affirmative, the
+physician gave a sound half a sigh and half a gasp, and nodded in turn. 'Then I
+will tell you', he said.
+
+So for an hour, in the sunniest room they could find upstairs, the physician
+whispered his frightful tale to the wondering father. There was nothing to relate
+beyond the looming up of that form when the greenish-black vapour from the
+kylix parted, and Willett was too tired to ask himself what had really occurred.
+There were futile, bewildered head-shakings from both men, and once Mr. Ward
+ventured a hushed suggestion, 'Do you suppose it would be of any use to dig?'
+The doctor was silent, for it seemed hardly fitting for any human brain to answer
+when powers of unknown spheres had so vitally encroached on this side of the
+Great Abyss. Again Mr. Ward asked, 'But where did it go? It brought you here,
+you know, and it sealed up the hole somehow.' And Willett again let silence
+answer for him.
+
+But after all, this was not the final phase of the matter. Reaching for his
+handkerchief before rising to leave. Dr. Willett's fingers closed upon a piece of
+paper in his pocket which had not been there before, and which was
+companioned by the candles and matches he had seized in the vanished vault. It
+was a common sheet, torn obviously from the cheap pad in that fabulous room of
+horror somewhere underground, and the writing upon it was that of an ordinary
+lead pencil - doubtless the one which had lain beside the pad. It was folded very
+carelessly, and beyond the faint acrid scent of the cryptic chamber bore no print
+or mark of any world but this. But in the text itself it did indeed reek with
+wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the laboured strokes
+of mediaeval darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it,
+yet having combinations of symbols which seemed vaguely familiar. The briefly
+scrawled message was this, and its mystery lent purpose to the shaken pair, who
+
+
+
+
+forthwith walked steadily out to the Ward car and gave orders to be driven first
+to a quiet dining place and then to the John Hay Library on the hill.
+
+At the library it was easy to find good manuals of palaeography, and over these
+the two men puzzled till the lights of evening shone out from the great
+chandelier. In the end they found what was needed. The letters were indeed no
+fantastic invention, but the normal script of a very dark period. They were the
+pointed Saxon minuscules of the eighth or ninth century A.D., and brought with
+them memories of an uncouth time when under a fresh Christian veneer ancient
+faiths and ancient rites stirred stealthily, and the pale moon of Britain looked
+sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins of Caerleon and Hexham, and
+by the towers along Hadrian's crumbling wall. The words were in such Latin as a
+barbarous age might remember - 'Corvinus necandus est. Cadaver aq(ua) forti
+dissolvendum, nee aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace ut potes.' - which may roughly be
+translated, "Curwen must be killed. The body must be dissolved in aqua fortis,
+nor must anything be retained. Keep silence as best you are able."
+
+Willett and Mr. Ward were mute and baffled. They had met the unknown, and
+found that they lacked emotions to respond to it as they vaguely believed they
+ought. With Willett, especially, the capacity for receiving fresh impressions of
+awe was well-nigh exhausted; and both men sat still and helpless till the closing
+of the library forced them to leave. Then they drove listlessly to the Ward
+mansion in Prospect Street, and talked to no purpose into the night. The doctor
+rested toward morning, but did not go home. And he was still there Sunday
+noon when a telephone message came from the detectives who had been
+assigned to look up Dr. Allen.
+
+Mr. Ward, who was pacing nervously about in a dressing-gown, answered the
+call in person; and told the men to come up early the next day when he heard
+their report was almost ready. Both Willett and he were glad that this phase of
+the matter was taking form, for whatever the origin of the strange minuscule
+message, it seemed certain the "Curwen" who must be destroyed could be no
+other than the bearded and spectacled stranger. Charles had feared this man, and
+had said in the frantic note that he must be killed and dissolved in acid. Allen,
+moreover, had been receiving letters from the strange wizards in Europe under
+the name of Curwen, and palpably regarded himself as an avatar of the bygone
+necromancer. And now from a fresh and unknown source had come a message
+saying that "Curwen" must be killed and dissolved in acid. The linkage was too
+unmistakable to be factitious; and besides, was not Allen planning to murder
+young Ward upon the advice of the creature called Hutchinson? Of course, the
+letter they had seen had never reached the bearded stranger; but from its text
+they could see that Allen had already formed plans for dealing with the youth if
+he grew too "squeamish". Without doubt, Allen must be apprehended; and even
+
+
+
+
+if the most drastic directions were not carried out, he must be placed where he
+could inflict no harm upon Charles Ward.
+
+That afternoon, hoping against hope to extract some gleam of information anent
+the inmost mysteries from the only available one capable of giving it, the father
+and the doctor went down the bay and called on young Charles at the hospital.
+Simply and gravely Willett told him all he had found, and noticed how pale he
+turned as each description made certain the truth of the discovery. The physician
+employed as much dramatic effect as he could, and watched for a wincing on
+Charles's part when he approached the matter of the covered pits and the
+nameless hybrids within. But Ward did not wince. Willett paused, and his voice
+grew indignant as he spoke of how the things were starving. He taxed the youth
+with shocking inhumanity, and shivered when only a sardonic laugh came in
+reply. For Charles, having dropped as useless his pretence that the crypt did not
+exist, seemed to see some ghastly jest in this affair; and chucked hoarsely at
+something which amused him. Then he whispered, in accents doubly terrible
+because of the cracked voice he used, 'Damn 'em, they do eat, but they don't
+need to! That's the rare part! A month, you say, without food? Lud, Sir, you be
+modest! D'ye know, that was the joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous
+bluster! Kill everything off, would he? Why, damme, he was half-deaf with noise
+from Outside and never saw or heard aught from the wells! He never dreamed
+they were there at all! Devil take ye, those cursed things have been howling
+down there ever since Curwen was done for a hundred and fifty-seven years
+gone!'
+
+But no more than this could Willett get from the youth. Horrified, yet almost
+convinced against his will, he went on with his tale in the hope that some
+incident might startle his auditor out of the mad composure he maintained.
+Looking at the youth's face, the doctor could not but feel a kind of terror at the
+changes which recent months had wrought. Truly, the boy had drawn down
+nameless horrors from the skies. When the room with the formulae and the
+greenish dust was mentioned, Charles shewed his first sign of animation. A
+quizzical look overspread his face as he heard what Willett had read on the pad,
+and he ventured the mild statement that those notes were old ones, of no
+possible significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history of magic. But,
+he added, 'had you but known the words to bring up that which I had out in the
+cup, you had not been here to tell me this. 'Twas Number 118, and I conceive you
+would have shook had you looked it up in my list in t'other room. 'Twas never
+raised by me, but I meant to have it up that day you came to invite me hither.'
+
+Then Willett told of the formula he had spoken and of the greenish-black smoke
+which had arisen; and as he did so he saw true fear dawn for the first time on
+Charles Ward's face. 'It came, and you be here alive?' As Ward croaked the
+
+
+
+
+words his voice seemed almost to burst free of its trammels and sink to
+cavernous abysses of uncanny resonance. Willett, gifted with a flash of
+inspiration, believed he saw the situation, and wove into his reply a caution from
+a letter he remembered. 'No. 118, you say? But don't forget that stones are all
+changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are never sure till you question!'
+And then, without warning, he drew forth the minuscule message and flashed it
+before the patient's eyes. He could have wished no stronger result, for Charles
+Ward fainted forthwith.
+
+All this conversation, of course, had been conducted with the greatest secrecy
+lest the resident alienists accuse the father and the physician of encouraging a
+madman in his delusions. Unaided, too. Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward picked up the
+stricken youth and placed him on the couch. In reviving, the patient mumbled
+many times of some word which he must get to Orne and Hutchinson at once; so
+when his consciousness seemed fully back the doctor told him that of those
+strange creatures at least one was his bitter enemy, and had given Dr. Allen
+advice for his assassination. This revelation produced no visible effect, and
+before it was made the visitors could see that their host had already the look of a
+hunted man. After that he would converse no more, so Willett and the father
+departed presently; leaving behind a caution against the bearded Allen, to which
+the youth only replied that this individual was very safely taken care of, and
+could do no one any harm even if he wished. This was said with an almost evil
+chuckle very painful to hear. They did not worry about any communications
+Charles might indite to that monstrous pair in Europe, since they knew that the
+hospital authorities seized all outgoing mail for censorship and would pass no
+wild or outre-looking missive.
+
+There is, however, a curious sequel to the matter of Orne and Hutchinson, if such
+indeed the exiled wizards were. Moved by some vague presentiment amidst the
+horrors of that period, Willett arranged with an international press-cutting
+bureau for accounts of notable current crimes and accidents in Prague and in
+eastern Transylvania; and after six months believed that he had found two very
+significant things amongst the multifarious items he received and had translated.
+One was the total wrecking of a house by night in the oldest quarter of Prague,
+and the disappearance of the evil old man called Josef Nadek, who had dwelt in
+it alone ever since anyone could remember. The other was a titan explosion in
+the Transylvanian mountains east of Rakus, and the utter extirpation with all its
+inmates of the ill-regarded Castle Ferenczy, whose master was so badly spoken
+of by peasants and soldiery alike that he would shortly have been summoned to
+Bucharest for serious questioning had not this incident cut off a career already so
+long as to antedate all common memory. Willett maintains that the hand which
+wrote those minuscules was able to wield stronger weapons as well; and that
+while Curwen was left to him to dispose of, the writer felt able to find and deal
+
+
+
+
+with Orne and Hutchinson itself. If what their fate may have been the doctor
+strives sedulously not to think.
+
+
+
+The following morning Dr. Willett hastened to the Ward home to be present
+when the detectives arrived. Allen's destruction or imprisonment - or Curwen's
+if one might regard the tacit claim to reincarnation as valid - he felt must be
+accomplished at any cost, and he communicated this conviction to Mr. Ward as
+they sat waiting for the men to come. They were downstairs this time, for the
+upper parts of the house were beginning to be shunned because of a particular
+nauseousness which hung indefinitely about; a nauseousness which the older
+servants connected with some curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait.
+
+At nine o'clock the three detectives presented themselves and immediately
+delivered all that they had to say. They had not, regrettably enough, located the
+Brava Tony Gomes as they had wished, nor had they found the least trace of Dr.
+Allen's source or present whereabouts; but they had managed to unearth a
+considerable number of local impressions and facts concerning the reticent
+stranger. Allen had struck Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being, and
+there was a universal belief that his thick sandy beard was either dyed or false - a
+belief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a false beard, together with a
+pair of dark glasses, in his room at the fateful bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward
+could well testify from his one telephone conversation, had a depth and
+hoUowness that could not be forgotten; and his glanced seemed malign even
+through his smoked and horn-rimmed glasses. One shopkeeper, in the course of
+negotiations, had seen a specimen of his handwriting and declared it was very
+queer and crabbed; this being confirmed by pencilled notes of no clear meaning
+found in his room and identified by the merchant. In connexion with the
+vampirism rumours of the preceding summer, a majority of the gossips believed
+that Allen rather than Ward was the actual vampire. Statements were also
+obtained from the officials who had visited the bungalow after the unpleasant
+incident of the motor truck robbery. They had felt less of the sinister in Dr. Allen,
+but had recognised him as the dominant figure in the queer shadowy cottage.
+The place had been too dark for them to observe him clearly, but they would
+know him again if they saw him. His beard had looked odd, and they thought he
+had some slight scar above his dark spectacled right eye. As for the detectives'
+search of Allen's room, it yielded nothing definite save the beard and glasses,
+and several pencilled notes in a crabbed writing which Willett at once saw was
+identical with that shared by the old Curwen manuscripts and by the
+voluminous recent notes of young Ward found in the vanished catacombs of
+horror.
+
+
+
+
+Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward caught something of a profound, subtle, and insidious
+cosmic fear from this data as it was gradually unfolded, and almost trembled in
+following up the vague, mad thought which had simultaneously reached their
+minds. The false beard and glasses - the crabbed Curwen penmanship - the old
+portrait and its tiny scar - and the altered youth in the hospital with such a scar -
+that deep, hollow voice on the telephone - was it not of this that Mr. Ward was
+reminded when his son barked forth those pitiable tones to which he now
+claimed to be reduced? Who had ever seen Charles and Allen together? Yes, the
+officials had once, but who later on? Was it not when Allen left that Charles
+suddenly lost his growing fright and began to live wholly at the bungalow?
+Curwen - Allen - Ward - in what blasphemous and abominable fusion had two
+ages and two persons become involved? That damnable resemblance of the
+picture to Charles - had it not used to stare and stare, and follow the boy around
+the room with its eyes? Why, too, did both Allen and Charles copy Joseph
+Curwen's handwriting, even when alone and off guard? And then the frightful
+work of those people - the lost crypt of horrors that had aged the doctor
+overnight; the starving monsters in the noisome pits; the awful formula which
+had yielded such nameless results; the message in minuscules found in Willett's
+pocket; the papers and the letters and all the talk of graves and "salts" and
+discoveries - whither did everything lead? In the end Mr. Ward did the most
+sensible thing. Steeling himself against any realisation of why he did it, he gave
+the detectives an article to be shewn to such Pawtuxet shopkeepers as had seen
+the portentous Dr. Allen. That article was a photograph of his luckless son, on
+which he now carefully drew in ink the pair of heavy glasses and the black
+pointed beard which the men had brought from Allen's room.
+
+For two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where fear and
+miasma were slowly gathering as the empty panel in the upstairs library leered
+and leered and leered. Then the men returned. Yes. The altered photograph was
+a very passable likeness of Dr. Allen. Mr. Ward turned pale, and Willett wiped a
+suddenly dampened brow with his handkerchief. Allen - Ward - Curwen - it was
+becoming too hideous for coherent thought. What had the boy called out of the
+void, and what had it done to him? What, really, had happened from first to last?
+Who was this Allen who sought to kill Charles as too "squeamish", and why had
+his destined victim said in the postscript to that frantic letter that he must be so
+completely obliterated in acid? Why, too, had the minuscule message, of whose
+origin no one dared think, said that "Curwen" must be likewise obliterated?
+What was the change, and when had the final stage occurred? That day when his
+frantic note was received - he had been nervous all the morning, then there was
+an alteration. He had slipped out unseen and swaggered boldly in past the men
+hired to guard him. That was the time, when he was out. But no - had he not
+cried out in terror as he entered his study - this very room? What had he found
+there? Or wait - what had found him? That simulacrum which brushed boldly in
+
+
+
+
+without having been seen to go - was that an ahen shadow and a horror forcing
+itself upon a trembhng figure which had never gone out at all? Had not the
+butler spoken of queer noises?
+
+Willett rang for the man and asked him some low -toned questions. It had, surely
+enough, been a bad business. There had been noises - a cry, a gasp, a choking,
+and a sort of clattering or creaking or thumping, or all of these. And Mr. Charles
+was not the same when he stalked out without a word. The butler shivered as he
+spoke, and sniffed at the heavy air that blew down from some open window
+upstairs. Terror had settled definitely upon the house, and only the business-like
+detectives failed to imbibe a full measure of it. Even they were restless, for this
+case had held vague elements in the background which pleased them not at all.
+Dr. Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly, and his thoughts were terrible ones.
+Now and then he would almost break into muttering as he ran over in his head a
+new, appalling, and increasingly conclusive chain of nightmare happenings.
+
+Then Mr. Ward made a sign that the conference was over, and everyone save
+him and the doctor left the room. It was noon now, but shadows as of coming
+night seemed to engulf the phantom-haunted mansion. Willett began talking
+very seriously to his host, and urged that he leave a great deal of the future
+investigation to him. There would be, he predicted, certain obnoxious elements
+which a friend could bear better than a relative. As family physician he must
+have a free hand, and the first thing he required was a period alone and
+undisturbed in the abandoned library upstairs, where the ancient overmantel
+had gathered about itself an aura of noisome horror more intense than when
+Joseph Curwen's features themselves glanced slyly down from the painted
+panel.
+
+Mr. Ward, dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably
+maddening suggestions that poured in upon him from every side, could only
+acquiesce; and half an hour later the doctor was locked in the shunned room
+with the panelling from Olney Court. The father, listening outside, heard
+fumbling sounds of moving and rummaging as the moments passed; and finally
+a wrench and a creak, as if a tight cupboard door were being opened. Then there
+was a muffled cry, a kind of snorting choke, and a hasty slamming of whatever
+had been opened. Almost at once the key rattled and Willett appeared in the hall,
+haggard and ghastly, and demanding wood for the real fireplace on the south
+wall of the room. The furnace was not enough, he said; and the electric log had
+little practical use. Longing yet not daring to ask questions, Mr. Ward gave the
+requisite orders and a man brought some stout pine logs, shuddering as he
+entered the tainted air of the library to place them in the grate. Willett meanwhile
+had gone up to the dismantled laboratory and brought down a few odds and
+
+
+
+
+ends not included in the moving of the July before. They were in a covered
+basket, and Mr. Ward never saw what they were.
+
+Then the doctor locked himself in the library once more, and by the clouds of
+smoke which rolled down past the windows from the chimney it was known that
+he had lighted the fire. Later, after a great rustling of newspapers, that odd
+wrench and creaking were heard again; followed by a thumping which none of
+the eavesdroppers liked. Thereafter two suppressed cries of Willett's were heard,
+and hard upon these came a swishing rustle of indefinable hatefulness. Finally
+the smoke that the wind beat down from the chimney grew very dark and acrid,
+and everyone wished that the weather had spared them this choking and
+venomous inundation of peculiar fumes. Mr. Ward's head reeled, and the
+servants all clustered together in a knot to watch the horrible black smoke swoop
+down. After an age of waiting the vapours seemed to lighted, and half-formless
+sounds of scraping, sweeping, and other minor operations were heard behind
+the bolted door. And at last, after the slamming of some cupboard within, Willett
+made his appearance - sad, pale, and haggard, and bearing the cloth-draped
+basket he had taken from the upstairs laboratory. He had left the window open,
+and into that once accursed room was pouring a wealth of pure, wholesome air
+to mix with a queer new smell of disinfectants. The ancient overmantel still
+lingered; but it seemed robbed of malignity now, and rose as calm and stately in
+its white panelling as if it had never borne the picture of Joseph Curwen. Night
+was coming on, yet this time its shadows held no latent fright, but only a gentle
+melancholy. Of what he had done the doctor would never speak. To Mr. Ward
+he said, 'I can answer no questions, but I will say that there are different kinds of
+magic. I have made a great purgation, and those in this house will sleep the
+better for it.'
+
+
+
+That Dr. Willett's "purgation" had been an ordeal almost as nerve-racking in its
+way as his hideous wandering in the vanished crypt is shewn by the fact that the
+elderly physician gave out completely as soon as he reached home that evening.
+For three days he rested constantly in his room, though servants later muttered
+something about having heard him after midnight on Wednesday, when the
+outer door softly opened and closed with phenomenal softness. Servants'
+imaginations, fortunately, are limited, else comment might have been excited by
+an item in Thursday's Evening Bulletin which ran as follows:
+
+North End Ghouls Again Active
+
+After a lull of ten months since the dastardly vandalism in the Weeden lot at the
+North Burial Ground, a nocturnal prowler was glimpsed early this morning in
+
+
+
+
+the same cemetery by Robert Hart, the night watchman. Happening to glance for
+a moment from his shelter at about 2 a.m.. Hart observed the glow of a lantern or
+pocket torch not far to the northwest, and upon opening the door detected the
+figure of a man with a trowel very plainly silhouetted against a nearby electric
+light. At once starting in pursuit, he saw the figure dart hurriedly toward the
+main entrance, gaining the street and losing himself among the shadows before
+approach or capture was possible.
+
+Like the first of the ghouls active during the past year, this intruder had done no
+real damage before detection. A vacant part of the Ward lot shewed signs of a
+little superficial digging, but nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been
+attempted, and no previous grave had been disturbed.
+
+Hart, who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man probably having a
+full beard, inclines to the view that all three of the digging incidents have a
+common source; but police from the Second Station think otherwise on account
+of the savage nature of teh second incident, where an ancient coffin was removed
+and its headstone violently shattered.
+
+The first of the incidents, in which it is thought an attempt to bury something
+was frustrated, occurred a year ago last March, and has been attributed to
+bootleggers seeking a cache. It is possible, says Sergt. Riley, that this third affair
+is of similar nature. Officers at the Second Station are taking especial pains to
+capture the gang of miscreants responsible for these repeated outrages.
+
+All day Thursday Dr. Willett rested as if recuperating from something past or
+nerving himself for something to come. In the evening he wrote a note to Mr.
+Ward, which was delivered the next morning and which caused the half-dazed
+parent to ponder long and deeply. Mr. Ward had not been able to go down to
+business since the shock of Monday with its baffling reports and its sinister
+"purgation", but he found something calming about the doctor's letter in spite of
+the despair it seemed to promise and the fresh mysteries it seemed to evoke.
+
+10 Barnes St.,
+
+Providence, R. I.
+
+April 12, 1928.
+
+Dear Theodore:-
+
+I feel that I must say a word to you before doing what I am going to do
+tomorrow. It will conclude the terrible business we have been going through (for
+I feel that no spade is ever likely to reach that monstrous place we know of), but
+
+
+
+
+I'm afraid it won't set your mind at rest unless I expressly assure you how very
+conclusive it is.
+
+You have known me ever since you were a small boy, so I think you will not
+distrust me when I hint that some matters are best left undecided and
+unexplored. It is better that you attempt no further speculation as to Charles's
+case, and almost imperative that you tell his mother nothing more than she
+already suspects. When I call on you tomorrow Charles will have escaped. That
+is all which need remain in anyone's mind. He was mad, and he escaped. You
+can tell his mother gently and gradually about the mad part when you stop
+sending the typed notes in his name. I'd advise you to join her in Atlantic City
+and take a rest yourself. God knows you need one after this shock, as I do myself.
+I am going South for a while to calm down and brace up.
+
+So don't ask me any questions when I call. It may be that something will go
+wrong, but I'll tell you if it does. I don't think it will. There will be nothing more
+to worry about, for Charles will be very, very safe. He is now - safer than you
+dream. You need hold no fears about Allen, and who or what he is. He forms as
+much a part of the past as Joseph Curwen's picture, and when I ring your
+doorbell you may feel certain that there is no such person. And what wrote that
+minuscule message will never trouble you or yours.
+
+But you must steel yourself to melancholy, and prepare your wife to do the
+same. I must tell you frankly that Charles's escape will not mean his restoration
+to you. He has been afflicted with a peculiar disease, as you must realise from the
+subtle physical as well as mental changes in him, and you must not hope to see
+him again. Have only this consolation - that he was never a fiend or even truly a
+madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery
+and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to
+know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and
+something came out of those years to engulf him.
+
+And now comes the matter in which I must ask you to trust me most of all. For
+there will be, indeed, no uncertainty about Charles's fate. In about a year, say,
+you can if you wish devise a suitable account of the end; for the boy will be no
+more. You can put up a stone in your lot at the North Burial Ground exactly ten
+feet west of your father's and facing the same way, and that will mark the true
+resting-place of your son. Nor need you fear that it will mark any abnormality or
+changeling. The ashes in that grave will be those of your own unaltered bone and
+sinew - of the real Charles Dexter Ward whose mind you watched from infancy -
+the real Charles with the olive-mark on his hip and without the black witch-mark
+on his chest or the pit on his forehead. The Charles who never did actual evil,
+and who will have paid with his life for his "squeamishness".
+
+
+
+
+That is all. Charles will have escaped, and a year from now you can put up his
+stone. Do not question me tomorrow. And believe that the honour of your
+ancient family remains untainted now, as it has been at all times in the past.
+
+With profoundest sympathy, and exhortations to fortitude, calmness, and
+resignation, I am ever
+
+Sincerely your friend,
+
+Marinus B. Willett.
+
+So on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus Bicknell Willett visited the
+room of Charles Dexter Ward at Dr. Waite's private hospital on Conanicut
+Island. The youth, though making no attempt to evade his caller, was in a sullen
+mood; and seemed disinclined to open the conversation which Willett obviously
+desired. The doctor's discovery of the crypt and his monstrous experience
+therein had of course created a new source of embarrassment, so that both
+hesitated perceptibly after the interchange of a few strained formalities. Then a
+new element of constraint crept in, as Ward seemed to read behind the doctor's
+mask-like face a terrible purpose which had never been there before. The patient
+quailed, conscious that since the last visit there had been a change whereby the
+solicitous family physician had given place to the ruthless and implacable
+avenger.
+
+Ward actually turned pale, and the doctor was the first to speak. 'More,' he said,
+'has been found out, and I must warn you fairly that a reckoning is due.'
+
+'Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?' was the ironic reply.
+It was evident that the youth meant to shew bravado to the last.
+
+'No,' Willett slowly rejoined, 'this time I did not have to dig. We have had men
+looking up Dr. Allen, and they found the false beard and spectacles in the
+bungalow.'
+
+'Excellent,' commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily insulting,
+'and I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and glasses you now
+have on!'
+
+'They would become you very well,' came the even and studied response, 'as
+indeed they seem to have done.'
+
+As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over the sun;
+though there was no change in the shadows on the floor. Then Ward ventured:
+
+
+
+
+'And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does find it now
+and then useful to be twofold?'
+
+'No', said Willett gravely, 'again you are wrong. It is no business of mine if any
+man seeks duality; provided he has any right to exist at all, and provided he does
+not destroy what called him out of space.'
+
+Ward now started violently. 'Well, Sir, what have ye found, and what d'ye want
+of me?'
+
+The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his words for an
+effective answer.
+
+'I have found', he finally intoned, 'something in a cupboard behind an ancient
+overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and buried the ashes
+where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be.'
+
+The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been sitting:
+
+'Damn ye, who did ye tell - and who'll believe it was he after these two full
+months, with me alive? What d'ye mean to do?'
+
+Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as he
+calmed the patient with a gesture.
+
+'I have told no one. This is no common case - it is a madness out of time and a
+horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists
+could ever fathom or grapple with. Thank God some chance has left inside me
+the spark of imagination, that I might not go astray in thinking out this thing.
+You cannot deceive me, Joseph Curwen, for I know that your accursed magic is
+true!'
+
+'I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastened on
+your double and descendant; I know how you drew him into the past and got
+him to raise you up from your detestable grave; I know how he kept you hidden
+in his laboratory while you studied modern things and roved abroad as a
+vampire by night, and how you later shewed yourself in beard and glasses that
+no one might wonder at your godless likeness to him; I know what you resolved
+to do when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the world's tombs, and at
+what you planned afterward , and I know how you did it.'
+
+'You left off your beard and glasses and fooled the guards around the house.
+They thought it was he who went in, and they thought it was he who came out
+when you had strangled and hidden him. But you hadn't reckoned on the
+
+
+
+
+different contents of two minds. You were a fool, Joseph Curwen, to fancy that a
+mere visual identity would be enough. Why didn't you think of the speech and
+the voice and the handwriting? It hasn't worked, you see, after all. You know
+better than I who or what wrote that message in minuscules, but I will warn you
+it was not written in vain. There are abominations and blasphemies which must
+be stamped out, and I believe that the writer of those words will attend to Orne
+and Hutchinson. One of those creatures wrote you once, "do not call up any that
+you can not put down". You were undone once before, perhaps in that very way,
+and it may be that your own evil magic will undo you all again. Curwen, a man
+can't tamper with Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have
+woven will rise up to wipe you out.'
+
+But here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from the creature before
+him. Hopelessly at bay, weaponless, and knowing that any show of physical
+violence would bring a score of attendants to the doctor's rescue, Joseph Curwen
+had recourse to his one ancient ally, and began a series of cabbalistic motions
+with his forefingers as his deep, hollow voice, now unconcealed by feigned
+hoarseness, bellowed out the opening words of a terrible formula.
+
+'PER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI SABAOTH, METRATON
+
+
+
+But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside began to
+howl, and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the bay, the doctor
+commenced the solemn and measured intonation of that which he had meant all
+along to recite. An eye for an eye - magic for magic - let the outcome shew how
+well the lesson of the abyss had been learned! So in a clear voice Marinus
+Bicknell Willett began the second of that pair of formulae whose first had raised
+the writer of those minuscules - the cryptic invocation whose heading was the
+Dragon's Tail, sign of the descending node -
+
+OGTHROD AI'F
+
+GEB'L-EE'H
+
+YOG-SOTHOTH
+
+'NGAH'NG AI'Y
+
+ZHRO!
+
+At the very first word from Willett's mouth the previously commenced formula
+of the patient stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster made wild motions
+with his arms until they too were arrested. When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth
+was uttered, the hideous change began. It was not merely a dissolution, but
+rather a transformation or recapitulation; and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint
+before the rest of the incantation could be pronounced.
+
+
+
+
+But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden secrets
+never troubled the world again. The madness out of time had subsided, and the
+case of Charles Dexter Ward was closed. Opening his eyes before staggering out
+of that room of horror. Dr. Willett saw that what he had kept in memory had not
+been kept amiss. There had, as he had predicted, been no need for acids. For like
+his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor
+as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.
+
+
+
+
+The Cats of Ulthar
+
+Written on JunelS, 1920
+
+Published in November 1920 in The Tryout
+
+It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat;
+and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the
+fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He
+is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe
+and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and
+sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is
+more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
+
+In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old
+cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbors.
+Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the
+night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at
+twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in
+trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of
+the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying
+was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the
+old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of
+the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under
+spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of
+cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as
+brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray
+toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable
+oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament
+impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his
+children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew
+not whence it is all cats first came.
+
+One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow
+cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving
+folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they
+told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the
+land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to
+strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange
+figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions. And the
+leader of the caravan wore a headdress with two horns and a curious disk
+betwixt the horns.
+
+
+
+
+There was in this singular caravan a Httle boy with no father or mother, but only
+a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left
+him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young,
+one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the
+dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sat playing with
+his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
+
+On the third morning of the wanderers' stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his
+kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of
+the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard
+these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He
+stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could
+understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand,
+since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the
+clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his
+petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic
+things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked disks. Nature is full of
+such illusions to impress the imaginative.
+
+That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the
+householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was
+not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large
+and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster,
+swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of
+Menes' kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean
+notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to
+suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one
+durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper's son,
+vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard
+under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage,
+two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers
+did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared
+that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide
+the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
+
+So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at dawn—
+behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black,
+grey, striped, yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the
+cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one
+another of the affair, and marveled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it
+was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the
+cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the
+refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk
+
+
+
+
+was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar
+would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
+
+It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at
+dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked
+that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away.
+In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the
+strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful
+to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses.
+And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly
+picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles
+crawling in the shadowy corners.
+
+There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the
+coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang
+and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper's
+son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the
+old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his
+black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the
+doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in
+the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
+
+And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by
+traders in Hatheg and discussed by travelers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no
+man may kill a cat.
+
+
+
+
+The Colour Out of Space
+
+Written in March of 1927
+
+Published in September 1927 in Amazing Stories
+
+West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that
+no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope
+fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the
+glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with
+squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in
+the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys
+crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
+
+The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-
+Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and
+departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but
+because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination,
+and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the
+foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls
+from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the
+only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to
+do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads
+around Arkham.
+
+There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight
+where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was
+laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst
+the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even
+when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods
+will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose
+surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange
+days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean,
+and all the mystery of primal earth.
+
+When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me
+the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old
+town full of witch legends I thought the evil must he something which grandams
+had whispered to children through centuries. The name "blasted heath" seemed
+to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore
+of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for
+myself, end ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder mystery. It was
+
+
+
+
+morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too
+thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There
+was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft
+with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
+
+In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside
+farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only 6ne or
+two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and
+briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon
+everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and
+the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I
+did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep
+in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some
+forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.
+
+But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I
+came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such
+a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the
+phrase from having seen this one particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed
+it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over these five
+acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by
+acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line,
+but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about
+approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and
+past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a
+fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it
+were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim.
+As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney
+and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose
+stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the
+long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled
+no more at the frightened whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house
+or ruin near; even in the old days the place must have been lonely and remote.
+And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back
+to the town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds
+would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept
+into my soul.
+
+In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what
+was meant by that phrase "strange days" which so many evasively muttered. I
+could not, however, get any good answersl except that all the mystery was much
+more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but
+something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the
+
+
+
+
+'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be
+exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's
+crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone
+in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was
+a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour
+which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent
+knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door
+could could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had
+expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and
+white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.
+
+Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter
+of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the
+district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, and
+before I knew it had graNped quite as much of the subject as any man I had
+talked with in Arkham. He was not like other rustics I bad known in the sections
+where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old
+wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been
+had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all that he
+showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had
+roamed all his life. They were better under water now - better under water since
+the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his
+body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and
+impressively.
+
+It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and
+whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to
+recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew only
+by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his
+sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder
+that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak
+much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to
+have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to -
+Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old forest
+and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black
+well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon
+be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery
+fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night
+- at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink
+the new city water of Arkham.
+
+It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been
+no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods
+
+
+
+
+were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the
+devil held court beside a curious 'lone altar older than the Indians. These were
+not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange
+days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in
+the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all
+Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in
+the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house
+which had stood where the blasted heath was to come - the trim white Nahum
+Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
+
+Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at
+Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were
+fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three
+professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see
+the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum
+had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed
+out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the
+archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do
+not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed
+faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found
+it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged
+rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took
+it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece
+refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and
+seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing
+smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps
+they had taken less than they thought.
+
+The day after that-all this was in June of '82-the professors had trooped out again
+in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things
+the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a
+glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange
+stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered
+laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on
+charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself
+absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-
+hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its
+luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the
+college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the
+spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal
+spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical
+properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when
+faced by the unknown.
+
+
+
+
+Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did
+nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely
+hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in
+recalling all these things, but recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in
+the usual order of use. There were am monia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether,
+nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew
+steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling,
+there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked the substance
+at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and
+after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the
+Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown
+very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker
+that they left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The
+next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred
+spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.
+
+All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he
+went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his
+wife did not accompany him. It had now most cer tainly shrunk, and even the
+sober professors could not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the
+dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth
+had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, it
+was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface curiously
+as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and chisel. They gouged
+deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw that the core
+of the thing was not quite homogeneous.
+
+They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule
+embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in
+the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was
+only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon
+tapping it appeared to promise both brittle ness and hollowness. One of the
+professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little
+pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the
+puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and
+all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing
+substance wasted away.
+
+Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by
+drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen which proved, however,
+as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic,
+having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful
+acids, possessing an unknown spec trum, wasting away in air, and attacking
+
+
+
+
+silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no
+identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college scientists
+were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a
+piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and
+obedient to outside laws.
+
+That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to
+Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone,
+magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it
+had "drawn the lightning," as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six times
+within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard,
+and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient
+well-sweep, half-choked with a caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and
+the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was total; so
+that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the
+disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week,
+at the end of which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no
+residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had
+indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs
+outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of
+matter, force, and entity.
+
+As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate
+sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At
+least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of
+local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his wife
+and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged
+visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him
+after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had
+attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July
+and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre
+pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the
+shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years,
+and he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.
+
+Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and
+Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was
+growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that
+extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came
+sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not
+one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had
+crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced
+a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum
+
+
+
+
+sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that
+the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most of the other
+crops were in the upland lot along the road.
+
+Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual,
+and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too,
+seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going
+or their attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this
+reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household
+confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum
+himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was
+disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints
+of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to
+see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never
+specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy
+and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened
+without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house
+in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a
+rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than
+either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when
+brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect,
+and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every
+morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.
+
+In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting
+woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar
+specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way
+impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one
+ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw
+the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the
+people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had
+now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered
+legend was fast taking form.
+
+People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere
+else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store at
+Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and
+had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods
+across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held
+strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were
+monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as
+wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the
+abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in
+
+
+
+
+a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it
+went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course
+it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from the college
+had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
+
+One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore
+were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but
+all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral
+element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away.
+And as for the footprints and frightened horses - of course this was mere country
+talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There
+was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious
+rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the
+professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of
+dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later, recalled that the queer
+colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of
+light shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the
+brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this
+analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the
+property.
+
+The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed
+ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore
+that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not
+credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner
+family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which
+they could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of
+moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such
+moments increased week by week, till it became common speech that
+"something was wrong with all Nahum's folks." When the early saxifrage came
+out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but
+plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some
+blossoms to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that
+dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in which the
+dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's
+to tell a stolid city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak
+butterflies behaved in connection with these saxifrages.
+
+April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the
+road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation.
+All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony
+soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which
+only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane
+
+
+
+
+wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and
+leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some
+diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the' known tints of
+earth. The "Dutchman's breeches" became a thing of sinister menace, and the
+bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners
+thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided
+that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed
+and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land
+around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's
+strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for
+almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him
+waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on him, of
+course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at school
+each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an
+especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
+
+In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and
+crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and
+motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The
+Gardners took to watching at night - watching in all directions at random for
+something - they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that Thaddeus
+had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the
+window as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky.
+The boughs surely moved, and there was no 'wind. It must be the sap.
+Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's
+family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and
+what they could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton
+who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in
+Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all the
+farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the buggy-
+lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which everyone knew from the
+account must be Nahum's, the darkness had been less thick. A dim though
+distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and
+blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence
+appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.
+
+The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the
+lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then
+Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not
+long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the
+verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of
+brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his
+visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were
+
+
+
+
+virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their errands in
+town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was
+surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
+
+It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor
+woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her
+raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things
+moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not
+wholly sounds. Something was taken away - she was being drained of something
+- something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be - someone must make
+it keep off - nothing was ever still in the night - the walls and windows shifted.
+Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the
+house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her
+expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and
+Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep
+her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours,
+and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly
+luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby
+vegetation.
+
+It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused
+them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible.
+There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened
+the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week
+to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and
+unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be
+shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but
+found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the
+end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men used their own
+strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching.
+And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers
+whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out
+grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and
+distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such
+blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The
+strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their
+hives and taken to the woods.
+
+By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and
+Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His
+wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant
+state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the
+boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realised that
+
+
+
+
+the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid
+nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher
+ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the
+warning, for he had by that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant
+things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as
+listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did
+their thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was
+something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another
+world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.
+
+Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a
+pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and
+sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about "the moving colours
+down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave
+about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and
+hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his
+mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors
+was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some
+terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully
+imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the
+brother who had been his greatest playmate.
+
+Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry
+turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome
+upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo
+loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course
+useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach
+his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine
+began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their
+eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for
+they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the
+cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled
+or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the
+last stages - and death was always the result - there would be a greying and
+turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of
+poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of
+prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can
+pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease - yet what disease
+could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest
+came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and poultry
+were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all
+vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some
+
+
+
+
+time before, but their going was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no
+mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.
+
+On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous
+news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come
+in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family
+plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There could have been
+nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were intact;
+but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the
+stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror
+seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence
+of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi
+accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might
+to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had
+come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him;
+and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's
+screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring
+look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached,
+Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that
+spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not
+have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more
+imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he
+been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must
+inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the
+screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.
+
+Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in
+the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs.
+Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was gone.
+He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had never
+come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was
+about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard
+then, but before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no
+glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the time
+Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and
+the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he
+had found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and
+apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern;
+while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to
+hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs.
+Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale,
+could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the
+people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city
+
+
+
+
+people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin
+was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and
+heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and
+Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he
+could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's
+ways so far as he knew.
+
+For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about
+what might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a
+visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor
+was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was shocking -
+greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle
+wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the
+grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel
+had come from some subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was
+alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but
+perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room was
+deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for
+more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was
+unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came
+down the chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him
+any more comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest
+cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more
+sorrow.
+
+Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing
+Zenas. "In the well - he lives in the well - " was all that the clouded father would
+say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the mad
+wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. "Nabby? Why, here she is!" was the
+surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for
+himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their
+nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close
+and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of the
+four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried various keys of the
+ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some fumbling
+Ammi threw open the low white door.
+
+It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the
+crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked
+floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to
+retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air.
+When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more
+clearly he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud
+
+
+
+
+eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some
+hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a
+present horror numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor
+that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had
+sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous
+monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the
+nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about
+the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to
+crumble.
+
+Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the
+comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which
+cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes
+cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic
+room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a
+deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone
+but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked
+conscious through that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him.
+There would be Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and
+removed to some place where he could be cared for.
+
+Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He
+even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the
+clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What
+presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear, he heard
+still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a
+most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction.
+With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably
+of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this
+into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward,
+but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle
+of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread
+expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow step - and merciful
+Heaven! - the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight;
+steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.
+
+Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at
+once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and
+buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to
+guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been another sound
+out there. A sort of liquid splash - water - it must have been the well. He had left
+Hero untied near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping and
+knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably
+
+
+
+
+ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it buih before 1670,
+and the gambrel roof no later than 1730.
+
+A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's
+grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose.
+Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the
+kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no
+longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion.
+Whether it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces,
+Ammi could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in
+the last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far
+advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off.
+Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that
+had been a face. "What was it, Nahum - what was it?" He whispered, and the
+cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.
+
+"Nothin'... nothin'... the colour... it burns... cold an' wet, but it burns... it lived
+in the well... I seen it... a kind of smoke... jest like the flowers last spring... the
+well shone at night... Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas... everything alive... suckin'
+the life out of everything... in that stone... it must a' come in that stone pizened
+the whole place... dun't know what it wants... that round thing them men from
+the college dug outen the stone. . . they smashed it. . . it was the same colour. . . jest
+the same, like the flowers an' plants... must a' ben more of 'em... seeds...
+seeds... they growed... I seen it the fust time this week... must a' got strong on
+Zenas... he was a big boy, full o' life... it beats down your mind an' then gets
+ye... burns ye up... in the well water... you was right about that... evil water...
+Zenas never come back from the well... can't git away... draws ye... ye know
+summ'at's comin' but tain't no use... I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was
+took... whar's Nabby, Ammi?... my head's no good... dun't know how long
+sense I fed her. . . it'll git her ef we ain't keerful. . . jest a colour. . . her face is gittin'
+to hev that colour sometimes towards night... an' it burns an' sucks... it come
+from some place whar things ain't as they is here... one o' them professors said
+so. . . he was right. . . look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more. . . sucks the life out. . ."
+
+But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had
+completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and
+reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre
+pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass
+that well from which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the
+window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching
+buggy had not dislodged anything after all - the splash had been something else -
+something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.
+
+
+
+
+When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him
+and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he
+set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family
+was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum
+and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the
+cause seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He
+also stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable
+questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take
+three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical
+examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went
+much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of
+night over that accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people
+with him.
+
+The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and
+arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers
+were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in
+the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole
+aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two
+crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and
+even the medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine.
+Specimens could be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them -
+and here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college
+laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the
+spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the
+baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange meteor had yielded in
+the previous year. The property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a month,
+the dust thereafter consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.
+
+Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant
+to do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious
+to be away. But he could not help glancing nervously at the stony curb by the
+great sweep, and when a detective questioned him he admitted that Nahum had
+feared something down there so much so that he had never even thought of
+searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they
+empty and explore the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while
+pail after pail of rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground
+outside. The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their
+noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job as they
+had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is no need
+to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in
+part, though the vestiges were mainly skeletal. There were also a small deer and
+a large dog in about the same state, and a number of bones of small animals. The
+
+
+
+
+ooze and slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a
+man who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the
+wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any solid
+obstruction.
+
+Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when
+it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went
+indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light of a
+spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The men were
+frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common
+element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of live-
+stock and humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the
+tainted well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not
+believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor
+had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten
+nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very
+possibly. It might be a good idea to analyze it. But what peculiar madness could
+have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar-and the
+fragments showed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why
+was everything so grey and brittle?
+
+It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed
+the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds
+seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this new
+glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the
+black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little
+ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and
+as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this
+strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen
+that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the
+nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy
+vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that
+very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where
+nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and
+hateful current of vapour had brushed past him - and then poor Nahum had
+been taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last - said it was
+like the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway in the yard and
+the splash in the well-and now that well was belching forth to the night a pale
+insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.
+
+It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that tense
+moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder
+at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime.
+
+
+
+
+against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation
+seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't
+right - it was against Nature - and he thought of those terrible last words of his
+stricken friend, "It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here... one
+o' them professors said so..."
+
+All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, were
+now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door to
+do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. "Dun't go out thar,"
+he whispered. "They's more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin'
+lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some'at growed from
+a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June.
+Sucks an' burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar now,
+that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on
+everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it this last week. It
+must be somethin' from away off in the sky like the men from the college last
+year says the meteor stone was. The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like
+no way 0' God's world. It's some'at from beyond."
+
+So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the
+hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful
+moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous
+sets of fragments-two from the house and two from the well-in the woodshed
+behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths
+in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured
+he himself was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic
+room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever know
+what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not so
+far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not
+have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly increased strength and the
+special signs of purpose it was soon to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit
+sky.
+
+All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The
+others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the
+point at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need
+for words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer,
+and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering
+later on, that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary
+to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not
+long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the
+lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the
+standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm
+
+
+
+
+the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were
+twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic
+madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if
+jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors
+writhing and struggling below the black roots.
+
+Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed
+over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily.
+At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical
+from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a
+fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top
+height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each
+bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles'
+heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a
+glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed
+marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come
+to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well
+was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a
+sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious
+minds could form. It was no longer shining out; it was pouring out; and as the
+shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly
+into the sky.
+
+The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra
+bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of
+controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of
+the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly frightful,
+but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured forth for any
+earthly reward. With the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their
+restless branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood
+of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly pointed
+to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the west. They were
+commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so
+far unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and clopping in the road, and
+as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realized that the span of
+frantic greys had broken their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.
+
+The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were
+exchanged. "It spreads on everything organic that's been around here," muttered
+the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well
+gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something intangible. "It was
+awful," he added. "There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the
+feeling of something lurking under there." Ammi's horse still pawed and
+
+
+
+
+screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint
+quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. "It come from that stone - it
+growed down thar - it got everything livin' - it fed itself on 'em, mind and body -
+Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby - Nahum was the last - they all drunk the
+water - it got strong on 'em - it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they be
+here - now it's goin' home -"
+
+At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and
+began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator
+described differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no
+man before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched
+sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in
+horror and nausea. Words could not convey it - when Ammi looked out again
+the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the
+splintered shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next
+day. But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective
+silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In the
+absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to
+pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and the
+fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned
+windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the
+shelf and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it
+strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things must leave that
+house.
+
+Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the ten-
+acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look
+back till they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, for
+they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was bad enough passing
+the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their gnarled,
+fiendish contours; but thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high
+up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic
+bridge over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open
+meadows.
+
+When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the
+bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous
+unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as
+had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all
+straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of
+the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn
+and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned
+that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of
+
+
+
+
+cryptic poison from the well - seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating,
+straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.
+
+Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a
+rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and
+curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No
+watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of
+Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had
+melted into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to
+earth by the crackling in the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and
+crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the
+outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up
+from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of
+unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and
+sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and
+fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly
+reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in
+another second they had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to
+which the men dared not return, and all about was a mounting wind which
+seemed to sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked
+and howled, and lashed the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy,
+till soon the trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to
+show what was left down there at Nahum's.
+
+Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward
+Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them
+to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did
+not wish to cross the blighted, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the
+main road. For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was
+crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years
+to come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set
+their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed
+valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that
+stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down
+again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the
+sky. It was just a colour - but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And
+because Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant
+must still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.
+
+Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the
+horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new
+reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the sunlight
+changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the
+
+
+
+
+water will always be very deep - but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think
+I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with
+Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were not
+any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the cellar, some
+mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that nefandous well.
+Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and buried, and the buggy
+which they shortly returned to him, everything that had ever been living had
+gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever
+grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten
+by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in
+spite of the rural tales have named it "the blasted heath."
+
+The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college
+chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well,
+or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study
+the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the
+country notion that the blight is spreading - little by little, perhaps an inch a year.
+People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in the spring,
+and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never
+seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses - the few that
+are left in this motor age - grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot
+depend on their dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.
+
+They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the
+years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then
+the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live
+in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one
+sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of
+whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very
+horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is
+enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of
+strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods
+whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious about
+the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale.
+When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd
+timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
+
+Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know - that is all. There was no one but
+Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and
+all three professors who saw the aerolite and its coloured globule are dead. There
+were other globules - depend upon that. One must have fed itself and escaped,
+and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is still down the
+well - I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above the
+
+
+
+
+miasmal brink. The rustics say the bhght creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there
+is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon hatchhng is
+there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is it
+fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham
+tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at night.
+
+What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi
+described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of our
+cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and
+photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies
+whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to
+measure. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed
+realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere
+existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it
+throws open before our frenzied eyes.
+
+I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale
+was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible
+came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible - though I
+know not in what proportion - still remains. I shall be glad to see the water come.
+Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing -
+and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away?
+How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's - "Can't git away - draws
+ye - ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use - ". Ammi is such a good old
+man - when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to
+keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted,
+brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.
+
+
+
+
+The Descendant
+
+Written in 1926
+
+Published in 1938 in Leaves
+
+Writing on what my doctor tells me is my deathbed, my most hideous fear is that
+the man is wrong. I suppose I shall seem to be buried next week, but. . .
+
+In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all
+alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad.
+His room is filled with books of the tamest and most puerile kind, and hour after
+hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble pages. All he seeks from life is not to
+think. For some reason thought is very horrible to him, and anything which stirs
+the imagination he flees as a plague. He is very thin and grey and wrinkled, but
+there are those who declare he is not nearly so old as he looks. Fear has its grisly
+claws upon him, and a sound will make him start with staring eyes and sweat-
+beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he wishes to answer no
+questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete say it is very pitiful
+to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and no one feels sure whether
+he left the country or merely sank from sight in some hidden byway. It is a
+decade now since he moved into Gray's Inn, and of where he had been he would
+say nothing till the night young Williams bought the Necronomicon.
+
+Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved into the
+ancient house he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind about the grey
+wizened man in the next room. He forced his friendship where old friends dared
+not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that sat upon this gaunt, haggard
+watcher and listener. For that the man always watched and listened no one could
+doubt. He watched and listened with his mind more than with his eyes and ears,
+and strove every moment to drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay,
+insipid novels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears and
+scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would howl in unison till the last
+peal died reverberantly away.
+
+But try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of anything
+profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect and manner,
+but would feign a smile and a light tone and prattle feverishly and frantically of
+cheerful trifles; his voice every moment rising and thickening till at last it would
+split in a piping and incoherent falsetto. That his learning was deep and
+thorough, his most trivial remarks made abundantly clear; and Williams was not
+surprised to hear that he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developed that
+
+
+
+
+he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the
+Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when Williams tried to talk of
+the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit that there was
+anything unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when the subject of the
+supposed under crypts, hewn out of the solid crag that frowns on the North Sea,
+was brought up.
+
+So matters went till that night when Williams brought home the infamous
+Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded
+volume since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led
+him to ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller in Chandos Street; and he had
+always wondered why men paled when they spoke of it. The old bookseller had
+told him that only five copies were known to have survived the shocked edicts of
+the priests and lawgivers against it and that all of these were locked up with
+frightened care by custodians who had ventured to begin a reading of the hateful
+black-letter. But now, at last, he had not only found an accessible copy but had
+made it his own at a ludicrously low figure. It was at a Jew's shop in the squalid
+precincts of Clare Market, where he had often bought strange things before, and
+he almost fancied the gnarled old Levite smiled amidst tangles of beard as the
+great discovery was made. The bulky leather cover with the brass clasp had been
+so prominently visible, and the price was so absurdly slight.
+
+The one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into transports,
+and some of the diagrams set in the vague Latin text excited the tensest and most
+disquieting recollections in his brain. He felt it was highly necessary to get the
+ponderous thing home and begin deciphering it, and bore it out of the shop with
+such precipitate haste that the old Jew chuckled disturbingly behind him. But
+when at last it was safe in his room he found the combination of black-letter and
+debased idiom too much for his powers as a linguist, and reluctantly called on
+his strange, frightened friend for help with the twisted, mediaeval Latin. Lord
+Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked cat, and started violently when
+the young man entered. Then he saw the volume and shuddered wildly, and
+fainted altogether when Williams uttered the title. It was when he regained his
+senses that he told his story; told his fantastic figment of madness in frantic
+whispers, lest his friend be not quick to burn the accursed book and give wide
+scattering to its ashes.
+
+
+
+* * * *
+
+
+
+There must. Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the start;
+but it would never have come to a head if he had not explored too far. He was
+the nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginings went uncomfortably far back into
+the past- unbelievably far, if vague tradition could be heeded, for there were
+
+
+
+
+family tales of a descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Lunaeus Gabinius
+Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum
+in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for
+participation in certain rites unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius
+had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met
+together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons
+knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the
+west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the roths and circles and
+shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no certainty, of course,
+in the legend that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden
+cave and founded a line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were
+powerless to obliterate; or in the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the
+bold companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created
+Baron of Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were often told; and in
+truth the stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of
+Hadrian's Wall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar dreams when
+sleeping in the older parts of the castle, and had acquired a constant habit of
+looking back through his memory for half-amorphous scenes and patterns and
+impressions which formed no part of his waking experience. He became a
+dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and
+relationships once familiar, yet lying nowhere in the visible regions of earth.
+
+Filled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric vast and
+ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere of the
+known at every point, Northam in youth and young manhood drained in turn
+the founts of formal religion and occult mystery. Nowhere, however, could he
+find ease and content; and as he grew older the staleness and limitations of life
+became more and more maddening to him. During the 'nineties he dabbled in
+Satanism, and at all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which
+seemed to promise escape from the close vistas of science and the dully
+unvarying laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly's commerical account of
+Atlantis he absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort
+enthralled him with their vagaries. He would travel leagues to follow up a
+furtive village tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert of Araby
+to seek a Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever beheld. There
+rose within him the tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which
+if one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled
+so dimly at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might
+be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within his own half-explored brain
+that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives in forgotten
+dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and
+eternities beyond them.
+
+
+
+
+The Doom That Came to Sarnath
+
+Written on December 3, 1919
+
+Published June 1920 in The Scot
+
+There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of
+which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the
+mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.
+
+It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever
+the men of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake;
+the gray stone city of lb, which was old as the lake itself, and peopled with
+beings not pleasing to behold. Very odd and ugly were these beings, as indeed
+are most beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned. It is written on the
+brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings of lb were in hue as green as the
+lake and the mists that rise above it; that they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby
+lips, and curious ears, and were without voice. It is also written that they
+descended one night from the moon in a mist; they and the vast still lake and
+gray stone city lb. However this may be, it is certain that they worshipped a sea-
+green stone idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard; before
+which they danced horribly when the moon was gibbous. And it is written in the
+papyrus of Ilarnek, that they one day discovered fire, and thereafter kindled
+flames on many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written of these beings,
+because they lived in very ancient times, and man is young, and knows but little
+of the very ancient living things.
+
+After many eons men came to the land of Mnar, dark shepherd folk with their
+fleecy flocks, who built Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai.
+And certain tribes, more hardy than the rest, pushed on to the border of the lake
+and built Sarnath at a spot where precious metals were found in the earth.
+
+Not far from the gray city of lb did the wandering tribes lay the first stones of
+Sarnath, and at the beings of lb they marveled greatly. But with their marveling
+was mixed hate, for they thought it not meet that beings of such aspect should
+walk about the world of men at dusk. Nor did they like the strange sculptures
+upon the gray monoliths of lb, for why those sculptures lingered so late in the
+world, even until the coming men, none can tell; unless it was because the land
+of Mnar is very still, and remote from most other lands, both of waking and of
+dream.
+
+
+
+
+As the men of Sarnath beheld more of the beings of lb their hate grew, and it was
+not less because they found the beings weak, and soft as jelly to the touch of
+stones and arrows. So one day the young warriors, the slingers and the spearmen
+and the bowmen, marched against lb and slew all the inhabitants thereof,
+pushing the queer bodies into the lake with long spears, because they did not
+wish to touch them. And because they did not like the gray sculptured monoliths
+of lb they cast these also into the lake; wondering from the greatness of the labor
+how ever the stones were brought from afar, as they must have been, since there
+is naught like them in the land of Mnar or in the lands adjacent.
+
+Thus of the very ancient city of lb was nothing spared, save the sea-green stone
+idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young warriors
+took back with them as a symbol of conquest over the old gods and beings of Th,
+and as a sign of leadership in Mnar. But on the night after it was set up in the
+temple, a terrible thing must have happened, for weird lights were seen over the
+lake, and in the morning the people found the idol gone and the high-priest
+Taran-Ish lying dead, as from some fear unspeakable. And before he died, Taran-
+Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shaky strokes the sign
+of DOOM.
+
+After Taran-Ish there were many high-priests in Sarnath but never was the sea-
+green stone idol found. And many centuries came and went, wherein Sarnath
+prospered exceedingly, so that only priests and old women remembered what
+Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite. Betwixt Sarnath and the city
+of Ilarnek arose a caravan route, and the precious metals from the earth were
+exchanged for other metals and rare cloths and jewels and books and tools for
+artificers and all things of luxury that are known to the people who dwell along
+the winding river Ai and beyond. So Sarnath waxed mighty and learned and
+beautiful, and sent forth conquering armies to subdue the neighboring cities; and
+in time there sate upon a throne in Sarnath the kings of all the land of Mnar and
+of many lands adjacent.
+
+The wonder of the world and the pride of all mankind was Sarnath the
+magnificent. Of polished desert-quarried marble were its walls, in height three
+hundred cubits and in breadth seventy-five, so that chariots might pass each
+other as men drove them along the top. For full five hundred stadia did they run,
+being open only on the side toward the lake where a green stone sea-wall kept
+back the waves that rose oddly once a year at the festival of the destroying of lb.
+In Sarnath were fifty streets from the lake to the gates of the caravans, and fifty
+more intersecting them. With onyx were they paved, save those whereon the
+horses and camels and elephants trod, which were paved with granite. And the
+gates of Sarnath were as many as the landward ends of the streets, each of
+bronze, and flanked by the figures of lions and elephants carven from some stone
+
+
+
+
+no longer known among men. The houses of Sarnath were of glazed brick and
+chalcedony, each having its walled garden and crystal lakelet. With strange art
+were they builded, for no other city had houses like them; and travelers from
+Thraa and Ilarnek and Kadatheron marveled at the shining domes wherewith
+they were surmounted.
+
+But more marvelous still were the palaces and the temples, and the gardens
+made by Zokkar the olden king. There were many palaces, the last of which were
+mightier than any in Thraa or Ilarnek or Kadatheron. So high were they that one
+within might sometimes fancy himself beneath only the sky; yet when lighted
+with torches dipt in the oil of Dother their walls showed vast paintings of kings
+and armies, of a splendor at once inspiring and stupefying to the beholder. Many
+were the pillars of the palaces, all of tinted marble, and carven into designs of
+surpassing beauty. And in most of the palaces the floors were mosaics of beryl
+and lapis lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle and other choice materials, so
+disposed that the beholder might fancy himself walking over beds of the rarest
+flowers. And there were likewise fountains, which cast scented waters about in
+pleasing jets arranged with cunning art. Outshining all others was the palace of
+the kings of Mnar and of the lands adjacent. On a pair of golden crouching lions
+rested the throne, many steps above the gleaming floor. And it was wrought of
+one piece of ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece could
+have come. In that palace there were also many galleries, and many
+amphitheaters where lions and men and elephants battled at the pleasure of the
+kings. Sometimes the amphitheaters were flooded with water conveyed from the
+lake in mighty aqueducts, and then were enacted stirring sea-fights, or combats
+betwixt swimmers and deadly marine things.
+
+Lofty and amazing were the seventeen tower-like temples of Sarnath, fashioned
+of a bright multi-colored stone not known elsewhere. A full thousand cubits high
+stood the greatest among them, wherein the high-priests dwelt with a
+magnificence scarce less than that of the kings. On the ground were halls as vast
+and splendid as those of the palaces; where gathered throngs in worship of Zo-
+Kalar and Tamash and Lobon, the chief gods of Sarnath, whose incense-
+enveloped shrines were as the thrones of monarchs. Not like the eikons of other
+gods were those of Zo-Kalar and Tamash and Lobon. For so close to life were
+they that one might swear the graceful bearded gods themselves sate on the
+ivory thrones. And up unending steps of zircon was the tower-chamber,
+wherefrom the high-priests looked out over the city and the plains and the lake
+by day; and at the cryptic moon and significant stars and planets, and their
+reflections in the lake, at night. Here was done the very secret and ancient rite in
+detestation of Bokrug, the water-lizard, and here rested the altar of chrysolite
+which bore the Doom-scrawl of Taran-Ish.
+
+
+
+
+Wonderful likewise were the gardens made by Zokkar the olden king. In the
+center of Sarnath they lay, covering a great space and encircled by a high wall.
+And they were surmounted by a mighty dome of glass, through which shone the
+sun and moon and planets when it was clear, and from which were hung fulgent
+images of the sun and moon and stars and planets when it was not clear. In
+summer the gardens were cooled with fresh odorous breezes skilfully wafted by
+fans, and in winter they were heated with concealed fires, so that in those
+gardens it was always spring. There ran little streams over bright pebbles,
+dividing meads of green and gardens of many hues, and spanned by a multitude
+of bridges. Many were the waterfalls in their courses, and many were the hued
+lakelets into which they expanded. Over the streams and lakelets rode white
+swans, whilst the music of rare birds chimed in with the melody of the waters. In
+ordered terraces rose the green banks, adorned here and there with bowers of
+vines and sweet blossoms, and seats and benches of marble and porphyry. And
+there were many small shrines and temples where one might rest or pray to
+small gods.
+
+Each year there was celebrated in Sarnath the feast of the destroying of lb, at
+which time wine, song, dancing, and merriment of every kind abounded. Great
+honors were then paid to the shades of those who had annihilated the odd
+ancient beings, and the memory of those beings and of their elder gods was
+derided by dancers and lutanists crowned with roses from the gardens of
+Zokkar. And the kings would look out over the lake and curse the bones of the
+dead that lay beneath it.
+
+At first the high-priests liked not these festivals, for there had descended
+amongst them queer tales of how the sea-green eikon had vanished, and how
+Taran-Ish had died from fear and left a warning. And they said that from their
+high tower they sometimes saw lights beneath the waters of the lake. But as
+many years passed without calamity even the priests laughed and cursed and
+joined in the orgies of the feasters. Indeed, had they not themselves, in their high
+tower, often performed the very ancient and secret rite in detestation of Bokrug,
+the water-lizard? And a thousand years of riches and delight passed over
+Sarnath, wonder of the world.
+
+Gorgeous beyond thought was the feast of the thousandth year of the destroying
+of lb. For a decade had it been talked of in the land of Mnar, and as it drew nigh
+there came to Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants men from Thraa,
+Ilarnek, and Kadetheron, and all the cities of Mnar and the lands beyond. Before
+the marble walls on the appointed night were pitched the pavilions of princes
+and the tents of travelers. Within his banquet-hall reclined Nargis-Hei, the king,
+drunken with ancient wine from the vaults of conquered Pnoth, and surrounded
+by feasting nobles and hurrying slaves. There were eaten many strange delicacies
+
+
+
+
+at that feast; peacocks from the distant hills of Linplan, heels of camels from the
+Bnazic desert, nuts and spices from Sydathrian groves, and pearls from wave-
+washed Mtal dissolved in the vinegar of Thraa. Of sauces there were an untold
+number, prepared by the subtlest cooks in all Mnar, and suited to the palate of
+every feaster. But most prized of all the viands were the great fishes from the
+lake, each of vast size, and served upon golden platters set with rubies and
+diamonds.
+
+Whilst the king and his nobles feasted within the palace, and viewed the
+crowning dish as it awaited them on golden platters, others feasted elsewhere. In
+the tower of the great temple the priests held revels, and in pavilions without the
+walls the princes of neighboring lands made merry. And it was the high-priest
+Gnai-Kah who first saw the shadows that descended from the gibbous moon into
+the lake, and the damnable green mists that arose from the lake to meet the moon
+and to shroud in a sinister haze the towers and the domes of fated Sarnath.
+Thereafter those in the towers and without the walls beheld strange lights on the
+water, and saw that the gray rock Akurion, which was wont to rear high above it
+near the shore, was almost submerged. And fear grew vaguely yet swiftly, so
+that the princes of Ilarnek and of far Rokol took down and folded their tents and
+pavilions and departed, though they scarce knew the reason for their departing.
+
+Then, close to the hour of midnight, all the bronze gates of Sarnath burst open
+and emptied forth a frenzied throng that blackened the plain, so that all the
+visiting princes and travelers fled away in fright. For on the faces of this throng
+was writ a madness born of horror unendurable, and on their tongues were
+words so terrible that no hearer paused for proof. Men whose eyes were wild
+with fear shrieked aloud of the sight within the king's banquet-hall, where
+through the windows were seen no longer the forms of Nargis-Hei and his
+nobles and slaves, but a horde of indescribable green voiceless things with
+bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears; things which danced
+horribly, bearing in their paws golden platters set with rubies and diamonds and
+containing uncouth flames. And the princes and travelers, as they fled from the
+doomed city of Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants, looked again upon
+the mist-begetting lake and saw the gray rock Akurion was quite submerged.
+Through all the land of Mnar and the land adjacent spread the tales of those who
+had fled from Sarnath, and caravans sought that accursed city and its precious
+metals no more. It was long ere any travelers went thither, and even then only
+the brave and adventurous young men of yellow hair and blue eyes, who are no
+kin to the men of Mnar. These men indeed went to the lake to view Sarnath; but
+though they found the vast still lake itself, and the gray rock Akurion which
+rears high above it near the shore, they beheld not the wonder of the world and
+pride of all mankind. Where once had risen walls of three hundred cubits and
+towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had
+
+
+
+
+dwelt fifty million of men now crawled the detestable water-lizard. Not even the
+mines of precious metal remained. DOOM had come to Sarnath.
+
+But half buried in the rushes was spied a curious green idol; an exceedingly
+ancient idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard. That idol,
+enshrined in the high temple at Ilarnek, was subsequently worshipped beneath
+the gibbous moon throughout the land of Mnar.
+
+
+
+
+The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
+
+Written in January of 1927
+
+Published in Beyond the Wall of Sleep
+
+Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times
+was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All
+golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and
+arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in
+broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between
+delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while
+on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables
+harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods, a fanfare of
+supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as
+clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and
+expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and
+suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening
+need to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.
+
+He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what
+cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could
+not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when wonder
+and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth
+prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery gates toward
+further and surprising marvels. But each night as he stood on that high marble
+terrace with the curious urns and carven rail and looked off over that hushed
+sunset city of beauty and unearthly immanence he felt the bondage of dream's
+tyrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or descend the wide
+marmoreal fights flung endlessly down to where those streets of elder witchery
+lay outspread and beckoning.
+
+When for the third time he awakened with those flights still undescended and
+those hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to the
+hidden gods of dream that brood capricious above the clouds on unknown
+Kadath, in the cold waste where no man treads. But the gods made no answer
+and shewed no relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when he prayed
+to them in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the bearded priests of
+Nasht and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple with its pillar of flame lies not far
+from the gates of the waking world. It seemed, however, that his prayers must
+have been adversely heard, for after even the first of them he ceased wholly to
+
+
+
+
+behold the marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar had been mere
+accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of the gods.
+
+At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill
+lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from
+his mind. Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone
+before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath,
+veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal
+the onyx castle of the Great Ones.
+
+In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and talked
+of this design to the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the priests
+shook their pshent-bearing heads and vowed it would be the death of his soul.
+They pointed out that the Great Ones had shown already their wish, and that it is
+not agreeable to them to be harassed by insistent pleas. They reminded him, too,
+that not only had no man ever been to Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in
+what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands around our own
+world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or
+Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached, but only three
+human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the black impious
+gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three, two had come back quite mad.
+There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking
+final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no
+dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which
+blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity - the boundless daemon
+sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily
+in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled,
+maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed
+flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and
+absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless
+Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
+
+Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the
+cavern of flame, but still he resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the
+cold waste, wherever that might be, and to win from them the sight and
+remembrance and shelter of the marvellous sunset city. He knew that his journey
+would be strange and long, and that the Great Ones would be against it; but
+being old in the land of dream he counted on many useful memories and devices
+to aid him. So asking a formal blessing of the priests and thinking shrewdly on
+his course, he boldly descended the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper
+Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.
+
+
+
+
+In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping
+boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the
+furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world
+and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of
+men, though it would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours,
+events, and vanishments occur among men where the Zoogs have access, and it
+is well that they cannot travel far outside the world of dreams. But over the
+nearer parts of the dream world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and
+unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths
+in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the trunks
+of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered that they
+have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many
+dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter, however, had
+no fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering language and
+made many a treaty with them; having found through their help the splendid
+city of Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half
+the year the great King Kuranes, a man he had known by another name in life.
+Kuranes was the one soul who had been to the star-gulls and returned free from
+madness.
+
+Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks.
+Carter made fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs, and listened now and
+then for responses. He remembered one particular village of the creatures was in
+the centre of the wood, where a circle of great mossy stones in what was once a
+cleaning tells of older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, and toward this
+spot he hastened. He traced his way by the grotesque fungi, which always seem
+better nourished as one approaches the dread circle where elder beings danced
+and sacrificed. Finally the great light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister
+green and grey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and out of
+sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter knew he was
+close to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering sound, he waited patiently; and
+was at last rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching him. It was the
+Zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern their small,
+slippery brown outlines.
+
+Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole
+dim-litten region was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter
+unpleasantly, and one even nipped loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless
+spirits were soon restrained by their elders. The Council of Sages, recognizing the
+visitor, offered a gourd of fermented sap from a haunted tree unlike the others,
+which had grown from a seed dropt down by someone on the moon; and as
+Carter drank it ceremoniously a very strange colloquy began. The Zoogs did not,
+unfortunately, know where the peak of Kadath lies, nor could they even say
+
+
+
+
+whether the cold waste is in our dream world or in another. Rumours of the
+Great Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say that they were
+likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks
+they dance reminiscently when the moon is above and the clouds beneath.
+
+Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the others; and said
+that in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, there still lingered the last copy of those
+inconceivably old Pnakotic Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten
+boreal kingdoms and borne into the land of dreams when the hairy cannibal
+Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoe and slew all the heroes of the land
+of Lomar. Those manuscripts he said, told much of the gods, and besides, in
+Ulthar there were men who had seen the signs of the gods, and even one old
+priest who had scaled a great mountain to behold them dancing by moonlight.
+He had failed, though his companion had succeeded and perished namelessly.
+
+So Randolph Carter thanked the Zoogs, who fluttered amicably and gave him
+another gourd of moon-tree wine to take with him, and set out through the
+phosphorescent wood for the other side, where the rushing Skai flows down
+from the slopes of Lerion, and Hatheg and Nir and Ulthar dot the plain. Behind
+him, furtive and unseen, crept several of the curious Zoogs; for they wished to
+learn what might befall him, and bear back the legend to their people. The vast
+oaks grew thicker as he pushed on beyond the village, and he looked sharply for
+a certain spot where they would thin somewhat, standing quite dead or dying
+among the unnaturally dense fungi and the rotting mould and mushy logs of
+their fallen brothers. There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty
+slab of stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say
+that it bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of great
+mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for, the Zoogs do not pause near
+that expansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that all which is forgotten
+need not necessarily be dead, and they would not like to see the slab rise slowly
+and deliberately.
+
+Carter detoured at the proper place, and heard behind him the frightened
+fluttering of some of the more timid Zoogs. He had known they would follow
+him, so he was not disturbed; for one grows accustomed to the anomalies of
+these prying creatures. It was twilight when he came to the edge of the wood,
+and the strengthening glow told him it was the twilight of morning. Over fertile
+plains rolling down to the Skai he saw the smoke of cottage chimneys, and on
+every hand were the hedges and ploughed fields and thatched roofs of a peaceful
+land. Once he stopped at a farmhouse well for a cup of water, and all the dogs
+barked affrightedly at the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept through the grass
+behind. At another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about
+
+
+
+
+the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his
+wile would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.
+
+At noon he walked through the one broad high street of Nir, which he had once
+visited and which marked his farthest former travels in this direction; and soon
+afterward he came to the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central
+piece the masons had sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it thirteen-
+hundred years before. Once on the other side, the frequent presence of cats (who
+all arched their backs at the trailing Zoogs) revealed the near neighborhood of
+Ulthar; for in Ulthar, according to an ancient and significant law, no man may
+kill a cat. Very pleasant were the suburbs of Ulthar, with their little green
+cottages and neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the quaint town itself,
+with its old peaked roofs and overhanging upper stories and numberless
+chimney-pots and narrow hill streets where one can see old cobbles whenever
+the graceful cats afford space enough. Carter, the cats being somewhat dispersed
+by the half-seen Zoogs, picked his way directly to the modest Temple of the
+Elder Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once within
+that venerable circular tower of ivied stone - which crowns Ulthar's highest hill -
+he sought out the patriarch Atal, who had been up the forbidden peak Hatheg-
+Kia in the stony desert and had come down again alive.
+
+Atal, seated on an ivory dais in a festooned shrine at the top of the temple, was
+fully three centuries old; but still very keen of mind and memory. From him
+Carter learned many things about the gods, but mainly that they are indeed only
+Earth's gods, ruling feebly our own dreamland and having no power or
+habitation elsewhere. They might, Atal said, heed a man's prayer if in good
+humour; but one must not think of climbing to their onyx stronghold atop
+Kadath in the cold waste. It was lucky that no man knew where Kadath towers,
+for the fruits of ascending it would be very grave. Atal's companion Banni the
+Wise had been drawn screaming into the sky for climbing merely the known
+peak of Hatheg-Kia. With unknown Kadath, if ever found, matters would be
+much worse; for although Earth's gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise
+mortal, they are protected by the Other Gods from Outside, whom it is better not
+to discuss. At least twice in the world's history the Other Gods set their seal upon
+Earth's primal granite; once in antediluvian times, as guessed from a drawing in
+those parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts too ancient to be read, and once on
+Hatheg-Kia when Barzai the Wise tried to see Earth's gods dancing by
+moonlight. So, Atal said, it would be much better to let all gods alone except in
+tactful prayers.
+
+Carter, though disappointed by Atal's discouraging advice and by the meagre
+help to be found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of
+Hsan, did not wholly despair. First he questioned the old priest about that
+
+
+
+
+marvellous sunset city seen from the railed terrace, thinking that perhaps he
+might find it without the gods' aid; but Atal could tell him nothing. Probably,
+Atal said, the place belonged to his especial dream world and not to the general
+land of vision that many know; and conceivably it might be on another planet. In
+that case Earth's gods could not guide him if they would. But this was not likely,
+since the stopping of the dreams shewed pretty clearly that it was something the
+Great Ones wished to hide from him.
+
+Then Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless host so many draughts of
+the moon-wine which the Zoogs had given him that the old man became
+irresponsibly talkative. Robbed of his reserve, poor Atal babbled freely of
+forbidden things; telling of a great image reported by travellers as carved on the
+solid rock of the mountain Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab in the Southern Sea, and
+hinting that it may be a likeness which Earth's gods once wrought of their own
+features in the days when they danced by moonlight on that mountain. And he
+hiccoughed likewise that the features of that image are very strange, so that one
+might easily recognize them, and that they are sure signs of the authentic race of
+the gods.
+
+Now the use of all this in finding the gods became at once apparent to Carter. It
+is known that in disguise the younger among the Great Ones often espouse the
+daughters of men, so that around the borders of the cold waste wherein stands
+Kadath the peasants must all bear their blood. This being so, the way to find that
+waste must be to see the stone face on Ngranek and mark the features; then,
+having noted them with care, to search for such features among living men.
+Where they are plainest and thickest, there must the gods dwell nearest; and
+whatever stony waste lies back of the villages in that place must be that wherein
+stands Kadath.
+
+Much of the Great Ones might be learnt in such regions, and those with their
+blood might inherit little memories very useful to a seeker. They might not know
+their parentage, for the gods so dislike to be known among men that none can be
+found who has seen their faces wittingly; a thing which Carter realized even as
+he sought to scale Kadath. But they would have queer lofty thoughts
+misunderstood by their fellows, and would sing of far places and gardens so
+unlike any known even in the dreamland that common folk would call them
+fools; and from all this one could perhaps learn old secrets of Kadath, or gain
+hints of the marvellous sunset city which the gods held secret. And more, one
+might in certain cases seize some well-loved child of a god as hostage; or even
+capture some young god himself, disguised and dwelling amongst men with a
+comely peasant maiden as his bride.
+
+
+
+
+Atal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its isle of Oriab; and
+recommended that Carter follow the singing Skai under its bridges down to the
+Southern Sea; where no burgess of Ulthar has ever been, but whence the
+merchants come in boats or with long caravans of mules and two-wheeled carts.
+There is a great city there, Dylath-Leen, but in Ulthar its reputation is bad
+because of the black three-banked galleys that sail to it with rubies from no
+clearly named shore. The traders that come from those galleys to deal with the
+jewellers are human, or nearly so, but the rowers are never beheld; and it is not
+thought wholesome in Ulthar that merchants should trade with black ships from
+unknown places whose rowers cannot be exhibited.
+
+By the time he had given this information Atal was very drowsy, and Carter laid
+him gently on a couch of inlaid ebony and gathered his long beard decorously on
+his chest. As he turned to go, he observed that no suppressed fluttering followed
+him, and wondered why the Zoogs had become so lax in their curious pursuit.
+Then he noticed all the sleek complacent cats of Ulthar licking their chops with
+unusual gusto, and recalled the spitting and caterwauling he had faintly heard,
+in lower parts of the temple while absorbed in the old priest's conversation. He
+recalled, too, the evilly hungry way in which an especially impudent young
+Zoog had regarded a small black kitten in the cobbled street outside. And
+because he loved nothing on earth more than small black kittens, he stooped and
+petted the sleek cats of Ulthar as they licked their chops, and did not mourn
+because those inquisitive Zoogs would escort him no farther.
+
+It was sunset now, so Carter stopped at an ancient inn on a steep little street
+overlooking the lower town. And as he went out on the balcony of his room and
+gazed down at the sea of red tiled roofs and cobbled ways and the pleasant fields
+beyond, all mellow and magical in the slanted light, he swore that Ulthar would
+be a very likely place to dwell in always, were not the memory of a greater
+sunset city ever goading one onward toward unknown perils. Then twilight fell,
+and the pink walls of the plastered gables turned violet and mystic, and little
+yellow lights floated up one by one from old lattice windows. And sweet bells
+pealed in. the temple tower above, and the first star winked softly above the
+meadows across the Skai. With the night came song, and Carter nodded as the
+lutanists praised ancient days from beyond the filigreed balconies and tesselated
+courts of simple Ulthar. And there might have been sweetness even in the voices
+of Ulthar's many cats, but that they were mostly heavy and silent from strange
+feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only
+to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap
+from tall housetops, but one small black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in
+Carter's lap to purr and play, and curled up near his feet when he lay down at
+last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed with fragrant, drowsy herbs.
+
+
+
+
+In the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound for Dylath-Leen with
+the spun wool of Ulthar and the cabbages of Ulthar's busy farms. And for six
+days they rode with tinkhng bells on the smooth road beside the Skai; stopping
+some nights at the inns of little quaint fishing towns, and on other nights
+camping under the stars while snatches of boatmen's songs came from the placid
+river. The country was very beautiful, with green hedges and groves and
+picturesque peaked cottages and octagonal windmills.
+
+On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon ahead, and then the tall
+black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its
+thin angular towers looks in the distance like a bit of the Giant's Causeway, and
+its streets are dark and uninviting. There are many dismal sea-taverns near the
+myriad wharves, and all the town is thronged with the strange seamen of every
+land on earth and of a few which are said to be not on earth. Carter questioned
+the oddly robed men of that city about the peak of Ngranek on the isle of Oriab,
+and found that they knew of it well.
+
+Ships came from Bahama on that island, one being due to return thither in only a
+month, and Ngranek is but two days' zebra-ride from that port. But few had seen
+the stone face of the god, because it is on a very difficult side of Ngranek, which
+overlooks only sheer crags and a valley of sinister lava. Once the gods were
+angered with men on that side, and spoke of the matter to the Other Gods.
+
+It was hard to get this information from the traders and sailors in Dylath-Leen's
+sea taverns, because they mostly preferred to whisper of the black galleys. One of
+them was due in a week with rubies from its unknown shore, and the townsfolk
+dreaded to see it dock. The mouths of the men who came from it to trade were
+too wide, and the way their turbans were humped up in two points above their
+foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes were the shortest and
+queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms. But worst of all was the matter of the
+unseen rowers. Those three banks of oars moved too briskly and accurately and
+vigorously to be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to stay in port for
+weeks while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its crew. It was not
+fair to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to the grocers and butchers, either;
+for not a scrap of provisions was ever sent aboard. The merchants took only gold
+and stout black slaves from Parg across the river. That was all they ever took,
+those unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen rowers; never anything
+from the butchers and grocers, but only gold and the fat black men of Parg
+whom they bought by the pound. And the odours from those galleys which the
+south wind blew in from the wharves are not to be described. Only by constantly
+smoking strong thagweed could even the hardiest denizen of the old sea-taverns
+bear them. Dylath-Leen would never have tolerated the black galleys had such
+
+
+
+
+rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine in all Earth's dreamland was
+known to produce their like.
+
+Of these things Dylath-Leen's cosmopolitan folk chiefly gossiped whilst Carter
+waited patiently for the ship from Bahama, which might bear him to the isle
+whereon carven Ngranek towers lofty and barren. Meanwhile he did not fall to
+seek through the haunts of far travellers for any tales they might have concerning
+Kadath in the cold waste or a marvellous city of marble walls and silver
+fountains seen below terraces in the sunset. Of these things, however, he learned
+nothing; though he once thought that a certain old slant-eyed merchant looked
+queerly intelligent when the cold waste was spoken of. This man was reputed to
+trade with the horrible stone villages on the icy desert plateau of Leng, which no
+healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar. He was even
+rumoured to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be Described, which wears
+a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone
+monastery. That such a person might well have had nibbling traffick with such
+beings as may conceivably dwell in the cold waste was not to be doubted, but
+Carter soon found that it was no use questioning him.
+
+Then the black galley slipped into the harbour past the basalt wale and the tall
+lighthouse, silent and alien, and with a strange stench that the south wind drove
+into the town. Uneasiness rustled through the taverns along that waterfront, and
+after a while the dark wide-mouthed merchants with humped turbans and short
+feet clumped steathily ashore to seek the bazaars of the jewellers. Carter
+observed them closely, and disliked them more the longer he looked at them.
+Then he saw them drive the stout black men of Parg up the gangplank grunting
+and sweating into that singular galley, and wondered in what lands - or if in any
+lands at all - those fat pathetic creatures might be destined to serve.
+
+And on the third evening of that galley's stay one of the uncomfortable
+merchants spoke to him, smirking sinfully and hinting of what he had heard in
+the taverns of Carter's quest. He appeared to have knowledge too secret for
+public telling; and although the sound of his voice was unbearably hateful.
+Carter felt that the lore of so far a traveller must not be overlooked. He bade him
+therefore be his guest in locked chambers above, and drew out the last of the
+Zoogs' moon-wine to loosen his tongue. The strange merchant drank heavily, but
+smirked unchanged by the draught. Then he drew forth a curious bottle with
+wine of his own, and Carter saw that the bottle was a single hollowed ruby,
+grotesquely carved in patterns too fabulous to be comprehended. He offered his
+wine to his host, and though Carter took only the least sip, he felt the dizziness of
+space and the fever of unimagined jungles. All the while the guest had been
+smiling more and more broadly, and as Carter slipped into blankness the last
+thing he saw was that dark odious face convulsed with evil laughter and
+
+
+
+
+something quite unspeakable where one of the two frontal puffs of that orange
+turban had become disarranged with the shakings of that epileptic mirth.
+
+Carter next had consciousness amidst horrible odours beneath a tent-like awning
+on the deck of a ship, with the marvellous coasts of the Southern Sea flying by in
+unnatural swiftness. He was not chained, but three of the dark sardonic
+merchants stood grinning nearby, and the sight of those humps in their turbans
+made him almost as faint as did the stench that filtered up through the sinister
+hatches. He saw slip past him the glorious lands and cities of which a fellow-
+dreamer of earth - a lighthouse-keeper in ancient Kingsport - had often
+discoursed in the old days, and recognized the templed terraces of Zak, abode of
+forgotten dreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a
+thousand wonders where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnel gardens of Zura,
+land of pleasures unattained, and the twin headlands of crystal, meeting above in
+a resplendent arch, which guard the harbour of Sona-Nyl, blessed land of fancy.
+
+Past all these gorgeous lands the malodourous ship flew unwholesomely, urged
+by the abnormal strokes of those unseen rowers below. And before the day was
+done Carter saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt
+Pillars of the West, beyond which simple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but
+which wise dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein
+the oceans of earth's dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot
+through the empty spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful
+voids outside the ordered universe where the daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws
+hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the
+Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and
+messenger Nyarlathotep.
+
+Meanwhile the three sardonic merchants would give no word of their intent,
+though Carter well knew that they must be leagued with those who wished to
+hold him from his quest. It is understood in the land of dream that the Other
+Gods have many agents moving among men; and all these agents, whether
+wholly human or slightly less than human, are eager to work the will of those
+blind and mindless things in return for the favour of their hideous soul and
+messenger, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. So Carter inferred that the
+merchants of the humped turbans, hearing of his daring search for the Great
+Ones in their castle of Kadath, had decided to take him away and deliver him to
+Nyarlathotep for whatever nameless bounty might be offered for such a prize.
+What might be the land of those merchants in our known universe or in the
+eldritch spaces outside. Carter could not guess; nor could he imagine at what
+hellish trysting-place they would meet the crawling chaos to give him up and
+claim their reward. He knew, however, that no beings as nearly human as these
+
+
+
+
+would dare approach the ultimate nighted throne of the daemon Azathoth in the
+formless central void.
+
+At the set of sun the merchants licked their excessively wide lips and glared
+hungrily and one of them went below and returned from some hidden and
+offensive cabin with a pot and basket of plates. Then they squatted close together
+beneath the awning and ate the smoking meat that was passed around. But when
+they gave Carter a portion, he found something very terrible in the size and
+shape of it; so that he turned even paler than before and cast that portion into the
+sea when no eye was on him. And again he thought of those unseen rowers
+beneath, and of the suspicious nourishment from which their far too mechanical
+strength was derived.
+
+It was dark when the galley passed betwixt the Basalt Pillars of the West and the
+sound of the ultimate cataract swelled portentous from ahead. And the spray of
+that cataract rose to obscure the stars, and the deck grew damp, and the vessel
+reeled in the surging current of the brink. Then with a queer whistle and plunge
+the leap was taken, and Carter felt the terrors of nightmare as earth fell away and
+the great boat shot silent and comet-like into planetary space. Never before had
+he known what shapeless black things lurk and caper and flounder all through
+the aether, leering and grinning at such voyagers as may pass, and sometimes
+feeling about with slimy paws when some moving object excites their curiosity.
+These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and like them are blind and
+without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.
+
+But that offensive galley did not aim as far as Carter had feared, for he soon saw
+that the helmsman was steering a course directly for the moon. The moon was a
+crescent shining larger and larger as they approached it, and shewing its singular
+craters and peaks uncomfortably. The ship made for the edge, and it soon
+became clear that its destination was that secret and mysterious side which is
+always turned away from earth, and which no fully human person, save perhaps
+the dreamer Snireth-Ko, has ever beheld. The close aspect of the moon as the
+galley drew near proved very disturbing to Carter, and he did not like the size
+and shape of the ruins which crumbled here and there. The dead temples on the
+mountains were so placed that they could have glorified no suitable or
+wholesome gods, and in the symmetries of the broken columns there seemed to
+be some dark and inner meaning which did not invite solution. And what the
+structure and proportions of the olden worshippers could have been. Carter
+steadily refused to conjecture.
+
+When the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those lands unseen by man,
+there appeared in the queer landscape certain signs of life, and Carter saw many
+low, broad, round cottages in fields of grotesque whitish fungi. He noticed that
+
+
+
+
+these cottages had no windows, and thought that their shape suggested the huts
+of Esquimaux. Then he ghmpsed the oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that
+the voyage was once more to be by water - or at least through some liquid. The
+galley struck the surface with a peculiar sound, and the odd elastic way the
+waves received it was very perplexing to Carter.
+
+They now slid along at great speed, once passing and hailing another galley of
+kindred form, but generally seeing nothing but that curious sea and a sky that
+was black and star-strewn even though the sun shone scorchingly in it.
+
+There presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking coast, and Carter
+saw the thick unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way they leaned and bent, the
+manner in which they were clustered, and the fact that they had no windows at
+all, was very disturbing to the prisoner; and he bitterly mourned the folly which
+had made him sip the curious wine of that merchant with the humped turban.
+As the coast drew nearer, and the hideous stench of that city grew stronger, he
+saw upon the jagged hills many forests, some of whose trees he recognized as
+akin to that solitary moon-tree in the enchanted wood of earth, from whose sap
+the small brown Zoogs ferment their curious wine.
+
+Carter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome wharves ahead,
+and the better he saw them the worse he began to fear and detest them. For they
+were not men at all, or even approximately men, but great greyish-white slippery
+things which could expand and contract at will, and whose principal shape -
+though it often changed - was that of a sort of toad without any eyes, but with a
+curious vibrating mass of short pink tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague
+snout. These objects were waddling busily about the wharves, moving bales and
+crates and boxes with preternatural strength, and now and then hopping on or
+off some anchored galley with long oars in their forepaws. And now and then
+one would appear driving a herd of clumping slaves, which indeed were
+approximate human beings with wide mouths like those merchants who traded
+in Dylath-Leen; only these herds, being without turbans or shoes or clothing, did
+not seem so very human after all. Some of the slaves - the fatter ones, whom a
+sort of overseer would pinch experimentally - were unloaded from ships and
+nailed in crates which workers pushed into the low warehouses or loaded on
+great lumbering vans.
+
+Once a van was hitched and driven off, and the, fabulous thing which drew it
+was such that Carter gasped, even after having seen the other monstrosities of
+that hateful place. Now and then a small herd of slaves dressed and turbaned
+like the dark merchants would be driven aboard a galley, followed by a great
+crew of the slippery toad-things as officers, navigators, and rowers. And Carter
+saw that the almost-human creatures were reserved for the more ignominious
+
+
+
+
+kinds of servitude which required no strength, such as steering and cooking,
+fetching and carrying, and bargaining with men on the earth or other planets
+where they traded. These creatures must have been convenient on earth, for they
+were truly not unlike men when dressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and
+could haggle in the shops of men without embarrassment or curious
+explanations. But most of them, unless lean or ill-favoured, were unclothed and
+packed in crates and drawn off in lumbering lorries by fabulous things.
+Occasionally other beings were unloaded and crated; some very like these semi-
+humans, some not so similar, and some not similar at all. And he wondered if
+any of the poor stout black men of Parg were left to be unloaded and crated and
+shipped inland in those obnoxious drays.
+
+When the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy rock a nightmare
+horde of toad-things wiggled out of the hatches, and two of them seized Carter
+and dragged him ashore. The smell and aspect of that city are beyond telling,
+and Carter held only scattered images of the tiled streets and black doorways
+and endless precipices of grey vertical walls without windows. At length he was
+dragged within a low doorway and made to climb infinite steps in pitch
+blackness. It was, apparently, all one to the toad-things whether it were light or
+dark. The odour of the place was intolerable, and when Carter was locked into a
+chamber and left alone he scarcely had strength to crawl around and ascertain its
+form and dimensions. It was circular, and about twenty feet across.
+
+From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carter
+would not touch it. What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he
+was held for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity's Other
+Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an unguessed span of
+hours or days, the great stone door swung wide again, and Carter was shoved
+down the stairs and out into the red-litten streets of that fearsome city. It was
+night on the moon, and all through the town were stationed slaves bearing
+torches.
+
+In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-things and
+twenty-four almost human torch-bearers, eleven on either side, and one each
+before and behind. Carter was placed in the middle of the line; five toad-things
+ahead and five behind, and one almost-human torch-bearer on either side of him.
+Certain of the toad-things produced disgustingly carven flutes of ivory and made
+loathsome sounds. To that hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled
+streets and into nighted plains of obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one
+of the lower and more gradual hills that lay behind the city. That on some
+frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos waited. Carter could
+not doubt; and he wished that the suspense might soon be over. The whining of
+those impious flutes was shocking, and he would have given worlds for some
+
+
+
+
+even half-normal sound; but these toad-things had no voices, and the slaves did
+not talk.
+
+Then through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It
+rolled from the higher hills, and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught
+up and echoed in a swelling pandaemoniac chorus. It was the midnight yell of
+the cat, and Carter knew at last that the old village folk were right when they
+made low guesses about the cryptical realms which are known only to cats, and
+to which the elders among cats repair by stealth nocturnally, springing from high
+housetops. Verily, it is to the moon's dark side that they go to leap and gambol
+on the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and here amidst that column of
+foetid things Carter heard their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the steep
+roofs and warm hearths and little lighted windows of home.
+
+Now much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter, and in this far
+terrible place he uttered the cry that was suitable. But that he need not have
+done, for even as his lips opened he heard the chorus wax and draw nearer, and
+saw swift shadows against the stars as small graceful shapes leaped from hill to
+hill in gathering legions. The call of the clan had been given, and before the foul
+procession had time even to be frightened a cloud of smothering fur and a
+phalanx of murderous claws were tidally and tempestuously upon it. The flutes
+stopped, and there were shrieks in the night. Dying almost-humans screamed,
+and cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a sound as
+their stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene
+fungi.
+
+It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before
+seen so many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common,
+Persian, and Marix; Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian; all were there in the fury of
+battle, and there hovered over them some trace of that profound and inviolate
+sanctity which made their goddess great in the temples of Bubastis. They would
+leap seven strong at the throat of an almost-human or the pink tentacled snout of
+a toad-thing and drag it down savagely to the fungous plain, where myriads of
+their fellows would surge over it and into it with the frenzied claws and teeth of
+a divine battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken slave, but was soon
+overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in the utter
+blackness hearing the clangour of war and the shouts of the victors, and feeling
+the soft paws of his friends as they rushed to and fro over him in the fray.
+
+At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it
+was upon a strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times
+greater than that of the moon as we see it, had risen with floods of weird light
+over the lunar landscape; and across all those leagues of wild plateau and ragged
+
+
+
+
+crest there squatted one endless sea of cats in orderly array. Circle on circle they
+reached, and two or three leaders out of the ranks were licking his face and
+purring to him consolingly. Of the dead slaves and toad-things there were not
+many signs, but Carter thought he saw one bone a little way off in the open space
+between him and the warriors.
+
+Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learned that
+his ancient friendship with the species was well known and often spoken of in
+the places where cats congregate. He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he
+passed through, and the sleek old cats had remembered how he patted them
+after they had attended to the hungry Zoogs who looked evilly at a small black
+kitten. And they recalled, too, how he had welcomed the very little kitten who
+came to see him at the inn, and how he had given it a saucer of rich cream in the
+morning before he left. The grandfather of that very little kitten was the leader of
+the army now assembled, for he had seen the evil procession from a far hill and
+recognized the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in the land of
+dream.
+
+A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in
+his conversation. It was one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest of
+the mountains to watch the one foe which Earth's cats fear; the very large and
+peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason have not been oblivious of the
+charm of our moon's dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil toad-
+things, and are notoriously hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this juncture a
+meeting would have been a somewhat grave matter.
+
+After a brief consultation of generals, the cats rose and assumed a closer
+formation, crowding protectingly around Carter and preparing to take the great
+leap through space back to the housetops of our earth and its dreamland. The old
+field-marshal advised Carter to let himself be borne along smoothly and
+passively in the massed ranks of furry leapers, and told him how to spring when
+the rest sprang and land gracefully when the rest landed. He also offered to
+deposit him in any spot he desired, and Carter decided on the city of Dylath-
+Leen whence the black galley had set out; for he wished to sail thence for Oriab
+and the carven crest Ngranek, and also to warn the people of the city to have no
+more traffick with black galleys, if indeed that traffick could be tactfully and
+judiciously broken off. Then, upon a signal, the cats all leaped gracefully with
+their friend packed securely in their midst; while in a black cave on an
+unhallowed summit of the moon-mountains still vainly waited the crawling
+chaos Nyarlathotep.
+
+The leap of the cats through space was very swift; and being surrounded by his
+companions Carter did not see this time the great black shapelessnesses that lurk
+
+
+
+
+and caper and flounder in the abyss. Before he fully realised what had happened
+he was back in his familiar room at the inn at Dylath-Leen, and the stealthy,
+friendly cats were pouring out of the window in streams. The old leader from
+Ulthar was the last to leave, and as Carter shook his paw he said he would be
+able to get home by cockcrow. When dawn came. Carter went downstairs and
+learned that a week had elapsed since his capture and leaving. There was still
+nearly a fortnight to wait for the ship bound toward Oriab, and during that time
+he said what he could against the black galleys and their infamous ways. Most of
+the townsfolk believed him; yet so fond were the jewellers of great rubies that
+none would wholly promise to cease trafficking with the wide-mouthed
+merchants. If aught of evil ever befalls Dylath-Leen through such traffick, it will
+not be his fault.
+
+In about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black wale and tall lighthouse,
+and Carter was glad to see that she was a barque of wholesome men, with
+painted sides and yellow lateen sails and a grey captain in silken robes. Her
+cargo was the fragrant resin of Oriab's inner groves, and the delicate pottery
+baked by the artists of Bahama, and the strange little figures carved from
+Ngranek's ancient lava. For this they were paid in the wool of Ulthar and the
+iridescent textiles of Hatheg and the ivory that the black men carve across the
+river in Parg. Carter made arrangements with the captain to go to Bahama and
+was told that the voyage would take ten days. And during his week of waiting
+he talked much with that captain of Ngranek, and was told that very few had
+seen the carven face thereon; but that most travellers are content to learn its
+legends from old people and lava-gatherers and image-makers in Bahama and
+afterward say in their far homes that they have indeed beheld it. The captain was
+not even sure that any person now living had beheld that carven face, for the
+wrong side of Ngranek is very difficult and barren and sinister, and there are
+rumours of caves near the peak wherein dwell the night-gaunts. But the captain
+did not wish to say just what a night-gaunt might be like, since such cattle are
+known to haunt most persistently the dreams of those who think too often of
+them. Then Carter asked that captain about unknown Kadath in the cold waste,
+and the marvellous sunset city, but of these the good man could truly tell
+nothing.
+
+Carter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when the tide turned, and
+saw the first rays of sunrise on the thin angular towers of that dismal basalt
+town. And for two days they sailed eastward in sight of green coasts, and saw
+often the pleasant fishing towns that climbed up steeply with their red roofs and
+chimney-pots from old dreaming wharves and beaches where nets lay drying.
+But on the third day they turned sharply south where the roll of water was
+stronger, and soon passed from sight of any land. On the fifth day the sailors
+were nervous, but the captain apologized for their fears, saying that the ship was
+
+
+
+
+about to pass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken city too old
+for memory, and that when the water was clear one could see so many moving
+shadows in that deep place that simple folk disliked it. He admitted, moreover,
+that many ships had been lost in that part of the sea; having been hailed when
+quite close to it, but never seen again.
+
+That night the moon was very bright, and one could see a great way down in the
+water. There was so little wind that the ship could not move much, and the ocean
+was very calm. Looking over the rail Carter saw many fathoms deep the dome of
+the great temple, and in front of it an avenue of unnatural sphinxes leading to
+what was once a public square. Dolphins sported merrily in and out of the ruins,
+and porpoises revelled clumsily here and there, sometimes coming to the surface
+and leaping clear out of the sea. As the ship drifted on a little the floor of the
+ocean rose in hills, and one could clearly mark the lines of ancient climbing
+streets and the washed-down walls of myriad little houses.
+
+Then the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building on a hill, of simpler
+architecture than the other structures, and in much better repair. It was dark and
+low and covered four sides of a square, with a tower at each corner, a paved
+court in the centre, and small curious round windows all over it. Probably it was
+of basalt, though weeds draped the greater part; and such was its lonely and
+impressive place on that far hill that it may have been a temple or a monastery.
+Some phosphorescent fish inside it gave the small round windows an aspect of
+shining, and Carter did not blame the sailors much for their fears. Then by the
+watery moonlight he noticed an odd high monolith in the middle of that central
+court, and saw that something was tied to it. And when after getting a telescope
+from the captain's cabin he saw that that bound thing was a sailor in the silk
+robes of Oriab, head downward and without any eyes, he was glad that a rising
+breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts of the sea.
+
+The next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails bound for Zar, in the land
+of forgotten dreams, with bulbs of strange coloured lilies for cargo. And on the
+evening of the eleventh day they came in sight of the isle of Oriab with Ngranek
+rising jagged and snow-crowned in the distance. Oriab is a very great isle, and its
+port of Bahama a mighty city. The wharves of Bahama are of porphyry, and the
+city rises in great stone terraces behind them, having streets of steps that are
+frequently arched over by buildings and the bridges between buildings. There is
+a great canal which goes under the whole city in a tunnel with granite gates and
+leads to the inland lake of Yath, on whose farther shore are the vast clay-brick
+ruins of a primal city whose name is not remembered. As the ship drew into the
+harbour at evening the twin beacons Thon and Thai gleamed a welcome, and in
+all the million windows of Bahama's terraces mellow lights peeped out quietly
+and gradually as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and
+
+
+
+
+climbing seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars of
+heaven and the reflections of those stars in the still harbour.
+
+The captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in his own small house on the
+shores of Yath where the rear of the town slopes down to it; and his wife and
+servants brought strange toothsome foods for the traveller's delight. And in the
+days after that Carter asked for rumours and legends of Ngranek in all the
+taverns and public places where lava-gatherers and image-makers meet, but
+could find no one who had been up the higher slopes or seen the carven face.
+Ngranek was a hard mountain with only an accursed valley behind it, and
+besides, one could never depend on the certainty that night-gaunts are altogether
+fabulous.
+
+When the captain sailed hack to Dylath-Leen Carter took quarters in an ancient
+tavern opening on an alley of steps in the original part of the town, which is built
+of brick and resembles the ruins of Yath's farther shore. Here he laid his plans for
+the ascent of Ngranek, and correlated all that he had learned from the lava-
+gatherers about the roads thither. The keeper of the tavern was a very old man,
+and had heard so many legends that he was a great help. He even took Carter to
+an upper room in that ancient house and shewed him a crude picture which a
+traveller had scratched on the clay wall in the old days when men were bolder
+and less reluctant to visit Ngranek's higher slopes. The old tavern-keeper's great-
+grandfather had heard from his great-grandfather that the traveller who
+scratched that picture had climbed Ngranek and seen the carven face, here
+drawing it for others to behold, but Carter had very great doubts, since the large
+rough features on the wall were hasty and careless, and wholly overshadowed
+by a crowd of little companion shapes in the worst possible taste, with horns and
+wings and claws and curling tails.
+
+At last, having gained all the information he was likely to gain in the taverns and
+public places of Bahama, Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on the
+road by Yath's shore for those inland parts wherein towers stony Ngranek. On
+his right were rolling hills and pleasant orchards and neat little stone
+farmhouses, and he was much reminded of those fertile fields that flank the Skai.
+By evening he was near the nameless ancient ruins on Yath's farther shore, and
+though old lava-gatherers had warned him not to camp there at night, he
+tethered his zebra to a curious pillar before a crumbling wall and laid his blanket
+in a sheltered corner beneath some carvings whose meaning none could
+decipher. Around him he wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in
+Oriab; and when upon awaking once he thought he felt the wings of some insect
+brushing his face he covered his head altogether and slept in peace till roused by
+the magah birds in distant resin groves.
+
+
+
+
+The sun had just come up over the great slope whereon leagues of primal brick
+foundations and worn walls and occasional cracked pillars and pedestals
+stretched down desolate to the shore of Yath, and Carter looked about for his
+tethered zebra. Great was his dismay to see that docile beast stretched prostrate
+beside the curious pillar to which it had been tied, and still greater was he vexed
+on finding that the steed was quite dead, with its blood all sucked away through
+a singular wound in its throat. His pack had been disturbed, and several shiny
+knickknacks taken away, and all round on the dusty soil' were great webbed
+footprints for which he could not in any way account. The legends and warnings
+of lava-gatherers occurred to him, and he thought of what had brushed his face
+in the night. Then he shouldered his pack and strode on toward Ngranek, though
+not without a shiver when he saw close to him as the highway passed through
+the ruins a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old temple, with steps leading
+down into darkness farther than he could peer.
+
+His course now lay uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and he
+saw only the huts of charcoal-burners and the camp of those who gathered resin
+from the groves. The whole air was fragrant with balsam, and all the magah
+birds sang blithely as they flashed their seven colours in the sun. Near sunset he
+came on a new camp of lava-gatherers returning with laden sacks from
+Ngranek's lower slopes; and here he also camped, listening to the songs and tales
+of the men, and overhearing what they whispered about a companion they had
+lost. He had climbed high to reach a mass of fine lava above him, and at nightfall
+did not return to his fellows. When they looked for him the next day they found
+only his turban, nor was there any sign on the crags below that he had fallen.
+They did not search any more, because the old man among them said it would be
+of no use.
+
+No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, though those beasts themselves
+were so uncertain as to be almost fabulous. Carter asked them if night-gaunts
+sucked blood and liked shiny things and left webbed footprints, but they all
+shook their heads negatively and seemed frightened at his making such an
+inquiry. When he saw how taciturn they had become he asked them no more,
+but went to sleep in his blanket.
+
+The next day he rose with the lava-gatherers and exchanged farewells as they
+rode west and he rode east on a zebra he bought of them. Their older men gave
+him blessings and warnings, and told him he had better not climb too high on
+Ngranek, but while he thanked them heartily he was in no wise dissuaded. For
+still did he feel that he must find the gods on unknown Kadath; and win from
+them a way to that haunting and marvellous city in the sunset. By noon, after a
+long uphill ride, he came upon some abandoned brick villages of the hill-people
+who had once dwelt thus close to Ngranek and carved images from its smooth
+
+
+
+
+lava. Here they had dweh till the days of the old tavernkeeper's grandfather, but
+about that time they felt that their presence was disliked. Their homes had crept
+even up the mountain's slope, and the higher they built the more people they
+would miss when the sun rose. At last they decided it would be better to leave
+altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in the darkness which no one
+could interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went down to the sea and
+dwelt in Bahama, inhabiting a very old quarter and teaching their sons the old
+art of image-making which to this day they carry on. It was from these children
+of the exiled hill-people that Carter had heard the best tales about Ngranek when
+searching through Bahama's ancient taverns.
+
+All this time the great gaunt side of Ngranek was looming up higher and higher
+as Carter approached it. There were sparse trees on the lower slopes and feeble
+shrubs above them, and then the bare hideous rock rose spectral into the sky, to
+mix with frost and ice and eternal snow. Carter could see the rifts and
+ruggedness of that sombre stone, and did not welcome the prospect of climbing
+it. In places there were solid streams of lava, and scoriae heaps that littered
+slopes and ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before even the gods had danced upon its
+pointed peak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared with the voices of
+the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and sinister, bearing on the hidden
+side that secret titan image whereof rumour told. And there were caves in that
+mountain, which might be empty and alone with elder darkness, or might - if
+legend spoke truly - hold horrors of a form not to be surmised.
+
+The ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly covered with scrub
+oaks and ash trees, and strewn with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There
+were the charred embers of many camps, where the lava-gatherers were wont to
+stop, and several rude altars which they had built either to propitiate the Great
+Ones or to ward off what they dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and
+labyrinthine caves. At evening Carter reached the farthermost pile of embers and
+camped for the night, tethering his zebra to a sapling and wrapping himself well
+in his blankets before going to sleep. And all through the night a voonith howled
+distantly from the shore of some hidden pool, but Carter felt no fear of that
+amphibious terror, since he had been told with certainty that not one of them
+dares even approach the slope of Ngranek.
+
+In the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long ascent, taking his zebra as
+far as that useful beast could go, but tying it to a stunted ash tree when the floor
+of the thin wood became too steep. Thereafter he scrambled up alone; first
+through the forest with its ruins of old villages in overgrown clearings, and then
+over the tough grass where anaemic shrubs grew here and there. He regretted
+coming clear of the trees, since the slope was very precipitous and the whole
+thing rather dizzying. At length he began to discern all the countryside spread
+
+
+
+
+out beneath him whenever he looked about; the deserted huts of the image-
+makers, the groves of resin trees and the camps of those who gathered from
+them, the woods where prismatic magahs nest and sing, and even a hint very far
+away of the shores of Yath and of those forbidding ancient ruins whose name is
+forgotten. He found it best not to look around, and kept on climbing and
+climbing till the shrubs became very sparse and there was often nothing but the
+tough grass to cling to.
+
+Then the soil became meagre, with great patches of bare rock cropping out, and
+now and then the nest of a condor in a crevice. Finally there was nothing at all
+but the bare rock, and had it not been very rough and weathered, he could
+scarcely have ascended farther. Knobs, ledges, and pinnacles, however, helped
+greatly; and it was cheering to see occasionally the sign of some lava-gatherer
+scratched clumsily in the friable stone, and know that wholesome human
+creatures had been there before him. After a certain height the presence of man
+was further shewn by handholds and footholds hewn where they were needed,
+and by little quarries and excavations where some choice vein or stream of lava
+had been found. In one place a narrow ledge had been chopped artificially to an
+especially rich deposit far to the right of the main line of ascent. Once or twice
+Carter dared to look around, and was almost stunned by the spread of landscape
+below. All the island betwixt him and the coast lay open to his sight, with
+Bahama's stone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in the distance.
+And beyond that the illimitable Southern Sea with all its curious secrets.
+
+Thus far there had been much winding around the mountain, so that the farther
+and carven side was still hidden. Carter now saw a ledge running upward and to
+the left which seemed to head the way he wished, and this course he took in the
+hope that it might prove continuous. After ten minutes he saw it was indeed no
+cul-de-sac, but that it led steeply on in an arc which would, unless suddenly
+interrupted or deflected, bring him after a few hours' climbing to that unknown
+southern slope overlooking the desolate crags and the accursed valley of lava. As
+new country came into view below him he saw that it was bleaker and wilder
+than those seaward lands he had traversed. The mountain's side, too, was
+somewhat different; being here pierced by curious cracks and caves not found on
+the straighter route he had left. Some of these were above him and some beneath
+him, all opening on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly unreachable by the
+feet of man. The air was very cold now, but so hard was the climbing that he did
+not mind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered him, and he thought that
+perhaps it was this which had turned the heads of other travellers and excited
+those absurd tales of night-gaunts whereby they explained the loss of such
+climbers as fell from these perilous paths. He was not much impressed by
+travellers' tales, but had a good curved scimitar in case of any trouble. All lesser
+
+
+
+
+thoughts were lost in the wish to see that carven face which might set him on the
+track of the gods atop unknown Kadath.
+
+At last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came round fully to the hidden
+side of Ngranek and saw in infinite gulfs below him the lesser crags and sterile
+abysses of lava which marked olden wrath of the Great Ones. There was
+unfolded, too, a vast expanse of country to the south; but it was a desert land
+without fair fields or cottage chimneys, and seemed to have no ending. No trace
+of the sea was visible on this side, for Oriab is a great island. Black caverns and
+odd crevices were still numerous on the sheer vertical cliffs, but none of them
+was accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great beetling mass which
+hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment shaken with doubt
+lest it prove impassable. Poised in windy insecurity miles above earth, with only
+space and death on one side and only slippery walls of rock on the other, he
+knew for a moment the fear that makes men shun Ngranek's hidden side. He
+could not turn round, yet the sun was already low. If there were no way aloft, the
+night would find him crouching there still, and the dawn would not find him at
+all.
+
+But there was a way, and he saw it in due season. Only a very expert dreamer
+could have used those imperceptible footholds, yet to Carter they were sufficient.
+Surmounting now the outward-hanging rock, he found the slope above much
+easier than that below, since a great glacier's melting had left a generous space
+with loam and ledges. To the left a precipice dropped straight from unknown
+heights to unknown depths, with a cave's dark mouth just out of reach above
+him. Elsewhere, however, the mountain slanted back strongly, and even gave
+him space to lean and rest.
+
+He felt from the chill that he must be near the snow line, and looked up to see
+what glittering pinnacles might be shining in that late ruddy sunlight. Surely
+enough, there was the snow uncounted thousands of feet above, and below it a
+great beetling crag like that, he had just climbed; hanging there forever in bold
+outline. And when he saw that crag he gasped and cried out aloud, and clutched
+at the jagged rock in awe; for the titan bulge had not stayed as earth's dawn had
+shaped it, but gleamed red and stupendous in the sunset with the carved and
+polished features of a god.
+
+Stern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit with fire. How vast it was no
+mind can ever measure, but Carter knew at once that man could never have
+fashioned it. It was a god chiselled by the hands of the gods, and it looked down
+haughty and majestic upon the seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and not
+to be mistaken, and Carter saw that it was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes
+
+
+
+
+and long-lobed ears, and that thin nose and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that
+is not of men but of gods.
+
+He clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even though it was this
+which he had expected and come to find; for there is in a god's face more of
+marvel than prediction can tell, and when that face is vaster than a great temple
+and seen looking downward at sunset in the scyptic silences of that upper world
+from whose dark lava it was divinely hewn of old, the marvel is so strong that
+none may escape it.
+
+Here, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although he had planned to
+search all dreamland over for those whose likeness to this face might mark them
+as the god's children, he now knew that he need not do so. Certainly, the great
+face carven on that mountain was of no strange sort, but the kin of such as he
+had seen often in the taverns of the seaport Celephais which lies in Ooth-Nargai
+beyond the Tanarian Hills and is ruled over by that King Kuranes whom Carter
+once knew in waking life. Every year sailors with such a face came in dark ships
+from the north to trade their onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and little red
+singing birds of Celephais, and it was clear that these could be no others than the
+hall-gods he sought. Where they dwelt, there must the cold waste lie close, and
+within it unknown Kadath and its onyx castle for the Great Ones. So to Celephais
+he must go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such parts as would take
+him back to Dylath-Teen and up the Skai to the bridge by Nir, and again into the
+enchanted wood of the Zoogs, whence the way would bend northward through
+the garden lands by Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where he might find
+a galleon bound over the Cerenarian Sea.
+
+But dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner in
+shadow. Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness he
+might neither go down nor go up, but only stand and cling and shiver in that
+narrow place till the day came, praying to keep awake lest sleep loose his hold
+and send him down the dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the
+accursed valley. The stars came out, but save for them there was only black
+nothingness in his eyes; nothingness leagued with death, against whose
+beckoning he might do no more than cling to the rocks and lean back away from
+an unseen brink. The last thing of earth that he saw in the gloaming was a condor
+soaring close to the westward precipice beside him, and darting screaming away
+when it came near the cave whose mouth yawned just out of reach.
+
+Suddenly, without a warning sound in the dark. Carter felt his curved scimitar
+drawn stealthily out of his belt by some unseen hand. Then he heard it clatter
+down over the rocks below. And between him and the Milky Way he thought he
+saw a very terrible outline of something noxiously thin and horned and tailed
+
+
+
+
+and bat-winged. Other things, too, had begun to blot out patches of stars west of
+him, as if a flock of vague entities were flapping thickly and silently out of that
+inaccessible cave in the face of the precipice. Then a sort of cold rubbery arm
+seized his neck and something else seized his feet, and he was lifted
+inconsiderately up and swung about in space. Another minute and the stars were
+gone, and Carter knew that the night-gaunts had got him.
+
+They bore him breathless into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous
+labyrinths beyond. When he struggled, as at first he did by instinct, they tickled
+him with deliberation. They made no sound at all themselves, and even their
+membranous wings were silent. They were frightfully cold and damp and
+slippery, and their paws kneaded one detestably. Soon they were plunging
+hideously downward through inconceivable abysses in a whirling, giddying,
+sickening rush of dank, tomb-like air; and Carter felt they were shooting into the
+ultimate vortex of shrieking and daemonic madness. He screamed again and
+again, but whenever he did so the black paws tickled him with greater subtlety.
+Then he saw a sort of grey phosphorescence about, and guessed they were
+coming even to that inner world of subterrene horror of which dim legends tell,
+and which is litten only by the pale death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air
+and the primal mists of the pits at earth's core.
+
+At last far below him he saw faint lines of grey and ominous pinnacles which he
+knew must be the fabled Peaks of Throk. Awful and sinister they stand in the
+haunted disc of sunless and eternal depths; higher than man may reckon, and
+guarding terrible valleys where the Dholes crawl and burrow nastily. But Carter
+preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and
+uncouth black things with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns
+that curved inward toward each other, bat wings whose beating made no sound,
+ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly.
+And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they
+had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face
+ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of
+night-gaunts.
+
+As the band flew lower the Peaks of Throk rose grey and towering on all sides,
+and one saw clearly that nothing lived on that austere and impressive granite of
+the endless twilight. At still lower levels the death-fires in the air gave out, and
+one met only the primal blackness of the void save aloft where the thin peaks
+stood out goblin-like. Soon the peaks were very far away, and nothing about but
+great rushing winds with the dankness of nethermost grottoes in them. Then in
+the end the night-gaunts landed on a floor of unseen things which felt like layers
+of bones, and left Carter all alone in that black valley. To bring him thither was
+the duty of the night-gaunts that guard Ngranek; and this done, they flapped
+
+
+
+
+away silently. When Carter tried to trace their flight he found he could not, since
+even the Peaks of Throk had faded out of sight. There was nothing anywhere but
+blackness and horror and silence and bones.
+
+Now Carter knew from a certain source that he was in the vale of Pnoth, where
+crawl and burrow the enormous Dholes; but he did not know what to expect,
+because no one has ever seen a Dhole or even guessed what such a thing may be
+like. Dholes are known only by dim rumour, from the rustling they make
+amongst mountains of bones and the slimy touch they have when they wriggle
+past one. They cannot be seen because they creep only in the dark. Carter did not
+wish to meet a Dhole, so listened intently for any sound in the unknown depths
+of bones about him. Even in this fearsome place he had a plan and an objective,
+for whispers of Pnoth were not unknown to one with whom he had talked much
+in the old days. In brief, it seemed fairly likely that this was the spot into which
+all the ghouls of the waking world cast the refuse of their feastings; and that if he
+but had good luck he might stumble upon that mighty crag taller even than
+Throk's peaks which marks the edge of their domain. Showers of bones would
+tell him where to look, and once found he could call to a ghoul to let down a
+ladder; for strange to say, he had a very singular link with these terrible
+creatures.
+
+A man he had known in Boston - a painter of strange pictures with a secret
+studio in an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard - had actually made
+friends with the ghouls and had taught him to understand the simpler part of
+their disgusting meeping and glibbering. This man had vanished at last, and
+Carter was not sure but that he might find him now, and use for the first time in
+dreamland that far-away English of his dim waking life. In any case, he felt he
+could persuade a ghoul to guide him out of Pnoth; and it would be better to meet
+a ghoul, which one can see, than a Dhole, which one cannot see.
+
+So Carter walked in the dark, and ran when he thought he heard something
+among the bones underfoot. Once he bumped into a stony slope, and knew it
+must be the base of one of Throk's peaks. Then at last he heard a monstrous
+rattling and clatter which reached far up in the air, and became sure he had come
+nigh the crag of the ghouls. He was not sure he could be heard from this valley
+miles below, but realised that the inner world has strange laws. As he pondered
+he was struck by a flying bone so heavy that it must have been a skull, and
+therefore realising his nearness to the fateful crag he sent up as best he might that
+meeping cry which is the call of the ghoul.
+
+Sound travels slowly, so it was some time before he heard an answering glibber.
+But it came at last, and before long he was told that a rope ladder would be
+lowered. The wait for this was very tense, since there was no telling what might
+
+
+
+
+not have been stirred up among those bones by his shouting. Indeed, it was not
+long before he actually did hear a vague rustling afar off. As this thoughtfully
+approached, he became more and more uncomfortable; for he did not wish to
+move away from the spot where the ladder would come. Finally the tension
+grew almost unbearable, and he was about to flee in panic when the thud of
+something on the newly heaped bones nearby drew his notice from the other
+sound. It was the ladder, and after a minute of groping he had it taut in his
+hands. But the other sound did not cease, and followed him even as he climbed.
+He had gone fully five feet from the ground when the rattling beneath waxed
+emphatic, and was a good ten feet up when something swayed the ladder from
+below. At a height which must have been fifteen or twenty feet he felt his whole
+side brushed by a great slippery length which grew alternately convex and
+concave with wriggling; and hereafter he climbed desperately to escape the
+unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed Dhole whose form no man
+might see.
+
+For hours he climbed with aching and blistered hands, seeing again the grey
+death-fire and Throk's uncomfortable pinnacles. At last he discerned above him
+the projecting edge of the great crag of the ghouls, whose vertical side he could
+not glimpse; and hours later he saw a curious face peering over it as a gargoyle
+peers over a parapet of Notre Dame. This almost made him lose his hold through
+faintness, but a moment later he was himself again; for his vanished friend
+Richard Pickman had once introduced him to a ghoul, and he knew well their
+canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable idiosyncrasies. So he had
+himself well under control when that hideous thing pulled him out of the dizzy
+emptiness over the edge of the crag, and did not scream at the partly consumed
+refuse heaped at one side or at the squatting circles of ghouls who gnawed and
+watched curiously.
+
+He was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were great
+boulders and the entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful,
+even if one did attempt to pinch him while several others eyed his leanness
+speculatively. Through patient glibbering he made inquiries regarding his
+vanished friend, and found he had become a ghoul of some prominence in
+abysses nearer the waking world. A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct
+him to Pickman's present habitation, so despite a natural loathing he followed
+the creature into a capacious burrow and crawled after him for hours in the
+blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim plain strewn with singular
+relics of earth - old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of
+monuments - and Carter realised with some emotion that he was probably
+nearer the waking world than at any other time since he had gone down the
+seven hundred steps from the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.
+
+
+
+
+There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in
+Boston, sat a ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was
+naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that
+its human origin was already obscure. But it still remembered a little English,
+and was able to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, helped out
+now and then by the glibbering of ghouls. When it learned that Carter wished to
+get to the enchanted wood and from there to the city Celephais in Ooth-Nargai
+beyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather doubtful; for these ghouls of the
+waking world do no business in the graveyards of upper dreamland (leaving
+that to the red-footed wamps that are spawned in dead cities), and many things
+intervene betwixt their gulf and the enchanted wood, including the terrible
+kingdom of the Gugs.
+
+The Gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made
+strange sacrifices to the Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until
+one night an abomination of theirs reached the ears of earth's gods and they were
+banished to caverns below. Only a great trap door of stone with an iron ring
+connects the abyss of the earth-ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the
+Gugs are afraid to open because of a curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse
+their cavern realm and leave by that door is inconceivable; for mortal dreamers
+were their former food, and they have legends of the toothsomeness of such
+dreamers even though banishment has restricted their diet to the ghasts, those
+repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and
+leap on long hind legs like kangaroos.
+
+So the ghoul that was Pickman advised Carter either to leave the abyss at
+Sarkomand, that deserted city in the valley below Leng where black nitrous
+stairways guarded by winged diarote lions lead down from dreamland to the
+lower gulfs, or to return through a churchyard to the waking world and begin
+the quest anew down the seventy steps of light slumber to the cavern of flame
+and the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted
+wood. This, however, did not suit the seeker; for he knew nothing of the way
+from Leng to Ooth-Nargai, and was likewise reluctant to awake lest he forget all
+he had so far gained in this dream. It was disastrous to his quest to forget the
+august and celestial faces of those seamen from the north who traded onyx in
+Celephais, and who, being the sons of gods, must point the way to the cold waste
+and Kadath where the Great Ones dwell.
+
+After much persuasion the ghoul consented to guide his guest inside the great
+wall of the Gugs' kingdom. There was one chance that Carter might be able to
+steal through that twilight realm of circular stone towers at an hour when the
+giants would be all gorged and snoring indoors, and reach the central tower with
+the sign of Koth upon it, which has the stairs leading up to that stone trap door
+
+
+
+
+in the enchanted wood. Pickman even consented to lend three ghouls to help
+with a tombstone lever in raising the stone door; for of ghouls the Gugs are
+somewhat afraid, and they often flee from their own colossal graveyards when
+they see them feasting there.
+
+He also advised Carter to disguise as a ghoul himself; shaving the beard he had
+allowed to grow (for ghouls have none), wallowing naked in the mould to get
+the correct surface, and loping in the usual slumping way, with his clothing
+carried in a bundle as if it were a choice morsel from a tomb. They would reach
+the city of Gugs - which is coterminous with the whole kingdom - through the
+proper burrows, emerging in a cemetery not far from the stair-containing Tower
+of Koth. They must beware, however, of a large cave near the cemetery; for this is
+the mouth of the vaults of Zin, and the vindictive ghasts are always on watch
+there murderously for those denizens of the upper abyss who hunt and prey on
+them. The ghasts try to come out when the Gugs sleep and they attack ghouls as
+readily as Gugs, for they cannot discriminate. They are very primitive, and eat
+one another. The Gugs have a sentry at a narrow in the vaults of Zin, but he is
+often drowsy and is sometimes surprised by a party of ghasts. Though ghasts
+cannot live in real light, they can endure the grey twilight of the abyss for hours.
+
+So at length Carter crawled through endless burrows with three helpful ghouls
+bearing the slate gravestone of Col. Nepemiah Derby, obit 1719, from the Charter
+Street Burying Ground in Salem. When they came again into open twilight they
+were in a forest of vast lichened monoliths reaching nearly as high as the eye
+could see and forming the modest gravestones of the Gugs. On the right of the
+hole out of which they wriggled, and seen through aisles of monoliths, was a
+stupendous vista of cyclopean round towers mounting up illimitable into the
+grey air of inner earth. This was the great city of the Gugs, whose doorways are
+thirty feet high. Ghouls come here often, for a buried Gug will feed a community
+for almost a year, and even with the added peril it is better to burrow for Gugs
+than to bother with the graves of men. Carter now understood the occasional
+titan bones he had felt beneath him in the vale of Pnoth.
+
+Straight ahead, and just outside the cemetery, rose a sheer perpendicular cliff at
+whose base an immense and forbidding cavern yawned. This the ghouls told
+Carter to avoid as much as possible, since it was the entrance to the unhallowed
+vaults of Zin where Gugs hunt ghasts in the darkness. And truly, that warning
+was soon well justified; for the moment a ghoul began to creep toward the
+towers to see if the hour of the Gugs' resting had been rightly timed, there
+glowed in the gloom of that great cavern's mouth first one pair of yellowish-red
+eyes and then another, implying that the Gugs were one sentry less, and that
+ghasts have indeed an excellent sharpness of smell. So the ghoul returned to the
+burrow and motioned his companions to be silent. It was best to leave the ghasts
+
+
+
+
+to their own devices, and there was a possibihty that they might soon withdraw,
+since they must naturally be rather tired after coping with a Gug sentry in the
+black vaults. After a moment something about the size of a small horse hopped
+out into the grey twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous
+and unwholesome beast, whose face is so curiously human despite the absence
+of a nose, a forehead, and other important particulars.
+
+Presently three other ghasts hopped out to join their fellow, and a ghoul
+glibbered softly at Carter that their absence of battle-scars was a bad sign. It
+proved that theY had not fought the Gug sentry at all, but had merely slipped
+past him as he slept, so that their strength and savagery were still unimpaired
+and would remain so till they had found and disposed of a victim. It was very
+unpleasant to see those filthy and disproportioned animals which soon
+numbered about fifteen, grubbing about and making their kangaroo leaps in the
+grey twilight where titan towers and monoliths arose, but it was still more
+unpleasant when they spoke among themselves in the coughing gutturals of
+ghasts. And yet, horrible as they were, they were not so horrible as what
+presently came out of the cave after them with disconcerting suddenness.
+
+It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable
+talons. Alter it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to
+which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes
+shone, and the head of the awakened Gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into
+view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances
+overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the
+mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of
+the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.
+
+But before that unfortunate Gug could emerge from the cave and rise to his full
+twenty feet, the vindictive ghasts were upon him. Carter feared for a moment
+that he would give an alarm and arouse all his kin, till a ghoul softly glibbered
+that Gugs have no voice but talk by means of facial expression. The battle which
+then ensued was truly a frightful one. From all sides the venomous ghasts
+rushed feverishly at the creeping Gug, nipping and tearing with their muzzles,
+and mauling murderously with their hard pointed hooves. All the time they
+coughed excitedly, screaming when the great vertical mouth of the Gug would
+occasionally bite into one of their number, so that the noise of the combat would
+surely have aroused the sleeping city had not the weakening of the sentry begun
+to transfer the action farther and farther within the cavern. As it was, the tumult
+soon receded altogether from sight in the blackness, with only occasional evil
+echoes to mark its continuance.
+
+
+
+
+Then the most alert of the ghouls gave the signal for all to advance, and Carter
+followed the loping three out of the forest of monoliths and into the dark
+noisome streets of that awful city whose rounded towers of cyclopean stone
+soared up beyond the sight. Silently they shambled over that rough rock
+pavement, hearing with disgust the abominable muffled snortings from great
+black doorways which marked the slumber of the Gugs. Apprehensive of the
+ending of the rest hour, the ghouls set a somewhat rapid pace; but even so the
+journey was no brief one, for distances in that town of giants are on a great scale.
+At last, however, they came to a somewhat open space before a tower even
+vaster than the rest; above whose colossal doorway was fixed a monstrous
+symbol in bas-relief which made one shudder without knowing its meaning.
+This was the central tower with the sign of Koth, and those huge stone steps just
+visible through the dusk within were the beginning of the great flight leading to
+upper dreamland and the enchanted wood.
+
+There now began a climb of interminable length in utter blackness: made almost
+impossible by the monstrous size of the steps, which were fashioned for Gugs,
+and were therefore nearly a yard high. Of their number Carter could form no just
+estimate, for he soon became so worn out that the tireless and elastic ghouls were
+forced to aid him. All through the endless climb there lurked the peril of
+detection and pursuit; for though no Gug dares lift the stone door to the forest
+because of the Great One's curse, there are no such restraints concerning the
+tower and the steps, and escaped ghasts are often chased, even to the very top.
+So sharp are the ears of Gugs, that the bare feet and hands of the climbers might
+readily be heard when the city awoke; and it would of course take but little time
+for the striding giants, accustomed from their ghast-hunts in the vaults of Zin to
+seeing without light, to overtake their smaller and slower quarry on those
+cyclopean steps. It was very depressing to reflect that the silent pursuing Gugs
+would not be heard at all, but would come very suddenly and shockingly in the
+dark upon the climbers. Nor could the traditional fear of Gugs for ghouls be
+depended upon in that peculiar place where the advantages lay so heavily with
+the Gugs. There was also some peril from the furtive and venomous ghasts,
+which frequently hopped up onto the tower during the sleep hour of the Gugs. If
+the Gugs slept long, and the ghasts returned soon from their deed in the cavern,
+the scent of the climbers might easily be picked up by those loathsome and ill-
+disposed things; in which case it would almost be better to be eaten by a Gug.
+
+Then, after aeons of climbing, there came a cough from the darkness above; and
+matters assumed a very grave and unexpected turn.
+
+It was clear that a ghast, or perhaps even more, had strayed into that tower
+before the coming of Carter and his guides; and it was equally clear that this peril
+was very close. Alter a breathless second the leading ghoul pushed Carter to the
+
+
+
+
+wall and arranged his kinfolk in the best possible way, with the old slate
+tombstone raised for a crushing blow whenever the enemy might come in sight.
+Ghouls can see in the dark, so the party was not as badly off as Carter would
+have been alone. In another moment the clatter of hooves revealed the
+downward hopping of at least one beast, and the slab-bearing ghouls poised
+their weapon for a desperate blow. Presently two yellowish-red eyes flashed into
+view, and the panting of the ghast became audible above its clattering. As it
+hopped down to the step above the ghouls, they wielded the ancient gravestone
+with prodigious force, so that there was only a wheeze and a choking before the
+victim collapsed in a noxious heap. There seemed to be only this one animal, and
+after a moment of listening the ghouls tapped Carter as a signal to proceed again.
+As before, they were obliged to aid him; and he was glad to leave that place of
+carnage where the ghast's uncouth remains sprawled invisible in the blackness.
+
+At last the ghouls brought their companion to a halt; and feeling above him.
+Carter realised that the great stone trap door was reached at last. To open so vast
+a thing completely was not to be thought of, but the ghouls hoped to get it up
+just enough to slip the gravestone under as a prop, and permit Carter to escape
+through the crack. They themselves planned to descend again and return
+through the city of the Gugs, since their elusiveness was great, and they did not
+know the way overland to spectral Sarkomand with its lion-guarded gate to the
+abyss.
+
+Mighty was the straining of those three ghouls at the stone of the door above
+them, and Carter helped push with as much strength as he had. They judged the
+edge next the top of the staircase to be the right one, and to this they bent all the
+force of their disreputably nourished muscles. Alter a few moments a crack of
+light appeared; and Carter, to whom that task had been entrusted, slipped the
+end of the old gravestone in the aperture. There now ensued a mighty heaving;
+but progress was very slow, and they had of course to return to their first
+position every time they failed to turn the slab and prop the portal open.
+
+Suddenly their desperation was magnified a thousand fold by a sound on the
+steps below them. It was only the thumping and rattling of the slain ghast's
+hooved body as it rolled down to lower levels; but of all the possible causes of
+that body's dislodgement and rolling, none was in the least reassuring.
+Therefore, knowing the ways of Gugs, the ghouls set to with something of a
+frenzy; and in a surprisingly short time had the door so high that they were able
+to hold it still whilst Carter turned the slab and left a generous opening. They
+now helped Carter through, letting him climb up to their rubbery shoulders and
+later guiding his feet as he clutched at the blessed soil of the upper dreamland
+outside. Another second and they were through themselves, knocking away the
+gravestone and closing the great trap door while a panting became audible
+
+
+
+
+beneath. Because of the Great One's curse no Gug might ever emerge from that
+portal, so with a deep rehef and sense of repose Carter lay quietly on the thick
+grotesque fungi of the enchanted wood while his guides squatted near in the
+manner that ghouls rest.
+
+Weird as was that enchanted wood through which he had fared so long ago, it
+was verily a haven and a delight after those gulfs he had now left behind. There
+was no living denizen about, for Zoogs shun the mysterious door in fear and
+Carter at once consulted with his ghouls about their future course. To return
+through the tower they no longer dared, and the waking world did not appeal to
+them when they learned that they must pass the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah
+in the cavern of flame. So at length they decided to return through Sarkomand
+and its gate of the abyss, though of how to get there they knew nothing. Carter
+recalled that it lies in the valley below Leng, and recalled likewise that he had
+seen in Dylath-Leen a sinister, slant-eyed old merchant reputed to trade on Leng,
+therefore he advised the ghouls to seek out Dylath-Leen, crossing the fields to
+Nir and the Skai and following the river to its mouth. This they at once resolved
+to do, and lost no time in loping off, since the thickening of the dusk promised a
+full night ahead for travel. And Carter shook the paws of those repulsive beasts,
+thanking them for their help and sending his gratitude to the beast which once
+was Pickman; but could not help sighing with pleasure when they left. For a
+ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man. After that Carter
+sought a forest pool and cleansed himself of the mud of nether earth, thereupon
+reassuming the clothes he had so carefully carried.
+
+It was now night in that redoubtable wood of monstrous trees, but because of the
+phosphorescence one might travel as well as by day; wherefore Carter set out
+upon the well-known route toward Celephais, in Ooth-Nargai beyond the
+Tanarian Hills. And as he went he thought of the zebra he had left tethered to an
+ash-tree on Ngranek in far-away Oriab so many aeons ago, and wondered if any
+lava-gatherers had fed and released it. And he wondered, too, if he would ever
+return to Bahama and pay for the zebra that was slain by night in those ancient
+ruins by Yath's shore, and if the old tavernkeeper would remember him. Such
+were the thoughts that came to him in the air of the regained upper dreamland.
+
+But presently his progress was halted by a sound from a very large hollow tree.
+He had avoided the great circle of stones, since he did not care to speak with
+Zoogs just now; but it appeared from the singular fluttering in that huge tree that
+important councils were in session elsewhere. Upon drawing nearer he made out
+the accents of a tense and heated discussion; and before long became conscious
+of matters which he viewed with the greatest concern. For a war on the cats was
+under debate in that sovereign assembly of Zoogs. It all came from the loss of the
+party which had sneaked after Carter to Ulthar, and which the cats had justly
+
+
+
+
+punished for unsuitable intentions. The matter had long rankled; and now, or at
+least within a month, the marshalled Zoogs were about to strike the whole feline
+tribe in a series of surprise attacks, taking individual cats or groups of cats
+unawares, and giving not even the myriad cats of Ulthar a proper chance to drill
+and mobilise. This was the plan of the Zoogs, and Carter saw that he must foil it
+before leaving upon his mighty quest.
+
+Very quietly therefore did Randolph Carter steal to the edge of the wood and
+send the cry of the cat over the starlit fields. And a great grimalkin in a nearby
+cottage took up the burden and relayed it across leagues of rolling meadow to
+warriors large and small, black, grey, tiger, white, yellow, and mixed, and it
+echoed through Nir and beyond the Skai even into Ulthar, and Ulthar's
+numerous cats called in chorus and fell into a line of march. It was fortunate that
+the moon was not up, so that all the cats were on earth. Swiftly and silently
+leaping, they sprang from every hearth and housetop and poured in a great furry
+sea across the plains to the edge of the wood. Carter was there to greet them, and
+the sight of shapely, wholesome cats was indeed good for his eyes after the
+things he had seen and walked with in the abyss. He was glad to see his
+venerable friend and one-time rescuer at the head of Ulthar's detachment, a
+collar of rank around his sleek neck, and whiskers bristling at a martial angle.
+Better still, as a sub-lieutenant in that army was a brisk young fellow who proved
+to be none other than the very little kitten at the inn to whom Carter had given a
+saucer of rich cream on that long-vanished morning in Ulthar. He was a
+strapping and promising cat now, and purred as he shook hands with his friend.
+His grandfather said he was doing very well in the army, and that he might well
+expect a captaincy after one more campaign.
+
+Carter now outlined the peril of the cat tribe, and was rewarded by deep-
+throated purrs of gratitude from all sides. Consulting with the generals, he
+prepared a plan of instant action which involved marching at once upon the
+Zoog council and other known strongholds of Zoogs; forestalling their surprise
+attacks and forcing them to terms before the mobilization of their army of
+invasion. Thereupon without a moment's loss that great ocean of cats flooded the
+enchanted wood and surged around the council tree and the great stone circle.
+Flutterings rose to panic pitch as the enemy saw the newcomers and there was
+very little resistance among the furtive and curious brown Zoogs. They saw that
+they were beaten in advance, and turned from thoughts of vengeance to
+thoughts of present self-preservation.
+
+Half the cats now seated themselves in a circular formation with the captured
+Zoogs in the centre, leaving open a lane down which were marched the
+additional captives rounded up by the other cats in other parts of the wood.
+Terms were discussed at length. Carter acting as interpreter, and it was decided
+
+
+
+
+that the Zoogs might remain a free tribe on condition of rendering to the cats a
+large tribute of grouse, quail, and pheasants from the less fabulous parts of the
+forest. Twelve young Zoogs of noble families were taken as hostages to be kept
+in the Temple of Cats at Ulthar, and the victors made it plain that any
+disappearances of cats on the borders of the Zoog domain would be followed by
+consequences highly disastrous to Zoogs. These matters disposed of, the
+assembled cats broke ranks and permitted the Zoogs to slink off one by one to
+their respective homes, which they hastened to do with many a sullen backward
+glance.
+
+The old cat general now offered Carter an escort through the forest to whatever
+border he wished to reach, deeming it likely that the Zoogs would harbour dire
+resentment against him for the frustration of their warlike enterprise. This offer
+he welcomed with gratitude; not only for the safety it afforded, but because he
+liked the graceful companionship of cats. So in the midst of a pleasant and
+playful regiment, relaxed after the successful performance of its duty, Randolph
+Carter walked with dignity through that enchanted and phosphorescent wood of
+titan trees, talking of his quest with the old general and his grandson whilst
+others of the band indulged in fantastic gambols or chased fallen leaves that the
+wind drove among the fungi of that primeval floor. And the old cat said that he
+had heard much of unknown Kadath in the cold waste, but did not know where
+it was. As for the marvellous sunset city, he had not even heard of that, but
+would gladly relay to Carter anything he might later learn.
+
+He gave the seeker some passwords of great value among the cats of dreamland,
+and commended him especially to the old chief of the cats in Celephais, whither
+he was bound. That old cat, already slightly known to Carter, was a dignified
+maltese; and would prove highly influential in any transaction. It was dawn
+when they came to the proper edge of the wood, and Carter bade his friends a
+reluctant farewell. The young sub-lieutenant he had met as a small kitten would
+have followed him had not the old general forbidden it, but that austere
+patriarch insisted that the path of duty lay with the tribe and the army. So Carter
+set out alone over the golden fields that stretched mysterious beside a willow-
+fringed river, and the cats went back into the wood.
+
+Well did the traveller know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the
+Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukianos that
+marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn,
+and heightened the colours of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and
+dangle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of
+the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming
+music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place,
+and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.
+
+
+
+
+By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the
+river's edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad
+comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanqnin to
+pray to the god of Oukianos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a
+cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground
+with its walls and courts, its seven pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where
+the river enters through hidden channels and the god sings softly in the night.
+Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and
+terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or the
+chant of the cryptical priests, none but the King of Ilek-Vad may say; for only he
+had entered the temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of day, that
+carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the murmur of the
+great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under the
+enchanted sun.
+
+All that afternoon the pilgrim wandered on through perfumed meadows and in
+the lee of gentle riverward hills bearing peaceful thatched cottages and the
+shrines of amiable gods carven from jasper or chrysoberyl. Sometimes he walked
+close to the bank of Oukianos and whistled to the sprightly and iridescent fish of
+that crystal stream, and at other times he paused amidst the whispering rushes
+and gazed at the great dark wood on the farther side, whose trees came down
+clear to the water's edge. In former dreams he had seen quaint lumbering
+buopoths come shyly out of that wood to drink, but now he could not glimpse
+any. Once in a while he paused to watch a carnivorous fish catch a fishing bird,
+which it lured to the water by showing its tempting scales in the sun, and
+grasped by the beak with its enormous mouth as the winged hunter sought to
+dart down upon it.
+
+Toward evening he mounted a low grassy rise and saw before him flaming in the
+sunset the thousand gilded spires of Thran. Lofty beyond belief are the alabaster
+walls of that incredible city, sloping inward toward the top and wrought in one
+solid piece by what means no man knows, for they are more ancient than
+memory. Yet lofty as they are with their hundred gates and two hundred turrets,
+the clustered towers within, all white beneath their golden spires, are loftier still;
+so that men on the plain around see them soaring into the sky, sometimes
+shining clear, sometimes caught at the top in tangles of cloud and mist, and
+sometimes clouded lower down with their utmost pinnacles blazing free above
+the vapours. And where Thran's gates open on the river are great wharves of
+marble, with ornate galleons of fragrant cedar and calamander riding gently at
+anchor, and strange bearded sailors sitting on casks and bales with the
+hieroglyphs of far places. Landward beyond the walls lies the farm country,
+where small white cottages dream between little hills, and narrow roads with
+many stone bridges wind gracefully among streams and gardens.
+
+
+
+
+Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight
+float up from the river to the marvellous golden spires of Thran. And just at the
+hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed
+sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer
+worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars
+where the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city
+he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was a tunnel, and thereafter
+amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the
+heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows,
+and,the sound of lutes and pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble
+fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down through darker streets
+to the river, where at an old sea tavern he found the captains and seamen he had
+known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephais on a
+great green galleon, and there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to
+the venerable cat of that inn, who blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and
+dreamed of old wars and forgotten gods.
+
+In the morning Carter boarded the galleon bound for Celephais, and sat in the
+prow as the ropes were cast off and the long sail down to the Cerenerian Sea
+begun. For many leagues the banks were much as they were above Thran, with
+now and then a curious temple rising on the farther hills toward the right, and a
+drowsy village on the shore, with steep red roofs and nets spread in the sun.
+Mindful of his search. Carter questioned all the mariners closely about those
+whom they had met in the taverns of Celephais, asking the names and ways of
+the strange men with long, narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin noses, and pointed
+chins who came in dark ships from the north and traded onyx for the carved jade
+and spun gold and little red singing birds of Celephais. Of these men the sailors
+knew not much, save that they talked but seldom and spread a kind of awe
+about them.
+
+Their land, very far away, was called Inquanok, and not many people cared to go
+thither because it was a cold twilight land, and said to be close to unpleasant
+Leng; although high impassable mountains towered on the side where Leng was
+thought to lie, so that none might say whether this evil plateau with its horrible
+stone villages and unmentionable monastery were really there, or whether the
+rumour were only a fear that timid people felt in the night when those
+formidable barrier peaks loomed black against a rising moon. Certainly, men
+reached Leng from very different oceans. Of other boundaries of Inquanok those
+sailors had no notion, nor had they heard of the cold waste and unknown Kadath
+save from vague unplaced report. And of the marvellous sunset city which
+Carter sought they knew nothing at all. So the traveller asked no more of far
+things, but bided his time till he might talk with those strange men from cold and
+
+
+
+
+twilight Inquanok who are the seed of such gods as carved their features on
+Ngranek.
+
+Late in the day the galleon reached those bends of the river which traverse the
+perfumed jungles of Kied. Here Carter wished he might disembark, for in those
+tropic tangles sleep wondrous palaces of ivory, lone and unbroken, where once
+dwelt fabulous monarchs of a land whose name is forgotten. Spells of the Elder
+Ones keep those places unharmed and undecayed, for it is written that there may
+one day be need of them again; and elephant caravans have glimpsed them from
+afar by moonlight, though none dares approach them closely because of the
+guardians to which their wholeness is due. But the ship swept on, and dusk
+hushed the hum of the day, and the first stars above blinked answers to the early
+fireflies on the banks as that jungle fell far behind, leaving only its fragrance as a
+memory that it had been. And all through the night that galleon floated on past
+mysteries unseen and unsuspected. Once a lookout reported fires on the hills to
+the east, but the sleepy captain said they had better not be looked at too much,
+since it was highly uncertain just who or what had lit them.
+
+In the morning the river had broadened out greatly, and Carter saw by the
+houses along the banks that they were close to the vast trading city of Hlanith on
+the Cerenerian Sea. Here the walls are of rugged granite, and the houses
+peakedly fantastic with beamed and plastered gables. The men of Hlanith are
+more like those of the waking world than any others in dreamland; so that the
+city is not sought except for barter, but is prized for the solid work of its artisans.
+The wharves of Hlanith are of oak, and there the galleon made fast while the
+captain traded in the taverns. Carter also went ashore, and looked curiously
+upon the rutted streets where wooden ox carts lumbered and feverish merchants
+cried their wares vacuously in the bazaars. The sea taverns were all close to the
+wharves on cobbled lanes salted with the spray of high tides, and seemed
+exceedingly ancient with their low black-beamed ceilings and casements of
+greenish bull's-eye panes. Ancient sailors in those taverns talked much of distant
+ports, and told many stories of the curious men from twilight Inquanok, but had
+little to add to what the seamen of the galleon had told. Then at last, after much
+unloading and loading, the ship set sail once more over the sunset sea, and the
+high walls and gables of Hlanith grew less as the last golden light of day lent
+them a wonder and beauty beyond any that men had given them.
+
+Two nights and two days the galleon sailed over the Cerenerian Sea, sighting no
+land and speaking but one other vessel. Then near sunset of the second day there
+loomed up ahead the snowy peak of Aran with its gingko-trees swaying on the
+lower slope, and Carter knew that they were come to the land of Ooth-Nargai
+and the marvellous city of Celephais. Swiftly there came into sight the glittering
+minarets of that fabulous town, and the untarnished marble walls with their
+
+
+
+
+bronze statues, and the great stone bridge where Naraxa joins the sea. Then rose
+the gentle hills behind the town, with their groves and gardens of asphodels and
+the small shrines and cottages upon them; and far in the background the purple
+ridge of the Tanarians, potent and mystical, behind which lay forbidden ways
+into the waking world and toward other regions of dream.
+
+The harbour was full of painted galleys, some of which were from the marble
+cloud-city of Serannian, that lies in ethereal space beyond where the sea meets
+the sky, and some of which were from more substantial parts of dreamland.
+Among these the steersman threaded his way up to the spice-fragrant wharves,
+where the galleon made fast in the dusk as the city's million lights began to
+twinkle out over the water. Ever new seemed this deathless city of vision, for
+here time has no power to tarnish or destroy. As it has always been is still the
+turquoise of Nath-Horthath, and the eighty orchid-wreathed priests are the same
+who builded it ten thousand years ago. Shining still is the bronze of the great
+gates, nor are the onyx pavements ever worn or broken. And the great bronze
+statues on the walls look down on merchants and camel drivers older than fable,
+yet without one grey hair in their forked beards.
+
+Carter did not once seek out the temple or the palace or the citadel, but stayed by
+the seaward wall among traders and sailors. And when it was too late for
+rumours and legends he sought out an ancient tavern he knew well, and rested
+with dreams of the gods on unknown Kadath whom he sought. The next day he
+searched all along the quays for some of the strange mariners of Inquanok, but
+was told that none were now in port, their galley not being due from the north
+for full two weeks. He found, however, one Thorabonian sailor who had been to
+Inquanok and had worked in the onyx quarries of that twilight place; and this
+sailor said there was certainly a descent to the north of the peopled region, which
+everybody seemed to fear and shun. The Thorabonian opined that this desert led
+around the utmost rim of impassable peaks into Leng's horrible plateau, and that
+this was why men feared it; though he admitted there were other vague tales of
+evil presences and nameless sentinels. Whether or not this could be the fabled
+waste wherein unknown Kadath stands he did not know; but it seemed unlikely
+that those presences and sentinels, if indeed they existed, were stationed for
+nought.
+
+On the following day Carter walked up the Street of the Pillars to the turquoise
+temple and talked with the High-Priest. Though Nath-Horthath is chiefly
+worshipped in Celephais, all the Great Ones are mentioned in diurnal prayers;
+and the priest was reasonably versed in their moods. Like Atal in distant Ulthar,
+he strongly advised against any attempts to see them; declaring that they are
+testy and capricious, and subject to strange protection from the mindless Other
+Gods from Outside, whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos
+
+
+
+
+Nyarlathotep. Their jealous hiding of the marvellous sunset city shewed clearly
+that they did not wish Carter to reach it, and it was doubtful how they would
+regard a guest whose object was to see them and plead before them. No man had
+ever found Kadath in the past, and it might be just as well if none ever found it in
+the future. Such rumours as were told about that onyx castle of the Great Ones
+were not by any means reassuring.
+
+Having thanked the orchid-crowned High-Priest, Carter left the temple and
+sought out the bazaar of the sheep-butchers, where the old chief of Celephais'
+cats dwelt sleek and contented. That grey and dignified being was sunning
+himself on the onyx pavement, and extended a languid paw as his caller
+approached. But when Carter repeated the passwords and introductions
+furnished him by the old cat general of Ulthar, the furry patriarch became very
+cordial and communicative; and told much of the secret lore known to cats on
+the seaward slopes of Ooth-Nargai. Best of all, he repeated several things told
+him furtively by the timid waterfront cats of Celephais about the men of
+Inquanok, on whose dark ships no cat will go.
+
+It seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that is not
+the reason why no cat will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that Inquanok
+holds shadows which no cat can endure, so that in all that cold twilight realm
+there is never a cheering purr or a homely mew. Whether it be because of things
+wafted over the impassable peaks from hypothetical Leng, or because of things
+filtering down from the chilly desert to the north, none may say; but it remains a
+fact that in that far land there broods a hint of outer space which cats do not like,
+and to which they are more sensitive than men. Therefore they will not go on the
+dark ships that seek the basalt quays of Inquanok.
+
+The old chief of the cats also told him where to find his friend King Kuranes,
+who in Carter's latter dreams had reigned alternately in the rose-crystal Palace of
+the Seventy Delights at Celephais and in the turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating
+Serannian. It seemed that he could no more find content in those places, but had
+formed a mighty longing for the English cliffs and downlands of his boyhood;
+where in little dreaming villages England's old songs hover at evening behind
+lattice windows, and where grey church towers peep lovely through the verdure
+of distant valleys. He could not go back to these things in the waking world
+because his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a
+small tract of such countryside in the region east of the city where meadows roll
+gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to the foot of the Tanarian Hills. There he dwelt
+in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea, and tried to think it
+was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and where thirteen generations
+of his forefathers had first seen the light. And on the coast nearby he had built a
+little Cornish fishing village with steep cobbled ways, settling therein such
+
+
+
+
+people as had the most Enghsh faces, and seeking ever to teach them the dear
+remembered accents of old Cornwall fishers. And in a valley not far off he had
+reared a great Norman Abbey whose tower he could see from his window,
+placing around it in the churchyard grey stones with the names of his ancestors
+carved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like Old England's moss. For though
+Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and
+marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstasies and delights, novelties and
+excitements at his command, he would gladly have resigned forever the whole of
+his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in that
+pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his
+being and of which he must always be immutably a part.
+
+So when Carter bade that old grey chief of the cats adieu, he did not seek the
+terraced palace of rose crystal but walked out the eastern gate and across the
+daisied fields toward a peaked gable which he glimpsed through the oaks of a
+park sloping up to the sea-cliffs. And in time he came to a great hedge and a gate
+with a little brick lodge, and when he rang the bell there hobbled to admit him
+no robed and annointed lackey of the palace, but a small stubby old man in a
+smock who spoke as best he could in the quaint tones of far Cornwall. And
+Carter walked up the shady path between trees as near as possible to England's
+trees, and clumbed the terraces among gardens set out as in Queen Anne's time.
+At the door, flanked by stone cats in the old way, he was met by a whiskered
+butler in suitable livery; and was presently taken to the library where Kuranes,
+Lord of Ooth-Nargai and the Sky around Serannian, sat pensive in a chair by the
+window looking on his little seacoast village and wishing that his old nurse
+would come in and scold him because he was not ready for that hateful lawn-
+party at the vicar's, with the carriage waiting and his mother nearly out of
+patience.
+
+Kuranes, clad in a dressing gown of the sort favoured by London tailors in his
+youth, rose eagerly to meet his guest; for the sight of an Anglo-Saxon from the
+waking world was very dear to him, even if it was a Saxon from Boston,
+Massachusetts, instead of from Cornwall. And for long they talked of old times,
+having much to say because both were old dreamers and well versed in the
+wonders of incredible places. Kuranes, indeed, had been out beyond the stars in
+the ultimate void, and was said to be the only one who had ever returned sane
+from such a voyage.
+
+At length Carter brought up the subject of his quest, and asked of his host those
+questions he had asked of so many others. Kuranes did not know where Kadath
+was, or the marvellous sunset city; but he did know that the Great Ones were
+very dangerous creatures to seek out, and that the Other Gods had strange ways
+of protecting them from impertinent curiosity. He had learned much of the Other
+
+
+
+
+Gods in distant parts of space, especially in that region where form does not
+exist, and coloured gases study the innermost secrets. The violet gas S'ngac had
+told him terrible things of the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, and had warned him
+never to approach the central void where the daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws
+hungrily in the dark.
+
+Altogether, it was not well to meddle with the Elder Ones; and if they
+persistently denied all access to the marvellous sunset city, it were better not to
+seek that city.
+
+Kuranes furthermore doubted whether his guest would profit aught by coming
+to the city even were he to gain it. He himself had dreamed and yearned long
+years for lovely Celephais and the land of Ooth-Nargai, and for the freedom and
+colour and high experience of life devoid of its chains, and conventions, and
+stupidities. But now that he was come into that city and that land, and was the
+king thereof, he found the freedom and the vividness all too soon worn out, and
+monotonous for want of linkage with anything firm in his feelings and
+memories. He was a king in Ooth-Nargai, but found no meaning therein, and
+drooped always for the old familiar things of England that had shaped his youth.
+All his kingdom would he give for the sound of Cornish church bells over the
+downs, and all the thousand minarets of Celephais for the steep homely roofs of
+the village near his home. So he told his guest that the unknown sunset city
+might not hold quite that content he sought, and that perhaps it had better
+remain a glorious and half-remembered dream. For he had visited Carter often in
+the old waking days, and knew well the lovely New England slopes that had
+given him birth.
+
+At the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the early
+remembered scenes; the glow of Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and
+winding hill streets of quaint Kingsport, the hoary gambrel roofs of ancient and
+witch-haunted Arkham, and the blessed meads and valleys where stone walls
+rambled and white farmhouse gables peeped out from bowers of verdure. These
+things he told Randolph Carter, but still the seeker held to his purpose. And in
+the end they parted each with his own conviction, and Carter went back through
+the bronze gate into Celephais and down the Street of Pillars to the old sea wall,
+where he talked more with the mariners of far ports and waited for the dark ship
+from cold and twilight Inquanok, whose strange-faced sailors and onyx-traders
+had in them the blood of the Great Ones.
+
+One starlit evening when the Pharos shone splendid over the harbour the
+longed-for ship put in, and strange-faced sailors and traders appeared one by
+one and group by group in the ancient taverns along the sea wall. It was very
+exciting to see again those living faces so like the godlike features of Ngranek,
+
+
+
+
+but Carter did not hasten to speak with the silent seamen. He did not know how
+much of pride and secrecy and dim supernal memory might fill those children of
+the Great Ones, and was sure it would not be wise to tell them of his quest or ask
+too closely of that cold desert stretching north of their twilight land. They talked
+little with the other folk in those ancient sea taverns; but would gather in groups
+in remote comers and sing among themselves the haunting airs of unknown
+places, or chant long tales to one another in accents alien to the rest of
+dreamland. And so rare and moving were those airs and tales that one might
+guess their wonders from the faces of those who listened, even though the words
+came to common ears only as strange cadence and obscure melody.
+
+For a week the strange seamen lingered in the taverns and traded in the bazaars
+of Celephais, and before they sailed Carter had taken passage on their dark ship,
+telling them that he was an old onyx miner and wishful to work in their quarries.
+That ship was very lovey and cunningly wrought, being of teakwood with ebony
+fittings and traceries of gold, and the cabin in which the traveller lodged had
+hangings of silk and velvet. One morning at the turn of the tide the sails were
+raised and the anchor lilted, and as Carter stood on the high stern he saw the
+sunrise-blazing walls and bronze statues and golden minarets of ageless
+Celephais sink into the distance, and the snowy peak of Mount Man grow
+smaller and smaller. By noon there was nothing in sight save the gentle blue of
+the Cerenerian Sea, with one painted galley afar off bound for that realm of
+Serannian where the sea meets the sky.
+
+And the night came with gorgeous stars, and the dark ship steered for Charles'
+Wain and the Little Bear as they swung slowly round the pole. And the sailors
+sang strange songs of unknown places, and they stole off one by one to the
+forecastle while the wistful watchers murmured old chants and leaned over the
+rail to glimpse the luminous fish playing in bowers beneath the sea. Carter went
+to sleep at midnight, and rose in the glow of a young morning, marking that the
+sun seemed farther south than was its wont. And all through that second day he
+made progress in knowing the men of the ship, getting them little by little to talk
+of their cold twilight land, of their exquisite onyx city, and of their fear of the
+high and impassable peaks beyond which Leng was said to be. They told him
+how sorry they were that no cats would stay in the land of Inquanok, and how
+they thought the hidden nearness of Leng was to blame for it. Only of the stony
+desert to the north they would not talk. There was something disquieting about
+that desert, and it was thought expedient not to admit its existence.
+
+On later days they talked of the quarries in which Carter said he was going to
+work. There were many of them, for all the city of Inquanok was builded of
+onyx, whilst great polished blocks of it were traded in Rinar, Ogrothan, and
+Celephais and at home with the merchants of Thraa, Flarnek, and Kadatheron,
+
+
+
+
+for the beautiful wares of those fabulous ports. And far to the north, almost in
+the cold desert whose existence the men of Inquanok did not care to admit, there
+was an unused quarry greater than all the rest; from which had been hewn in
+forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that the sight of their chiselled
+vacancies struck terror to all who beheld. Who had mined those incredible
+blocks, and whither they had been transported, no man might say; but it was
+thought best not to trouble that quarry, around which such inhuman memories
+might conceivably cling. So it was left all alone in the twilight, with only the
+raven and the rumoured Shantak-bird to brood on its immensities, when Carter
+heard of this quarry he was moved to deep thought, for he knew from old tales
+that the Great Ones' castle atop unknown Kadath is of onyx.
+
+Each day the sun wheeled lower and lower in the sky, and the mists overhead
+grew thicker and thicker. And in two weeks there was not any sunlight at all, but
+only a weird grey twilight shining through a dome of eternal cloud by day, and a
+cold starless phosphorescence from the under side of that cloud by night. On the
+twentieth day a great jagged rock in the sea was sighted from afar, the first land
+glimpsed since Man's snowy peak had dwindled behind the ship. Carter asked
+the captain the name of that rock, but was told that it had no name and had
+never been sought by any vessel because of the sounds that came from it at night.
+And when, after dark, a dull and ceaseless howling arose from that jagged
+granite place, the traveller was glad that no stop had been made, and that the
+rock had no name. The seamen prayed and chanted till the noise was out of
+earshot, and Carter dreamed terrible dreams within dreams in the small hours.
+
+Two mornings after that there loomed far ahead and to the east a line of great
+grey peaks whose tops were lost in the changeless clouds of that twilight world.
+And at the sight of them the sailors sang glad songs, and some knelt down on the
+deck to pray, so that Carter knew they were come to the land of Inquanok and
+would soon be moored to the basalt quays of the great town bearing that land's
+name. Toward noon a dark coastline appeared, and before three o'clock there
+stood out against the north the bulbous domes and fantastic spires of the onyx
+city. Rare and curious did that archaic city rise above its walls and quays, all of
+delicate black with scrolls, flutings, and arabesques of inlaid gold. Tall and
+many-windowed were the houses, and carved on every side with flowers and
+patterns whose dark symmetries dazzled the eye with a beauty more poignant
+than light. Some ended in swelling domes that tapered to a point, others in
+terraced pyramids whereon rose clustered minarets displaying every phase of
+strangeness and imagination. The walls were low, and pierced by frequent gates,
+each under a great arch rising high above the general level and capped by the
+head of a god chiselled with that same skill displayed in the monstrous face on
+distant Ngranek. On a hill in the centre rose a sixteen-angled tower greater than
+all the rest and bearing a high pinnacled belfry resting on a flattened dome. This,
+
+
+
+
+the seamen said, was the Temple of the Elder Ones, and was ruled by an old
+High-Priest sad with inner secrets.
+
+At intervals the clang of a strange bell shivered over the onyx city, answered
+each time by a peal of mystic music made up of horns, viols, and chanting voices.
+And from a row of tripods on a galley round the high dome of the temple there
+burst flares of flame at certain moments; for the priests and people of that city
+were wise in the primal mysteries, and faithful in keeping the rhythms of the
+Great Ones as set forth in scrolls older than the Pnakotic Manuscripts. As the
+ship rode past the great basalt breakwater into the harbour the lesser noises of
+the city grew manifest, and Carter saw the slaves, sailors, and merchants on the
+docks. The sailors and merchants were of the strange-faced race of the gods, but
+the slaves were squat, slant-eyed folk said by rumour to have drifted somehow
+across or around the impassable peaks from the valleys beyond Leng. The
+wharves reached wide outside the city wall and bore upon them all manner of
+merchandise from the galleys anchored there, while at one end were great piles
+of onyx both carved and uncarved awaiting shipment to the far markets of Rinar,
+Ograthan and Celephais.
+
+It was not yet evening when the dark ship anchored beside a jutting quay of
+stone, and all the sailors and traders filed ashore and through the arched gate
+into the city. The streets of that city were paved with onyx and some of them
+were wide and straight whilst others were crooked and narrow. The houses near
+the water were lower than the rest, and bore above their curiously arched
+doorways certain signs of gold said to be in honour of the respective small gods
+that favoured each. The captain of the ship took Carter to an old sea tavern
+where flocked the mariners of quaint countries, and promised that he would next
+day shew him the wonders of the twilight city, and lead him to the taverns of the
+onyx-miners by the northern wall. And evening fell, and little bronze lamps were
+lighted, and the sailors in that tavern sang songs of remote places. But when
+from its high tower the great bell shivered over the city, and the peal of the horns
+and viols and voices rose cryptical in answer thereto, all ceased their songs or
+tales and bowed silent till the. last echo died away. For there is a wonder and a
+strangeness on the twilight city of Inquanok, and men fear to be lax in its rites
+lest a doom and a vengeance lurk unsuspectedly close.
+
+Far in the shadows of that tavern Carter saw a squat form he did not like, for it
+was unmistakably that of the old slant-eyed merchant he had seen so long before
+in the taverns of Dylath-Leen, who was reputed to trade with the horrible stone
+villages of Leng which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night
+from afar, and even to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be Described,
+which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a
+prehistoric stone monastery. This man had seemed to shew a queer gleam of
+
+
+
+
+knowing when Carter asked the traders of DylathLeen about the cold waste and
+Kadath; and somehow his presence in dark and haunted Inquanok, so close to
+the wonders of the north, was not a reassuring thing. He slipped wholly out of
+sight before Carter could speak to him, and sailors later said that he had come
+with a yak caravan from some point not well determined, bearing the colossal
+and rich-flavoured eggs of the rumoured Shantak-bird to trade for the dextrous
+jade goblets that merchants brought from Ilarnek.
+
+On the following morning the ship-captain led Carter through the onyx streets of
+Inquanok, dark under their twilight sky. The inlaid doors and figured house-
+fronts, carven balconies and crystal-paned oriels all gleamed with a sombre and
+polished loveliness; and now and then a plaza would open out with black pillars,
+colonades, and the statues of curious beings both human and fabulous. Some of
+the vistas down long and unbending streets, or through side alleys and over
+bulbous domes, spires, and arabesqued roofs, were weird and beautiful beyond
+words; and nothing was more splendid than the massive heights of the great
+central Temple of the Elder Ones with its sixteen carven sides, its flattened dome,
+and its lofty pinnacled belfry, overtopping all else, and majestic whatever its
+foreground. And always to the east, far beyond the city walls and the leagues of
+pasture land, rose the gaunt grey sides of those topless and impassable peaks
+across which hideous Leng was said to lie.
+
+The captain took Carter to the mighty temple, which is set with its walled garden
+in a great round plaza whence the streets go as spokes from a wheel's hub. The
+seven arched gates of that garden, each having over it a carven face like those on
+the city's gates, are always open, and the people roam reverently at will down
+the tiled paths and through the little lanes lined with grotesque termini and the
+shrines of modest gods. And there are fountains, pools, and basins there to
+reflect the frequent blaze of the tripods on the high balcony, all of onyx and
+having in them small luminous fish taken by divers from the lower bowers of
+ocean. When the deep clang from the temple belfry shivers over the garden and
+the city, and the answer of the horns and viols and voices peals out from the
+seven lodges by the garden gates, there issue from the seven doors of the temple
+long columns of masked and hooded priests in black, bearing at arm's length
+before them great golden bowls from which a curious steam rises. And all the
+seven columns strut peculiarly in single file, legs thrown far forward without
+bending the knees, down the walks that lead to the seven lodges, wherein they
+disappear and do not appear again. It is said that subterrene paths connect the
+lodges with the temple, and that the long files of priests return through them; nor
+is it unwhispered that deep flights of onyx steps go down to mysteries that are
+never told. But only a few are those who hint that the priests in the masked and
+hooded columns are not human beings.
+
+
+
+
+Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to
+do that. But before he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the
+shivering clang deafening above him, and the wailing of the horns and viols and
+voices loud from the lodges by the gates. And down the seven great walks
+stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priests in their singular way, giving to the
+traveller a fear which human priests do not often give. When the last of them had
+vanished he left that garden, noting as he did so a spot on the pavement over
+which the bowls had passed. Even the ship-captain did not like that spot, and
+hurried him on toward the hill whereon the Veiled King's palace rises many-
+domed and marvellous.
+
+The ways to the onyx palace are steep and narrow, all but the broad curving one
+where the king and his companions ride on yaks or in yak-drawn chariots. Carter
+and his guide climbed up an alley that was all steps, between inlaid walls
+hearing strange signs in gold, and under balconies and oriels whence sometimes
+floated soft strains of music or breaths of exotic fragrance. Always ahead loomed
+those titan walls, mighty buttresses, and clustered and bulbous domes for which
+the Veiled King's palace is famous; and at length they passed under a great black
+arch and emerged in the gardens of the monarch's pleasure. There Carter paused
+in faintness at so much beauty, for the onyx terraces and colonnaded walks, the
+gay porterres and delicate flowering trees espaliered to golden lattices, the
+brazen urns and tripods with cunning bas-reliefs, the pedestalled and almost
+breathing statues of veined black marble, the basalt-bottomed lagoon's tiled
+fountains with luminous fish, the tiny temples of iridescent singing birds atop
+carven columns, the marvellous scrollwork of the great bronze gates, and the
+blossoming vines trained along every inch of the polished walls all joined to
+form a sight whose loveliness was beyond reality, and half-fabulous even in the
+land of dreams. There it shimmered like a vision under that grey twilight sky,
+with the domed and fretted magnificence of the palace ahead, and the fantastic
+silhouette of the distant impassable peaks on the right. And ever the small birds
+and the fountains sang, while the perfume of rare blossoms spread like a veil
+over that incredible garden. No other human presence was there, and Carter was
+glad it was so. Then they turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for
+the palace itself no visitor may enter; and it is not well to look too long and
+steadily at the great central dome, since it is said to house the archaic father of all
+the rumoured Shantak-birds, and to send out queer dreams to the curious.
+
+After that the captain took Carter to the north quarter of the town, near the Gate
+of the Caravans, where are the taverns of the yak-merchants and the onyx-
+miners. And there, in a low-ceiled inn of quarrymen, they said farewell; for
+business called the captain whilst Carter was eager to talk with miners about the
+north. There were many men in that inn, and the traveller was not long in
+speaking to some of them; saying that he was an old miner of onyx, and anxious
+
+
+
+
+to know somewhat of Inquanok's quarries. But all that he learned was not much
+more than he knew before, for the miners were timid and evasive about the cold
+desert to the north and the quarry that no man visits. They had fears of fabled
+emissaries from around the mountains where Leng is said to lie, and of evil
+presences and nameless sentinels far north among the scattered rocks. And they
+whispered also that the rumoured Shantak-birds are no wholesome things; it
+being, indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled
+father of Shantaks in the king's dome is fed in the dark).
+
+The next day, saying that he wished to look over all the various mines for himself
+and to visit the scattered farms and quaint onyx villages of Inquanok, Carter
+hired a yak and stuffed great leathern saddle-bags for a journey. Beyond the Gate
+of the Caravans the road lay straight betwixt tilled fields, with many odd
+farmhouses crowned by low domes. At some of these houses the seeker stopped
+to ask questions; once finding a host so austere and reticent, and so full of an
+unplaced majesty like to that in the huge features on Ngranek, that he felt certain
+he had come at last upon one of the Great Ones themselves, or upon one with
+full nine-tenths of their blood, dwelling amongst men. And to that austere and
+reticent cotter he was careful to speak very well of the gods, and to praise all the
+blessings they had ever accorded him.
+
+That night Carter camped in a roadside meadow beneath a great lygath-tree to
+which he tied his yak, and in the morning resumed his northward pilgrimage. At
+about ten o'clock he reached the small-domed village of Urg, where traders rest
+and miners tell their tales, and paused in its taverns till noon. It is here that the
+great caravan road turns west toward Selarn, but Carter kept on north by the
+quarry road. All the afternoon he followed that rising road, which was somewhat
+narrower than the great highway, and which now led through a region with
+more rocks than tilled fields. And by evening the low hills on his left had risen
+into sizable black cliffs, so that he knew he was close to the mining country. All
+the while the great gaunt sides of the impassable mountains towered afar off at
+his right, and the farther he went, the worse tales he heard of them from the
+scattered farmers and traders and drivers of lumbering onyx-carts along the way.
+
+On the second night he camped in the shadow of a large black crag, tethering his
+yak to a stake driven in the ground. He observed the greater phosphorescence of
+the clouds at his northerly point, and more than once thought he saw dark
+shapes outlined against them. And on the third morning he came in sight of the
+first onyx quarry, and greeted the men who there laboured with picks and
+chisels. Before evening he had passed eleven quarries; the land being here given
+over altogether to onyx cliffs and boulders, with no vegetation at all, but only
+great rocky fragments scattered about a floor of black earth, with the grey
+impassable peaks always rising gaunt and sinister on his right. The third night he
+
+
+
+
+spent in a camp of quarry men whose flickering fires cast weird reflections on the
+polished cliffs to the west. And they sang many songs and told many tales,
+shewing such strange knowledge of the olden days and the habits of gods that
+Carter could see they held many latent memories of their sires the Great Ones.
+They asked him whither he went, and cautioned him not to go too far to the
+north; but he replied that he was seeking new cliffs of onyx, and would take no
+more risks than were common among prospectors. In the morning he bade them
+adieu and rode on into the darkening north, where they had warned him he
+would find the feared and unvisited quarry whence hands older than men's
+hands had wrenched prodigious blocks. But he did not like it when, turning back
+to wave a last farewell, he thought he saw approaching the camp that squat and
+evasive old merchant with slanting eyes, whose conjectured traffick with Leng
+was the gossip of distant Dylath-Leen.
+
+After two more quarries the inhabited part of Inquanok seemed to end, and the
+road narrowed to a steeply rising yak-path among forbidding black cliffs.
+Always on the right towered the gaunt and distant peaks, and as Carter climbed
+farther and farther into this untraversed realm he found it grew darker and
+colder. Soon he perceived that there were no prints of feet or hooves on the black
+path beneath, and realised that he was indeed come into strange and deserted
+ways of elder time. Once in a while a raven would croak far overhead, and now
+and then a flapping behind some vast rock would make him think
+uncomfortably of the rumoured Shantak-bird. But in the main he was alone with
+his shaggy steed, and it troubled him to observe that this excellent yak became
+more and more reluctant to advance, and more and more disposed to snort
+affrightedly at any small noise along the route.
+
+The path now contracted between sable and glistening walls, and began to
+display an even greater steepness than before. It was a bad footing, and the yak
+often slipped on the stony fragments strewn thickly about. In two hours Carter
+saw ahead a definite crest, beyond which was nothing but dull grey sky, and
+blessed the prospect of a level or downward course. To reach this crest, however,
+was no easy task; for the way had grown nearly perpendicular, and was perilous
+with loose black gravel and small stones. Eventually Carter dismounted and led
+his dubious yak; pulling very hard when the animal balked or stumbled, and
+keeping his own footing as best he might. Then suddenly he came to the top and
+saw beyond, and gasped at what he saw.
+
+The path indeed led straight ahead and slightly down, with the same lines of
+high natural walls as before; but on the left hand there opened out a monstrous
+space, vast acres in extent, where some archaic power had riven and rent the
+native cliffs of onyx in the form of a giant's quarry. Far back into the solid
+precipice ran that Cyclopean gouge, and deep down within earth's bowels its
+
+
+
+
+lower delvings yawned. It was no quarry of man, and the concave sides were
+scarred with great squares, yards wide, which told of the size of the blocks once
+hewn by nameless hands and chisels. High over its jagged rim huge ravens
+flapped and croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or
+urhags or less mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness. There
+Carter stood in the narrow way amidst the twilight with the rocky path sloping
+down before him; tall onyx cliffs on his right that led on as far as he could see
+and tall cliffs on the left chopped off just ahead to make that terrible and
+unearthly quarry.
+
+All at once the yak uttered a cry and burst from his control, leaping past him and
+darting on in a panic till it vanished down the narrow slope toward the north.
+Stones kicked by its flying hooves fell over the brink of the quarry and lost
+themselves in the dark without any sound of striking bottom; but Carter ignored
+the perils of that scanty path as he raced breathlessly after the flying steed. Soon
+the left-behind cliffs resumed their course, making the way once more a narrow
+lane; and still the traveller leaped on after the yak whose great wide prints told
+of its desperate flight.
+
+Once he thought he heard the hoofbeats of the frightened beast, and doubled his
+speed from this encouragement. He was covering miles, and little by little the
+way was broadening in front till he knew he must soon emerge on the cold and
+dreaded desert to the north. The gaunt grey flanks of the distant impassable
+peaks were again visible above the right-hand crags, and ahead were the rocks
+and boulders of an open space which was clearly a foretaste of the dark arid
+limitless plain. And once more those hoofbeats sounded in his ears, plainer than
+before, but this time giving terror instead of encouragement because he realised
+that they were not the frightened hoofbeats of his fleeing yak. The beats were
+ruthless and purposeful, and they were behind him.
+
+Carter's pursuit of the yak became now a flight from an unseen thing, for though
+he dared not glance over his shoulder he felt that the presence behind him could
+be nothing wholesome or mentionable. His yak must have heard or felt it first,
+and he did not like to ask himself whether it had followed him from the haunts
+of men or had floundered up out of that black quarry pit. Meanwhile the cliffs
+had been left behind, so that the oncoming night fell over a great waste of sand
+and spectral rocks wherein all paths were lost. He could not see the hoofprints of
+his yak, but always from behind him there came that detestable clopping;
+mingled now and then with what he fancied were titanic flappings and
+whirrings. That he was losing ground seemed unhappily clear to him, and he
+knew he was hopelessly lost in this broken and blasted desert of meaningless
+rocks and untravelled sands. Only those remote and impassable peaks on the
+
+
+
+
+right gave him any sense of direction, and even they were less clear as the grey
+twilight waned and the sickly phosphorescence of the clouds took its place.
+
+Then dim and misty in the darkling north before him he glimpsed a terrible
+thing. He had thought it for some moments a range of black mountains, but now
+he saw it was something more. The phosphorescence of the brooding clouds
+shewed it plainly, and even silhouetted parts of it as vapours glowed behind.
+How distant it was he could not tell, but it must have been very far. It was
+thousands of feet high, stretching in a great concave arc from the grey
+impassable peaks to the unimagined westward spaces, and had once indeed been
+a ridge of mighty onyx hills. But now these hills were hills no more, for some
+hand greater than man's had touched them. Silent they squatted there atop the
+world like wolves or ghouls, crowned with clouds and mists and guarding the
+secrets of the north forever. All in a great half circle they squatted, those dog-like
+mountains carven into monstrous watching statues, and their right hands were
+raised in menace against mankind.
+
+It was only the flickering light of the clouds that made their mitred double heads
+seem to move, but as Carter stumbled on he saw arise from their shadowy caps
+great forms whose motions were no delusion. Winged and whirring, those forms
+grew larger each moment, and the traveller knew his stumbling was at an end.
+They were not any birds or bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland, for
+they were larger than elephants and had heads like a horse's. Carter knew that
+they must be the Shantak-birds of ill rumour, and wondered no more what evil
+guardians and nameless sentinels made men avoid the boreal rock desert. And as
+he stopped in final resignation he dared at last to look behind him, where indeed
+was trotting the squat slant-eyed trader of evil legend, grinning astride a lean
+yak and leading on a noxious horde of leering Shantaks to whose wings still
+clung the rime and nitre of the nether pits.
+
+Trapped though he was by fabulous and hippocephalic winged nightmares that
+pressed around in great unholy circles, Randolph Carter did not lose
+consciousness. Lofty and horrible those titan gargoyles towered above him,
+while the slant-eyed merchant leaped down from his yak and stood grinning
+before the captive. Then the man motioned Carter to mount one of the repugnant
+Shantaks, helping him up as his judgement struggled with his loathing. It was
+hard work ascending, for the Shantak-bird has scales instead of feathers, and
+those scales are very slippery. Once he was seated, the slant-eyed man hopped
+up behind him, leaving the lean yak to be led away northward toward the ring of
+carven mountains by one of the incredible bird colossi.
+
+There now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, endlessly up and
+eastward toward the gaunt grey flanks of those impassable mountains beyond
+
+
+
+
+which Leng was said to be. Far above the clouds they flew, till at last there lay
+beneath them those fabled summits which the folk of Inquanok have never seen,
+and which lie always in high vortices of gleaming mist. Carter beheld them very
+plainly as they passed below, and saw upon their topmost peaks strange caves
+which made him think of those on Ngranek; but he did not question his captor
+about these things when he noticed that both the man and the horse-headed
+Shantak appeared oddly fearful of them, hurrying past nervously and shewing
+great tension until they were left far in the rear.
+
+The Shantak now flew lower, revealing beneath the canopy of cloud a grey
+barren plain whereon at great distances shone little feeble fires. As they
+descended there appeared at intervals lone huts of granite and bleak stone
+villages whose tiny windows glowed with pallid light. And there came from
+those huts and villages a shrill droning of pipes and a nauseous rattle of crotala
+which proved at once that Inquanok's people are right in their geographic
+rumours. For travellers have heard such sounds before, and know that they float
+only from the cold desert plateau which healthy folk never visit; that haunted
+place of evil and mystery which is Leng.
+
+Around the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, and Carter was curious as to
+what manner of beings they might be; for no healthy folk have ever been to Leng,
+and the place is known only by its fires and stone huts as seen from afar. Very
+slowly and awkwardly did those forms leap, and with an insane twisting and
+bending not good to behold; so that Carter did not wonder at the monstrous evil
+imputed to them by vague legend, or the fear in which all dreamland holds their
+abhorrent frozen plateau. As the Shantak flew lower, the repulsiveness of the
+dancers became tinged with a certain hellish familiarity; and the prisoner kept
+straining his eyes and racking his memory for clues to where he had seen such
+creatures before.
+
+They leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet, and seemed to wear a
+sort of wig or headpiece with small horns. Of other clothing they had none, but
+most of them were quite furry. Behind they had dwarfish tails, and when they
+glanced upward he saw the excessive width of their mouths. Then he knew what
+they were, and that they did not wear any wigs or headpieces after all. For the
+cryptic folk of Leng were of one race with the uncomfortable merchants of the
+black galleys that traded rubies at Dylath-Leen; those not quite human
+merchants who are the slaves of the monstrous moon-things! They were indeed
+the same dark folk who had shanghaied Carter on their noisome galley so long
+ago, and whose kith he had seen driven in herds about the unclean wharves of
+that accursed lunar city, with the leaner ones toiling and the fatter ones taken
+away in crates for other needs of their polypous and amorphous masters. Now
+he saw where such ambiguous creatures came from, and shuddered at the
+
+
+
+
+thought that Leng must be known to these formless abominations from the
+moon.
+
+But the Shantak flew on past the fires and the stone huts and the less than human
+dancers, and soared over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and
+ice and snow. Day came, and the phosphorescence of low clouds gave place to
+the misty twilight of that northern world, and still the vile bird winged
+meaningly through the cold and silence. At times the slant-eyed man talked with
+his steed in a hateful and guttural language, and the Shantak would answer with
+tittering tones that rasped like the scratching of ground glass. All this while the
+land was getting higher, and finally they came to a wind-swept table-land which
+seemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless world. There, all alone in the
+hush and the dusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of a squat windowless
+building, around which a circle of crude monoliths stood. In all this arrangement
+there was nothing human, and Carter surmised from old tales that he was indeed
+come to that most dreadful and legendary of all places, the remote and
+prehistoric monastery wherein dwells uncompanioned the High-Priest Not To Be
+Described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and prays to the Other
+Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
+
+The loathsome bird now settled to the ground, and the slant-eyed man hopped
+down and helped his captive alight. Of the purpose of his seizure Carter now felt
+very sure; for clearly the slant-eyed merchant was an agent of the darker powers,
+eager to drag before his masters a mortal whose presumption had aimed at the
+finding of unknown Kadath and the saying of a prayer before the faces of the
+Great Ones in their onyx castle. It seemed likely that this merchant had caused
+his former capture by the slaves of the moon-things in Dylath-Leen, and that he
+now meant to do what the rescuing cats had baffled; taking the victim to some
+dread rendezvous with monstrous Nyarlathotep and telling with what boldness
+the seeking of unknown Kadath had been tried. Leng and the cold waste north of
+Inquanok must be close to the Other Gods, and there the passes to Kadath are
+well guarded.
+
+The slant-eyed man was small, but the great hippocephalic bird was there to see
+he was obeyed; so Carter followed where he led, and passed within the circle of
+standing rocks and into the low arched doorway of that windowless stone
+monastery. There were no lights inside, but the evil merchant lit a small clay
+lamp bearing morbid bas-reliefs and prodded his prisoner on through mazes of
+narrow winding corridors. On the walls of the corridors were printed frightful
+scenes older than history, and in a style unknown to the archaeologists of earth.
+After countless aeons their pigments were brilliant still, for the cold and dryness
+of hideous Leng keep alive many primal things. Carter saw them fleetingly in the
+rays of that dim and moving lamp, and shuddered at the tale they told.
+
+
+
+
+Through those archaic frescoes Leng's annals stalked; and the horned, hooved,
+and wide-mouthed almost-humans danced evilly amidst forgotten cities. There
+were scenes of old wars, wherein Leng's almost-humans fought with the bloated
+purple spiders of the neighbouring vales; and there were scenes also of the
+coming of the black galleys from the moon, and of the submission of Leng's
+people to the polypous and amorphous blasphemies that hopped and floundered
+and wriggled out of them. Those slippery greyish-white blasphemies they
+worshipped as gods, nor ever complained when scores of their best and fatted
+males were taken away in the black galleys. The monstrous moon-beasts made
+their camp on a jagged isle in the sea, and Carter could tell from the frescoes that
+this was none other than the lone nameless rock he had seen when sailing to
+Inquanok; that grey accursed rock which Inquanok's seamen shun, and from
+which vile bowlings reverberate all through the night.
+
+And in those frescoes was shewn the great seaport and capital of the almost-
+humans; proud and pillared betwixt the cliffs and the basalt wharves, and
+wondrous with high fanes and carven places. Great gardens and columned
+streets led from the cliffs and from each of the six sphinx-crowned gates to a vast
+central plaza, and in that plaza was a pair of winged colossal lions guarding the
+top of a subterrene staircase. Again and again were those huge winged lions
+shewn, their mighty flanks of diarite glistening in the grey twilight of the day
+and the cloudy phosphorescence of the night. And as Carter stumbled past their
+frequent and repeated pictures it came to him at last what indeed they were, and
+what city it was that the almost-humans had ruled so anciently before the
+coming of the black galleys. There could be no mistake, for the legends of
+dreamland are generous and profuse. Indubitably that primal city was no less a
+place than storied Sarkomand, whose ruins had bleached for a million years
+before the first true human saw the light, and whose twin titan lions guard
+eternally the steps that lead down from dreamland to the Great Abyss.
+
+Other views shewed the gaunt grey peaks dividing Leng from Inquanok, and the
+monstrous Shantak-birds that build nests on the ledges half way up. And they
+shewed likewise the curious caves near the very topmost pinnacles, and how
+even the boldest of the Shantaks fly screaming away from them. Carter had seen
+those caves when he passed over them, and had noticed their likeness to the
+caves on Ngranek. Now he knew that the likeness was more than a chance one,
+for in these pictures were shewn their fearsome denizens; and those bat-wings,
+curving horns, barbed tails, prehensile paws and rubbery bodies were not
+strange to him. He had met those silent, flitting and clutching creatures before;
+those mindless guardians of the Great Abyss whom even the Great Ones fear,
+and who own not Nyarlathotep but hoary Nodens as their lord. For they were
+the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile because they have no faces.
+
+
+
+
+and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt the Vale of Pnath and the passes to
+the outer world.
+
+The slant-eyed merchant had now prodded Carter into a great domed space
+whose walls were carved in shocking bas-reliefs, and whose centre held a gaping
+circular pit surrounded by six malignly stained stone altars in a ring. There was
+no light in this vast evil-smelling crypt, and the small lamp of the sinister
+merchant shone so feebly that one could grasp details only little by little. At the
+farther end was a high stone dais reached by five steps; and there on a golden
+throne sat a lumpish figure robed in yellow silk figured with red and having a
+yellow silken mask over its face. To this being the slant-eyed man made certain
+signs with his hands, and the lurker in the dark replied by raising a disgustingly
+carven flute of ivory in silk-covered paws and blowing certain loathsome sounds
+from beneath its flowing yellow mask. This colloquy went on for some time, and
+to Carter there was something sickeningly familiar in the sound of that flute and
+the stench of the malodorous place. It made him think of a frightful red-litten city
+and of the revolting procession that once filed through it; of that, and of an awful
+climb through lunar countryside beyond, before the rescuing rush of earth's
+friendly cats. He knew that the creature on the dais was without doubt the High-
+Priest Not To Be Described, of which legend whispers such fiendish and
+abnormal possibilities, but he feared to think just what that abhorred High-Priest
+might be.
+
+Then the figured silk slipped a trifle from one of the greyish-white paws, and
+Carter knew what the noisome High-Priest was. And in that hideous second,
+stark fear drove him to something his reason would never have dared to attempt,
+for in all his shaken consciousness there was room only for one frantic will to
+escape from what squatted on that golden throne. He knew that hopeless
+labyrinths of stone lay betwixt him and the cold table-land outside, and that even
+on that table-land the noxious Shantek still waited; yet in spite of all this there
+was in his mind only the instant need to get away from that wriggling, silk-robed
+monstrosity.
+
+The slant-eyed man had set the curious lamp upon one of the high and wickedly
+stained altar-stones by the pit, and had moved forward somewhat to talk to the
+High-Priest with his hands. Carter, hitherto wholly passive, now gave that man a
+terrific push with all the wild strength of fear, so that the victim toppled at once
+into that gaping well which rumour holds to reach down to the hellish Vaults of
+Zin where Gugs hunt ghasts in the dark. In almost the same second he seized the
+lamp from the altar and darted out into the frescoed labyrinths, racing this way
+and that as chance determined and trying not to think of the stealthy padding of
+shapeless paws on the stones behind him, or of the silent wrigglings and
+crawlings which must be going on back there in lightless corridors.
+
+
+
+
+After a few moments he regretted his thoughtless haste, and wished he had tried
+to follow backward the frescoes he had passed on the way in. True, they were so
+confused and duplicated that they could not have done him much good, but he
+wished none the less he had made the attempt. Those he now saw were even
+more horrible than those he had seen then, and he knew he was not in the
+corridors leading outside. In time he became quite sure he was not followed, and
+slackened his pace somewhat; but scarce had he breathed in half relief when a
+new peril beset him. His lamp was waning, and he would soon be in pitch
+blackness with no means of sight or guidance.
+
+When the light was all gone he groped slowly in the dark, and prayed to the
+Great Ones for such help as they might afford. At times he felt the stone floor
+sloping up or down, and once he stumbled over a step for which no reason
+seemed to exist. The farther he went the damper it seemed to be, and when he
+was able to feel a junction or the mouth of a side passage he always chose the
+way which sloped downward the least. He believed, though, that his general
+course was down; and the vault-like smell and incrustations on the greasy walls
+and floor alike warned him he was burrowing deep in Leng's unwholesome
+table-land. But there was not any warning of the thing which came at last; only
+the thing itself with its terror and shock and breath-taking chaos. One moment he
+was groping slowly over the slippery floor of an almost level place, and the next
+he was shooting dizzily downward in the dark through a burrow which must
+have been well-nigh vertical.
+
+Of the length of that hideous sliding he could never be sure, but it seemed to take
+hours of delirious nausea and ecstatic frenzy. Then he realized he was still, with
+the phosphorescent clouds of a northern night shining sickly above him. All
+around were crumbling walls and broken columns, and the pavement on which
+he lay was pierced by straggling grass and wrenched asunder by frequent shrubs
+and roots. Behind him a basalt cliff rose topless and perpendicular; its dark side
+sculptured into repellent scenes, and pierced by an arched and carven entrance
+to the inner blacknesses out of which he had come. Ahead stretched double rows
+of pillars, and the fragments and pedestals of pillars, that spoke of a broad and
+bygone street; and from the urns and basins along the way he knew it had been a
+great street of gardens. Far off at its end the pillars spread to mark a vast round
+plaza, and in that open circle there loomed gigantic under the lurid night clouds
+a pair of monstrous things. Huge winged lions of diarite they were, with
+blackness and shadow between them. Full twenty feet they reared their
+grotesque and unbroken heads, and snarled derisive on the ruins around them.
+And Carter knew right well what they must be, for legend tells of only one such
+twain. They were the changeless guardians of the Great Abyss, and these dark
+ruins were in truth primordial Sarkomand.
+
+
+
+
+Carter's first act was to close and barricade the archway in the cHff with fallen
+blocks and odd debris that lay around. He wished no follower from Leng's
+hateful monastery, for along the way ahead would lurk enough of other dangers.
+Of how to get from Sarkomand to the peopled parts of dreamland he knew
+nothing at all; nor could he gain much by descending to the grottoes of the
+ghouls, since he knew they were no better informed than he. The three ghouls
+which had helped him through the city of Gugs to the outer world had not
+known how to reach Sarkomand in their journey back, but had planned to ask
+old traders in Dylath-Leen. He did not like to think of going again to the
+subterrene world of Gugs and risking once more that hellish tower of Koth with
+its Cyclopean steps leading to the enchanted wood, yet he felt he might have to
+try this course if all else failed. Over Leng's plateau past the lone monastery he
+dared not go unaided; for the High-Priest's emissaries must be many, while at
+the journey's end there would no doubt be the Shantaks and perhaps other
+things to deal with. If he could get a boat he might sail back to Inquanok past the
+jagged and hideous rock in the sea, for the primal frescoes in the monastery
+labyrinth had shewn that this frightful place lies not far from Sarkomand's basalt
+quays. But to find a boat in this aeon-deserted city was no probable thing, and it
+did not appear likely that he could ever make one.
+
+Such were the thoughts of Randolph Carter when a new impression began
+beating upon his mind. All this while there had stretched before him the great
+corpse-like width of fabled Sarkomand with its black broken pillars and
+crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titan stones and monstrous winged lions
+against the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds. Now he saw far ahead
+and on the right a glow that no clouds could account for, and knew he was not
+alone in the silence of that dead city. The glow rose and fell fitfully, flickering
+with a greenish tinge which did not reassure the watcher. And when he crept
+closer, down the littered street and through some narrow gaps between tumbled
+walls, he perceived that it was a campfire near the wharves with many vague
+forms clustered darkly around it; and a lethal odour hanging heavily over all.
+Beyond was the oily lapping of the harbour water with a great ship riding at
+anchor, and Carter paused in stark terror when he saw that the ship was indeed
+one of the dreaded black galleys from the moon.
+
+Then, just as he was about to creep back from that detestable flame, he saw a
+stirring among the vague dark forms and heard a peculiar and unmistakable
+sound. It was the frightened meeping of a ghoul, and in a moment it had swelled
+to a veritable chorus of anguish. Secure as he was in the shadow of monstrous
+ruins. Carter allowed his curiosity to conquer his fear, and crept forward again
+instead of retreating. Once in crossing an open street he wriggled worm-like on
+his stomach, and in another place he had to rise to his feet to avoid making a
+noise among heaps of fallen marble. But always he succeeded in avoiding
+
+
+
+
+discovery, so that in a short time he had found a spot behind a titan pillar where
+he could watch the whole green-litten scene of action. There around a hideous
+fire fed by the obnoxious stems of lunar fungi, there squatted a stinking circle of
+the toadlike moonbeasts and their almost-human slaves. Some of these slaves
+were heating curious iron spears in the leaping flames, and at intervals applying
+their white-hot points to three tightly trussed prisoners that lay writhing before
+the leaders of the party. From the motions of their tentacles Carter could see that
+the blunt-snouted moonbeasts were enjoying the spectacle hugely, and vast was
+his horror when he suddenly recognised the frantic meeping and knew that the
+tortured ghouls were none other than the faithful trio which had guided him
+safely from the abyss, and had thereafter set out from the enchanted wood to
+find Sarkomand and the gate to their native deeps.
+
+The number of malodorous moonbeasts about that greenish fire was very great,
+and Carter saw that he could do nothing now to save his former allies. Of how
+the ghouls had been captured he could not guess; but fancied that the grey
+toadlike blasphemies had heard them inquire in Dylath-Leen concerning the way
+to Sarkomand and had not wished them to approach so closely the hateful
+plateau of Leng and the High-Priest Not To Be Described. For a moment he
+pondered on what he ought to do, and recalled how near he was to the gate of
+the ghouls' black kingdom. Clearly it was wisest to creep east to the plaza of twin
+lions and descend at once to the gulf, where assuredly he would meet no horrors
+worse than those above, and where he might soon find ghouls eager to rescue
+their brethren and perhaps to wipe out the moonbeasts from the black galley. It
+occurred to him that the portal, like other gates to the abyss, might be guarded
+by flocks of night-gaunts; but he did not fear these faceless creatures now. He
+had learned that they are bound by solemn treaties with the ghouls, and the
+ghoul which was Pickman had taught him how to glibber a password they
+understood.
+
+So Carter began another silent crawl through the ruins, edging slowly toward the
+great central plaza and the winged lions. It was ticklish work, but the
+moonbeasts were pleasantly busy and did not hear the slight noises which he
+twice made by accident among the scattered stones. At last he reached the open
+space and picked his way among the stunned trees and vines that had grown up
+therein. The gigantic lions loomed terrible above him in the sickly glow of the
+phosphorescent night clouds, but he manfully persisted toward them and
+presently crept round to their faces, knowing it was on that side he would find
+the mighty darkness which they guard. Ten feet apart crouched the mocking-
+faced beasts of diarite, brooding on cyclopean pedestals whose sides were
+chiselled in fearsome bas-reliefs. Betwixt them was a tiled court with a central
+space which had once been railed with balusters of onyx. Midway in this space a
+black well opened, and Carter soon saw that he had indeed reached the yawning
+
+
+
+
+gulf whose crusted and mouldy stone steps lead down to the crypts of
+nightmare.
+
+Terrible is the memory of that dark descent in which hours wore themselves
+away whilst Carter wound sightlessly round and round down a fathomless
+spiral of steep and slippery stairs. So worn and narrow were the steps, and so
+greasy with the ooze of inner earth, that the climber never quite knew when to
+expect a breathless fall and hurtling down to the ultimate pits; and he was
+likewise uncertain just when or how the guardian night-gaunts would suddenly
+pounce upon him, if indeed there were any stationed in this primeval passage.
+All about him was a stifling odour of nether gulfs, and he felt that the air of these
+choking depths was not made for mankind. In time he became very numb and
+somnolent, moving more from automatic impulse than from reasoned will; nor
+did he realize any change when he stopped moving altogether as something
+quietly seized him from behind. He was flying very rapidly through the air
+before a malevolent tickling told him that the rubbery night-gaunts had
+performed their duty.
+
+Awaked to the fact that he was in the cold, damp clutch of the faceless flutterers.
+Carter remembered the password of the ghouls and glibbered it as loudly as he
+could amidst the wind and chaos of flight. Mindless though night-gaunts are
+said to be, the effect was instantaneous; for all tickling stopped at once, and the
+creatures hastened to shift their captive to a more comfortable position. Thus
+encouraged Carter ventured some explanations; telling of the seizure and torture
+of three ghouls by the moonbeasts, and of the need of assembling a party to
+rescue them. The night-gaunts, though inarticulate, seemed to understand what
+was said; and shewed greater haste and purpose in their flight. Suddenly the
+dense blackness gave place to the grey twilight of inner earth, and there opened
+up ahead one of those flat sterile plains on which ghouls love to squat and gnaw.
+Scattered tombstones and osseous fragments told of the denizens of that place;
+and as Carter gave a loud meep of urgent summons, a score of burrows emptied
+forth their leathery, dog-like tenants. The night-gaunts now flew low and set
+their passenger upon his feet, afterward withdrawing a little and forming a
+hunched semicircle on the ground while the ghouls greeted the newcomer.
+
+Carter glibbered his message rapidly and explicitly to the grotesque company,
+and four of them at once departed through different burrows to spread the news
+to others and gather such troops as might be available for a rescue. After a long
+wait a ghoul of some importance appeared, and made significant signs to the
+night-gaunts, causing two of the latter to fly off into the dark. Thereafter there
+were constant accessions to the hunched flock of night-gaunts on the plain, till at
+length the slimy soil was fairly black with them. Meanwhile fresh ghouls crawled
+out of the burrows one by one, all glibbering excitedly and forming in crude
+
+
+
+
+battle array not far from the huddled night-gaunts. In time there appeared that
+proud and influential ghoul which was once the artist Richard Pickman of
+Boston, and to him Carter glibbered a very full account of what had occurred.
+The erstwhile Pickman, pleased to greet his ancient friend again, seemed very
+much impressed, and held a conference with other chiefs a little apart from the
+growing throng.
+
+Finally, after scanning the ranks with care, the assembled chiefs all meeped in
+unison and began glibbering orders to the crowds of ghouls and night-gaunts. A
+large detachment of the horned flyers vanished at once, while the rest grouped
+themselves two by two on their knees with extended forelegs, awaiting the
+approach of the ghouls one by one. As each ghoul reached the pair of night-
+gaunts to which he was assigned, he was taken up and borne away into the
+blackness; till at last the whole throng had vanished save for Carter, Pickman,
+and the other chiefs, and a few pairs of night-gaunts. Pickman explained that
+night-gaunts are the advance guard and battle steeds of the ghouls, and that the
+army was issuing forth to Sarkomand to deal with the moonbeasts. Then Carter
+and the ghoulish chiefs approached the waiting bearers and were taken up by
+the damp, slippery paws. Another moment and all were whirling in wind and
+darkness; endlessly up, up, up to the gate of the winged and the special ruins of
+primal Sarkomand.
+
+When, after a great interval. Carter saw again the sickly light of Sarkomand's
+nocturnal sky, it was to behold the great central plaza swarming with militant
+ghouls and night-gaunts. Day, he felt sure, must be almost due; but so strong
+was the army that no surprise of the enemy would be needed. The greenish flare
+near the wharves still glimmered faintly, though the absence of ghoulish
+meeping shewed that the torture of the prisoners was over for the nonce. Softly
+glibbering directions to their steeds and to the flock of riderless night-gaunts
+ahead, the ghouls presently rose in wide whirring columns and swept on over
+the bleak ruins toward the evil flame. Carter was now beside Pickman in the
+front rank of ghouls, and saw as they approached the noisome camp that the
+moonbeasts were totally unprepared. The three prisoners lay bound and inert
+beside the fire, while their toadlike captors slumped drowsily about in no certain
+order. The almost-human slaves were asleep, even the sentinels shirking a duty
+which in this realm must have seemed to them merely perfunctory.
+
+The final swoop of the night-gaunts and mounted ghouls was very sudden, each
+of the greyish toadlike blasphemies and their almost-human slaves being seized
+by a group of night-gaunts before a sound was made. The moonbeasts, of course,
+were voiceless; and even the slaves had little chance to scream before rubbery
+paws choked them into silence. Horrible were the writhings of those great
+jellyfish abnormalities as the sardonic night-gaunts clutched them, but nothing
+
+
+
+
+availed against the strength of those black prehensile talons. When a moonbeast
+writhed too violently, a night-gaunt would seize and pull its quivering pink
+tentacles; which seemed to hurt so much that the victim would cease its
+struggles. Carter expected to see much slaughter, but found that the ghouls were
+far subtler in their plans. They glibbered certain simple orders to the night-
+gaunts which held the captives, trusting the rest to instinct; and soon the hapless
+creatures were borne silently away into the Great Abyss, to be distributed
+impartially amongst the Dholes, Gugs, ghasts and other dwellers in darkness
+whose modes of nourishment are not painless to their chosen victims.
+Meanwhile the three bound ghouls had been released and consoled by their
+conquering kinsfolk, whilst various parties searched the neighborhood for
+possible remaining moonbeasts, and boarded the evil-smelling black galley at the
+wharf to make sure that nothing had escaped the general defeat. Surely enough,
+the capture had been thorough, for not a sign of further life could the victors
+detect. Carter, anxious to preserve a means of access to the rest of dreamland,
+urged them not to sink the anchored galley; and this request was freely granted
+out of gratitude for his act in reporting the plight of the captured trio. On the
+ship were found some very curious objects and decorations, some of which
+Carter cast at once into the sea.
+
+Ghouls and night-gaunts now formed themselves in separate groups, the former
+questioning their rescued fellow anent past happenings. It appeared that the
+three had followed Carter's directions and proceeded from the enchanted wood
+to Dylath-Leen by way of Nir and the Skin, stealing human clothes at a lonely
+farmhouse and loping as closely as possible in the fashion of a man's walk. In
+Dylath-Leen's taverns their grotesque ways and faces had aroused much
+comment; but they had persisted in asking the way to Sarkomand until at last an
+old traveller was able to tell them. Then they knew that only a ship for Lelag-
+Leng would serve their purpose, and prepared to wait patiently for such a vessel.
+
+But evil spies had doubtless reported much; for shortly a black galley put into
+port, and the wide-mouthed ruby merchants invited the ghouls to drink with
+them in a tavern. Wine was produced from one of those sinister bottles
+grotesquely carven from a single ruby, and after that the ghouls found
+themselves prisoners on the black galley as Carter had found himself. This time,
+however, the unseen rowers steered not for the moon but for antique
+Sarkomand; bent evidently on taking their captives before the High-Priest Not
+To Be Described. They had touched at the jagged rock in the northern sea which
+Inquanok's mariners shun, and the ghouls had there seen for the first time the
+red masters of the ship; being sickened despite their own callousness by such
+extremes of malign shapelessness and fearsome odour. There, too, were
+witnessed the nameless pastimes of the toadlike resident garrison-such pastimes
+as give rise to the night-howlings which men fear. After that had come the
+
+
+
+
+landing at ruined Sarkomand and the beginning of the tortures, whose
+continuance the present rescue had prevented.
+
+Future plans were next discussed, the three rescued ghouls suggesting a raid on
+the jagged rock and the extermination of the toadlike garrison there. To this,
+however, the night-gaunts objected; since the prospect of flying over water did
+not please them. Most of the ghouls favoured the design, but were at a loss how
+to follow it without the help of the winged night-gaunts. Thereupon Carter,
+seeing that they could not navigate the anchored galley, offered to teach them the
+use of the great banks of oars; to which proposal they eagerly assented. Grey day
+had now come, and under that leaden northern sky a picked detachment of
+ghouls filed into the noisome ship and took their seats on the rowers' benches.
+Carter found them fairly apt at learning, and before night had risked several
+experimental trips around the harbour. Not till three days later, however, did he
+deem it safe to attempt the voyage of conquest. Then, the rowers trained and the
+night-gaunts safely stowed in the forecastle, the party set sail at last; Pickman
+and the other chiefs gathering on deck and discussing models of approach and
+procedure.
+
+On the very first night the bowlings from the rock were heard. Such was their
+timbre that all the galley's crew shook visibly; but most of all trembled the three
+rescued ghouls who knew precisely what those bowlings meant. It was not
+thought best to attempt an attack by night, so the ship lay to under the
+phosphorescent clouds to wait for the dawn of a greyish day. when the light was
+ample and the bowlings still the rowers resumed their strokes, and the galley
+drew closer and closer to that jagged rock whose granite pinnacles clawed
+fantastically at the dull sky. The sides of the rock were very steep; but on ledges
+here and there could be seen the bulging walls of queer windowless dwellings,
+and the low railings guarding travelled highroads. No ship of men had ever
+come so near the place, or at least, had never come so near and departed again;
+but Carter and the ghouls were void of fear and kept inflexibly on, rounding the
+eastern face of the rock and seeking the wharves which the rescued trio
+described as being on the southern side within a harbour formed of steep
+headlands.
+
+The headlands were prolongations of the island proper, and came so closely
+together that only one ship at a time might pass between them. There seemed to
+be no watchers on the outside, so the galley was steered boldly through the
+flume-like strait and into the stagnant putrid harbour beyond. Here, however, all
+was bustle and activity; with several ships lying at anchor along a forbidding
+stone quay, and scores of almost-human slaves and moonbeasts by the
+waterfront handling crates and boxes or driving nameless and fabulous horrors
+hitched to lumbering lorries. There was a small stone town hewn out of the
+
+
+
+
+vertical cliff above the wharves, with the start of a winding road that spiralled
+out of sight toward higher ledges of the rock. Of what lay inside that prodigious
+peak of granite none might say, but the things one saw on the outside were far
+from encouraging.
+
+At sight of the incoming galley the crowds on the wharves displayed much
+eagerness; those with eyes staring intently, and those without eyes wriggling
+their pink tentacles expectantly. They did not, of course, realize that the black
+ship had changed hands; for ghouls look much like the horned and hooved
+almost-humans, and the night-gaunts were all out of sight below. By this time
+the leaders had fully formed a plan; which was to loose the night-gaunts as soon
+as the wharf was touched, and then to sail directly away, leaving matters wholly
+to the instincts of those almost-mindless creatures. Marooned on the rock, the
+horned flyers would first of all seize whatever living things they found there,
+and afterward, quite helpless to think except in terms of the homing instinct,
+would forget their fears of water and fly swiftly back to the abyss; bearing their
+noisome prey to appropriate destinations in the dark, from which not much
+would emerge alive.
+
+The ghoul that was Pickman now went below and gave the night-gaunts their
+simple instructions, while the ship drew very near to the ominous and
+malodorous wharves. Presently a fresh stir rose along the waterfront, and Carter
+saw that the motions of the galley had begun to excite suspicion. Evidently the
+steersman was not making for the right dock, and probably the watchers had
+noticed the difference between the hideous ghouls and the almost-human slaves
+whose places they were taking. Some silent alarm must have been given, for
+almost at once a horde of the mephitic moonbeasts began to pour from the little
+black doorways of the windowless houses and down the winding road at the
+right. A rain of curious javelins struck the galley as the prow hit the wharf felling
+two ghouls and slightly wounding another; but at this point all the hatches were
+thrown open to emit a black cloud of whirring night-gaunts which swarmed over
+the town like a flock of horned and cyclopean bats.
+
+The jellyish moonbeasts had procured a great pole and were trying to push off
+the invading ship, but when the night-gaunts struck them they thought of such
+things no more. It was a very terrible spectacle to see those faceless and rubbery
+ticklers at their pastime, and tremendously impressive to watch the dense cloud
+of them spreading through the town and up the winding roadway to the reaches
+above. Sometimes a group of the black flutterers would drop a toadlike prisoner
+from aloft by mistake, and the manner in which the victim would burst was
+highly offensive to the sight and smell. When the last of the night-gaunts had left
+the galley the ghoulish leaders glibbered an order of withdrawal, and the rowers
+
+
+
+
+pulled quietly out of the harbour between the grey headlands while still the
+town was a chaos of battle and conquest.
+
+The Pickman ghoul allowed several hours for the night-gaunts to make up their
+rudimentary minds and overcome their fear of flying over the sea, and kept the
+galley standing about a mile off the jagged rock while he waited, and dressed the
+wounds of the injured men. Night fell, and the grey twilight gave place to the
+sickly phosphorescence of low clouds, and all the while the leaders watched the
+high peaks of that accursed rock for signs of the night-gaunts' flight. Toward
+morning a black speck was seen hovering timidly over the top-most pinnacle,
+and shortly afterward the speck had become a swarm. Just before daybreak the
+swarm seemed to scatter, and within a quarter of an hour it had vanished wholly
+in the distance toward the northeast. Once or twice something seemed to fall
+from the thing swarm into the sea; but Carter did not worry, since he knew from
+observation that the toadlike moonbeasts cannot swim. At length, when the
+ghouls were satisfied that all the night-gaunts had left for Sarkomand and the
+Great Abyss with their doomed burdens, the galley put back into the harbour
+betwixt the grey headlands; and all the hideous company landed and roamed
+curiously over the denuded rock with its towers and eyries and fortresses
+chiselled from the solid stone.
+
+Frightful were the secrets uncovered in those evil and windowless crypts; for the
+remnants of unfinished pastimes were many, and in various stages of departure
+from their primal state. Carter put out of the way certain things which were after
+a fashion alive, and fled precipitately from a few other things about which he
+could not be very positive. The stench-filled houses were furnished mostly with
+grotesque stools and benches carven from moon-trees, and were painted inside
+with nameless and frantic designs. Countless weapons, implements, and
+ornaments lay about, including some large idols of solid ruby depicting singular
+beings not found on the earth. These latter did not, despite their material, invite
+either appropriation or long inspection; and Carter took the trouble to hammer
+five of them into very small pieces. The scattered spears and javelins he collected,
+and with Pickman's approval distributed among the ghouls. Such devices were
+new to the doglike lopers, but their relative simplicity made them easy to master
+after a few concise hints.
+
+The upper parts of the rock held more temples than private homes, and in
+numerous hewn chambers were found terrible carven altars and doubtfully
+stained fonts and shrines for the worship of things more monstrous than the wild
+gods atop Kadath. From the rear of one great temple stretched a low black
+passage which Carter followed far into the rock with a torch till he came to a
+lightless domed hall of vast proportions, whose vaultings were covered with
+demoniac carvings and in whose centre yawned a foul and bottomless well like
+
+
+
+
+that in the hideous monastery of Leng where broods alone the High-Priest Not
+To Be Described. On the distant shadowy side, beyond the noisome well, he
+thought he discerned a small door of strangely wrought bronze; but for some
+reason he felt an unaccountable dread of opening it or even approaching it, and
+hastened back through the cavern to his unlovely allies as they shambled about
+with an ease and abandon he could scarcely feel. The ghouls had observed the
+unfinished pastimes of the moonbeasts, and had profited in their fashion. They
+had also found a hogshead of potent moon-wine, and were rolling it down to the
+wharves for removal and later use in diplomatic dealings, though the rescued
+trio, remembering its effect on them in Dylath-Leen, had warned their company
+to taste none of it. Of rubies from lunar mines there was a great store, both rough
+and polished, in one of the vaults near the water; but when the ghouls found
+they were not good to eat they lost all interest in them. Carter did not try to carry
+any away, since he knew too much about those which had mined them.
+
+Suddenly there came an excited meeping from the sentries on the wharves, and
+all the loathsome foragers turned from their tasks to stare seaward and cluster
+round the waterfront. Betwixt the grey headlands a fresh black galley was
+rapidly advancing, and it would be but a moment before the almost-humans on
+deck would perceive the invasion of the town and give the alarm to the
+monstrous things below. Fortunately the ghouls still bore the spears and javelins
+which Carter had distributed amongst them; and at his command, sustained by
+the being that was Pickman, they now formed a line of battle and prepared to
+prevent the landing of the ship. Presently a burst of excitement on the galley told
+of the crew's discovery of the changed state of things, and the instant stoppage of
+the vessel proved that the superior numbers of the ghouls had been noted and
+taken into account. After a moment of hesitation the new comers silently turned
+and passed out between the headlands again, but not for an instant did the
+ghouls imagine that the conflict was averted. Either the dark ship would seek
+reinforcements or the crew would try to land elsewhere on the island; hence a
+party of scouts was at once sent up toward the pinnacle to see what the enemy's
+course would be.
+
+In a very few minutes the ghoul returned breathless to say that the moonbeasts
+and almost-humans were landing on the outside of the more easterly of the
+rugged grey headlands, and ascending by hidden paths and ledges which a goat
+could scarcely tread in safety. Almost immediately afterward the galley was
+sighted again through the flume-like strait, but only for a second. Then a few
+moments later, a second messenger panted down from aloft to say that another
+party was landing on the other headland; both being much more numerous than
+the size of the galley would seem to allow for. The ship itself, moving slowly
+with only one sparsely manned tier of oars, soon hove in sight betwixt the cliffs.
+
+
+
+
+and lay to in the foetid harbour as if to watch the coming fray and stand by for
+any possible use.
+
+By this time Carter and Pickman had divided the ghouls into three parties, one to
+meet each of the two invading columns and one to remain in the town. The first
+two at once scrambled up the rocks in their respective directions, while the third
+was subdivided into a land party and a sea party. The sea party, commanded by
+Carter, boarded the anchored galley and rowed out to meet the under-manned
+galley of the newcomers; whereat the latter retreated through the strait to the
+open sea. Carter did not at once pursue it, for he knew he might be needed more
+acutely near the town.
+
+Meanwhile the frightful detachments of the moonbeasts and almost-humans had
+lumbered up to the top of the headlands and were shockingly silhouetted on
+either side against the grey twilight sky. The thin hellish flutes of the invaders
+had now begun to whine, and the general effect of those hybrid, half-amorphous
+processions was as nauseating as the actual odour given off by the toadlike lunar
+blasphemies. Then the two parties of the ghouls swarmed into sight and joined
+the silhouetted panorama. Javelins began to fly from both sides, and the swelling
+meeps of the ghouls and the bestial howls of the almost-humans gradually joined
+the hellish whine of the flutes to form a frantick and indescribable chaos of
+daemon cacophony. Now and then bodies fell from the narrow ridges of the
+headlands into the sea outside or the harbour inside, in the latter case being
+sucked quickly under by certain submarine lurkers whose presence was
+indicated only by prodigious bubbles.
+
+For half an hour this dual battle raged in the sky, till upon the west cliff the
+invaders were completely annihilated. On the east cliff, however, where the
+leader of the moonbeast party appeared to be present, the ghouls had not fared
+so well; and were slowly retreating to the slopes of the pinnacle proper. Pickman
+had quickly ordered reinforcements for this front from the party in the town, and
+these had helped greatly in the earlier stages of the combat. Then, when the
+western battle was over, the victorious survivors hastened across to the aid of
+their hard-pressed fellows; turning the tide and forcing the invaders back again
+along the narrow ridge of the headland. The almost-humans were by this time all
+slain, but the last of the toadlike horrors fought desperately with the great spears
+clutched in their powerful and disgusting paws. The time for javelins was now
+nearly past, and the fight became a hand-to-hand contest of what few spearmen
+could meet upon that narrow ridge.
+
+As fury and recklessness increased, the number falling into the sea became very
+great. Those striking the harbour met nameless extinction from the unseen
+bubblers, but of those striking the open sea some were able to swim to the foot of
+
+
+
+
+the cliffs and land on tidal rocks, while the hovering galley of the enemy rescued
+several moonbeasts. The cliffs were unscalable except where the monsters had
+debarked, so that none of the ghouls on the rocks could rejoin their battle-line.
+Some were killed by javelins from the hostile galley or from the moonbeasts
+above, but a few survived to be rescued. When the security of the land parties
+seemed assured. Carter's galley sallied forth between the headlands and drove
+the hostile ship far out to sea; pausing to rescue such ghouls as were on the rocks
+or still swimming in the ocean. Several moonbeasts washed on rocks or reefs
+were speedily put out of the way.
+
+Finally, the moonbeast galley being safely in the distance and the invading land
+army concentrated in one place. Carter landed a considerable force on the eastern
+headland in the enemy's rear; after which the fight was short-lived indeed.
+Attacked from both sides, the noisome flounderers were rapidly cut to pieces or
+pushed into the sea, till by evening the ghoulish chiefs agreed that the island was
+again clear of them. The hostile galley, meanwhile, had disappeared; and it was
+decided that the evil jagged rock had better be evacuated before any
+overwhelming horde of lunar horrors might be assembled and brought against
+the victors.
+
+So by night Pickman and Carter assembled all the ghouls and counted them with
+care, finding that over a fourth had been lost in the day's battles. The wounded
+were placed on bunks in the galley, for Pickman always discouraged the old
+ghoulish custom of killing and eating one's own wounded, and the able-bodied
+troops were assigned to the oars or to such other places as they might most
+usefully fill. Under the low phosphorescent clouds of night the galley sailed, and
+Carter was not sorry to be departing from the island of unwholesome secrets,
+whose lightless domed hall with its bottomless well and repellent bronze door
+lingered restlessly in his fancy. Dawn found the ship in sight of Sarkomand's
+ruined quays of basalt, where a few night-gaunt sentries still waited, squatting
+like black horned gargoyles on the broken columns and crumbling sphinxes of
+that fearful city which lived and died before the years of man.
+
+The ghouls made camp amongst the fallen stones of Sarkomand, despatching a
+messenger for enough night-gaunts to serve them as steeds. Pickman and the
+other chiefs were effusive in their gratitude for the aid Carter had lent them.
+Carter now began to feel that his plans were indeed maturing well, and that he
+would be able to command the help of these fearsome allies not only in quitting
+this part of dreamland, but in pursuing his ultimate quest for the gods atop
+unknown Kadath, and the marvellous sunset city they so strangely withheld
+from his slumbers. Accordingly he spoke of these things to the ghoulish leaders;
+telling what he knew of the cold waste wherein Kadath stands and of the
+monstrous Shantaks and the mountains carven into double-headed images
+
+
+
+
+which guard it. He spoke of the fear of Shantaks for night-gaunts, and of how the
+vast hippocephahc birds fly screaming from the black burrows high up on the
+gaunt grey peaks that divide Inquanok from hateful Leng. He spoke, too, of the
+things he had learned concerning night-gaunts from the frescoes in the
+windowless monastery of the High-Priest Not To Be Described; how even the
+Great Ones fear them, and how their ruler is not the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep
+at all, but hoary and immemorial Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.
+
+All these things Carter glibbered to the assembled ghouls, and presently outlined
+that request which he had in mind and which he did not think extravagant
+considering the services he had so lately rendered the rubbery doglike lopers. He
+wished very much, he said, for the services of enough night-gaunts to bear him
+safely through the aft past the realm of Shantaks and carven mountains, and up
+into the old waste beyond the returning tracks of any other mortal. He desired to
+fly to the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste to plead with the
+Great Ones for the sunset city they denied him, and felt sure that the night-
+gaunts could take him thither without trouble; high above the perils of the plain,
+and over the hideous double heads of those carven sentinel mountains that squat
+eternally in the grey dusk. For the horned and faceless creatures there could be
+no danger from aught of earth since the Great Ones themselves dread them. And
+even were unexpected things to come from the Other Gods, who are prone to
+oversee the affairs of earth's milder gods, the night-gaunts need not fear; for the
+outer hells are indifferent matters to such silent and slippery flyers as own not
+Nyarlathotep for their master, but bow only to potent and archaic Nodens.
+
+A flock of ten or fifteen night-gaunts. Carter glibbered, would surely be enough
+to keep any combination of Shantaks at a distance, though perhaps it might be
+well to have some ghouls in the party to manage the creatures, their ways being
+better known to their ghoulish allies than to men. The party could land him at
+some convenient point within whatever walls that fabulous onyx citadel might
+have, waiting in the shadows for his return or his signal whilst he ventured
+inside the castle to give prayer to the gods of earth. If any ghouls chose to escort
+him into the throne-room of the Great Ones, he would be thankful, for their
+presence would add weight and importance to his plea. He would not, however,
+insist upon this but merely wished transportation to and from the castle atop
+unknown Kadath; the final journey being either to the marvellous sunset city
+itself, in case of gods proved favourable, or back to the earthward Gate of Deeper
+Slumber in the Enchanted Wood in case his prayers were fruitless.
+
+Whilst Carter was speaking all the ghouls listened with great attention, and as
+the moments advanced the sky became black with clouds of those night-gaunts
+for which messengers had been sent. The winged steeds settled in a semicircle
+around the ghoulish army, waiting respectfully as the doglike chieftains
+
+
+
+
+considered the wish of the earthly traveller. The ghoul that was Pickman
+glibbered gravely with his fellows and in the end Carter was offered far more
+than he had at most expected. As he had aided the ghouls in their conquest of the
+moonbeasts, so would they aid him in his daring voyage to realms whence none
+had ever returned; lending him not merely a few of their allied night-gaunts, but
+their entire army as then encamped, veteran fighting ghouls and newly
+assembled night-gaunts alike, save only a small garrison for the captured black
+galley and such spoils as had come from the jagged rock in the sea. They would
+set out through the aft whenever he might wish, and once arrived on Kadath a
+suitable train of ghouls would attend him in state as he placed his petition before
+earth's gods in their onyx castle.
+
+Moved by a gratitude and satisfaction beyond words. Carter made plans with
+the ghoulish leaders for his audacious voyage. The army would fly high, they
+decided, over hideous Leng with its nameless monastery and wicked stone
+villages; stopping only at the vast grey peaks to confer with the Shantak-
+frightening night-gaunts whose burrows honeycombed their summits. They
+would then, according to what advice they might receive from those denizens,
+choose their final course; approaching unknown Kadath either through the
+desert of carven mountains north of Inquanok, or through the more northerly
+reaches of repulsive Leng itself. Doglike and soulless as they are, the ghouls and
+night-gaunts had no dread of what those untrodden deserts might reveal; nor
+did they feel any deterring awe at the thought of Kadath towering lone with its
+onyx castle of mystery.
+
+About midday the ghouls and night-gaunts prepared for flight, each ghoul
+selecting a suitable pair of horned steeds to bear him. Carter was placed well up
+toward the head of the column beside Pickman, and in front of the whole a
+double line of riderless night-gaunts was provided as a vanguard. At a brisk
+meep from Pickman the whole shocking army rose in a nightmare cloud above
+the broken columns and crumbling sphinxes of primordial Sarkomand; higher
+and higher, till even the great basalt cliff behind the town was cleared, and the
+cold, sterile table-land of Leng's outskirts laid open to sight. Still higher flew the
+black host, till even this table-land grew small beneath them; and as they worked
+northward over the wind-swept plateau of horror Carter saw once again with a
+shudder the circle of crude monoliths and the squat windowless building which
+he knew held that frightful silken-masked blasphemy from whose clutches he
+had so narrowly escaped. This time no descent was made as the army swept
+batlike over the sterile landscape, passing the feeble fires of the unwholesome
+stone villages at a great altitude, and pausing not at all to mark the morbid
+twistings of the hooved, horned almost-humans that dance and pipe eternally
+therein. Once they saw a Shantak-bird flying low over the plain, but when it saw
+them it screamed noxiously and flapped off to the north in grotesque panic.
+
+
+
+
+At dusk they reached the jagged grey peaks that form the barrier of Inquanok,
+and hovered about these strange caves near the summits which Carter recalled as
+so frightful to the Shantaks. At the insistent meeping of the ghoulish leaders
+there issued forth from each lofty burrow a stream of horned black flyers with
+which the ghouls and night-gaunts of the party conferred at length by means of
+ugly gestures. It soon became clear that the best course would be that over the
+cold waste north of Inquanok, for Leng's northward reaches are full of unseen
+pitfalls that even the night-gaunts dislike; abysmal influences centering in certain
+white hemispherical buildings on curious knolls, which common folklore
+associates unpleasantly with the Other Gods and their crawling chaos
+Nyarlathotep.
+
+Of Kadath the flutterers of the peaks knew almost nothing, save that there must
+be some mighty marvel toward the north, over which the Shantaks and the
+carven mountains stand guard. They hinted at rumoured abnormalities of
+proportion in those trackless leagues beyond, and recalled vague whispers of a
+realm where night broods eternally; but of definite data they had nothing to give.
+So Carter and his party thanked them kindly; and, crossing the topmost granite
+pinnacles to the skies of Inquanok, dropped below the level of the
+phosphorescent night clouds and beheld in the distance those terrible squatting
+gargoyles that were mountains till some titan hand carved fright into their virgin
+rock.
+
+There they squatted in a hellish half-circle, their legs on the desert sand and their
+mitres piercing the luminous clouds; sinister, wolflike, and double-headed, with
+faces of fury and right hands raised, dully and malignly watching the rim of
+man's world and guarding with horror the reaches of a cold northern world that
+is not man's. From their hideous laps rose evil Shantaks of elephantine bulk, but
+these all fled with insane titters as the vanguard of night-gaunts was sighted in
+the misty sky. Northward above those gargoyle mountains the army flew, and
+over leagues of dim desert where never a landmark rose. Less and less luminous
+grew the clouds, till at length Carter could see only blackness around him; but
+never did the winged steeds falter, bred as they were in earth's blackest crypts,
+and seeing not with any eyes, but with the whole dank surface of their slippery
+forms. On and on they flew, past winds of dubious scent and sounds of dubious
+import; ever in thickest darkness, and covering such prodigious spaces that
+Carter wondered whether or not they could still be within earth's dreamland.
+
+Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. All
+below was still black, but those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a
+meaning and directiveness they had never possessed elsewhere. It was not that
+the figures of the constellations were different, but that the same familiar shapes
+now revealed a significance they had formerly failed to make plain. Everything
+
+
+
+
+focussed toward the north; every curve and asterism of the ghttering sky became
+part of a vast design whose function was to hurry first the eye and then the
+whole observer onward to some secret and terrible goal of convergence beyond
+the frozen waste that stretched endlessly ahead. Carter looked toward the east
+where the great ridge of barrier peaks had towered along all the length of
+Inquanok and saw against the stars a jagged silhouette which told of its
+continued presence. It was more broken now, with yawning clefts and
+fantastically erratic pinnacles; and Carter studied closely the suggestive turnings
+and inclinations of that grotesque outline, which seemed to share with the stars
+some subtle northward urge.
+
+They were flying past at a tremendous speed, so that the watcher had to strain
+hard to catch details; when all at once he beheld just above the line of the
+topmost peaks a dark and moving object against the stars, whose course exactly
+paralleled that of his own bizarre party. The ghouls had likewise glimpsed it, for
+he heard their low glibbering all about him, and for a moment he fancied the
+object was a gigantic Shantak, of a size vastly greater than that of the average
+specimen. Soon, however, he saw that this theory would not hold; for the shape
+of the thing above the mountains was not that of any hippocephalic bird. Its
+outline against the stars, necessarily vague as it was, resembled rather some huge
+mitred head, or pair of heads infinitely magnified; and its rapid bobbing flight
+through the sky seemed most peculiarly a wingless one. Carter could not tell
+which side of the mountains it was on, but soon perceived that it had parts below
+the parts he had first seen, since it blotted out all the stars in places where the
+ridge was deeply cleft.
+
+Then came a wide gap in the range, where the hideous reaches of transmontane
+Leng were joined to the cold waste on this side by a low pass trough which the
+stars shone wanly. Carter watched this gap with intense care, knowing that he
+might see outlined against the sky beyond it the lower parts of the vast thing that
+flew undulantly above the pinnacles. The object had now floated ahead a trifle,
+and every eye of the party was fixed on the rift where it would presently appear
+in full-length silhouette. Gradually the huge thing above the peaks neared the
+gap, slightly slackening its speed as if conscious of having outdistanced the
+ghoulish army. For another minute suspense was keen, and then the brief instant
+of full silhouette and revelation came; bringing to the lips of the ghouls an awed
+and half-choked meep of cosmic fear, and to the soul of the traveller a chill that
+never wholly left it. For the mammoth bobbing shape that overtopped the ridge
+was only a head - a mitred double head - and below it in terrible vastness loped
+the frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain-high monstrosity that
+walked in stealth and silence; the hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoid
+shape that trotted blackly against the sky, its repulsive pair of cone-capped heads
+reaching half way to the zenith.
+
+
+
+
+Carter did not lose consciousness or even scream aloud, for he was an old
+dreamer; but he looked behind him in horror and shuddered when he saw that
+there were other monstrous heads silhouetted above the level of the peaks,
+bobbing along stealthily after the first one. And straight in the rear were three of
+the mighty mountain shapes seen full against the southern stars, tiptoeing
+wolflike and lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding thousands of feet in the aft.
+The carven mountains, then, had not stayed squatting in that rigid semicircle
+north of Inquanok, with right hands uplifted. They had duties to perform, and
+were not remiss. But it was horrible that they never spoke, and never even made
+a sound in walking.
+
+Meanwhile the ghoul that was Pickman had glibbered an order to the night-
+gaunts, and the whole army soared higher into the air. Up toward the stars the
+grotesque column shot, till nothing stood out any longer against the sky; neither
+the grey granite ridge that was still nor the carven mitred mountains that
+walked. All was blackness beneath as the fluttering legion surged northward
+amidst rushing winds and invisible laughter in the aether, and never a Shantak
+or less mentionable entity rose from the haunted wastes to pursue them. The
+farther they went, the faster they flew, till soon their dizzying speed seemed to
+pass that of a rifle ball and approach that of a planet in its orbit. Carter wondered
+how with such speed the earth could still stretch beneath them, but knew that in
+the land of dream dimensions have strange properties. That they were in a realm
+of eternal night he felt certain, and he fancied that the constellations overhead
+had subtly emphasized their northward focus; gathering themselves up as it
+were to cast the flying army into the void of the boreal pole, as the folds of a bag
+are gathered up to cast out the last bits of substance therein.
+
+Then he noticed with terror that the wings of the night-gaunts were not flapping
+any more. The horned and faceless steeds had folded their membranous
+appendages, and were resting quite passive in the chaos of wind that whirled
+and chuckled as it bore them on. A force not of earth had seized on the army, and
+ghouls and night-gaunts alike were powerless before a current which pulled
+madly and relentlessly into the north whence no mortal had ever returned. At
+length a lone pallid light was seen on the skyline ahead, thereafter rising steadily
+as they approached, and having beneath it a black mass that blotted out the stars.
+Carter saw that it must be some beacon on a mountain, for only a mountain
+could rise so vast as seen from so prodigious a height in the air.
+
+Higher and higher rose the light and the blackness beneath it, till all the northern
+sky was obscured by the rugged conical mass. Lofty as the army was, that pale
+and sinister beacon rose above it, towering monstrous over all peaks and
+concernments of earth, and tasting the atomless aether where the cryptical moon
+and the mad planets reel. No mountain known of man was that which loomed
+
+
+
+
+before them. The high clouds far below were but a fringe for its foothills. The
+groping dizziness of topmost air was but a girdle for its loins. Scornful and
+spectral climbed that bridge betwixt earth and heaven, black in eternal night, and
+crowned with a pshent of unknown stars whose awful and significant outline
+grew every moment clearer. Ghouls meeped in wonder as they saw it, and Carter
+shivered in fear lest all the hurtling army be dashed to pieces on the unyielding
+onyx of that Cyclopean cliff.
+
+Higher and higher rose the light, till it mingled with the loftiest orbs of the zenith
+and winked down at the flyers with lurid mockery. All the north beneath it was
+blackness now; dread, stony blackness from infinite depths to infinite heights,
+with only that pale winking beacon perched unreachably at the top of all vision.
+Carter studied the light more closely, and saw at last what lines its inky
+background made against the stars. There were towers on that titan
+mountaintop; horrible domed towers in noxious and incalculable tiers and
+clusters beyond any dreamable workmanship of man; battlements and terraces
+of wonder and menace, all limned tiny and black and distant against the starry
+pshent that glowed malevolently at the uppermost rim of sight. Capping that
+most measureless of mountains was a castle beyond all mortal thought, and in it
+glowed the daemon-light. Then Randolph Carter knew that his quest was done,
+and that he saw above him the goal of all forbidden steps and audacious visions;
+the fabulous, the incredible home of the Great Ones atop unknown Kadath.
+
+Even as he realised this thing. Carter noticed a change in the course of the
+helplessly wind-sucked party. They were rising abruptly now, and it was plain
+that the focus of their flight was the onyx castle where the pale light shone. So
+close was the great black mountain that its sides sped by them dizzily as they
+shot upward, and in the darkness they could discern nothing upon it. Vaster and
+vaster loomed the tenebrous towers of the nighted castle above, and Carter could
+see that it was well-nigh blasphemous in its immensity. Well might its stones
+have been quarried by nameless workmen in that horrible gulf rent out of the
+rock in the hill pass north of Inquanok, for such was its size that a man on its
+threshold stood even as air out on the steps of earth's loftiest fortress. The pshent
+of unknown stars above the myriad domed turrets glowed with a sallow, sickly
+flare, so that a kind of twilight hung about the murky walls of slippery onyx. The
+pallid beacon was now seen to be a single shining window high up in one of the
+loftiest towers, and as the helpless army neared the top of the mountain Carter
+thought he detected unpleasant shadows flitting across the feebly luminous
+expanse. It was a strangely arched window, of a design wholly alien to earth.
+
+The solid rock now gave place to the giant foundations of the monstrous castle,
+and it seemed that the speed of the party was somewhat abated. Vast walls shot
+up, and there was a glimpse of a great gate through which the voyagers were
+
+
+
+
+swept. All was night in the titan courtyard, and then came the deeper blackness
+of inmost things as a huge arched portal engulfed the column. Vortices of cold
+wind surged dankly through sightless labyrinths of onyx, and Carter could never
+tell what Cyclopean stairs and corridors lay silent along the route of his endless
+aerial twisting. Always upward led the terrible plunge in darkness, and never a
+sound, touch or glimpse broke the dense pall of mystery. Large as the army of
+ghouls and night-gaunts was, it was lost in the prodigious voids of that more
+than earthly castle. And when at last there suddenly dawned around him the
+lurid light of that single tower room whose lofty window had served as a beacon,
+it took Carter long to discern the far walls and high, distant ceiling, and to realize
+that he was indeed not again in the boundless air outside.
+
+Randolph Carter had hoped to come into the throne-room of the Great Ones with
+poise and dignity, flanked and followed by impressive lines of ghouls in
+ceremonial order, and offering his prayer as a free and potent master among
+dreamers. He had known that the Great Ones themselves are not beyond a
+mortal's power to cope with, and had trusted to luck that the Other Gods and
+their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep would not happen to come to their aid at the
+crucial moment, as they had so often done before when men sought out earth's
+gods in their home or on their mountains. And with his hideous escort he had
+half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that
+ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only
+archaic Nodens for their lord. But now he saw that supernal Kadath in its cold
+waste is indeed girt with dark wonders and nameless sentinels, and that the
+Other Gods are of a surety vigilant in guarding the mild, feeble gods of earth.
+Void as they are of lordship over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless,
+shapeless blasphemies of outer space can yet control them when they must; so
+that it was not in state as a free and potent master of dreamers that Randolph
+Carter came into the Great Ones' throne-room with his ghouls. Swept and
+herded by nightmare tempests from the stars, and dogged by unseen horrors of
+the northern waste, all that army floated captive and helpless in the lurid light,
+dropping numbly to the onyx floor when by some voiceless order the winds of
+fright dissolved.
+
+Before no golden dais had Randolph Carter come, nor was there any august
+circle of crowned and haloed beings with narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin
+nose, and pointed chin whose kinship to the carven face on Ngranek might
+stamp them as those to whom a dreamer might pray. Save for the one tower
+room the onyx castle atop Kadath was dark, and the masters were not there.
+Carter had come to unknown Kadath in the cold waste, but he had not found the
+gods. Yet still the lurid light glowed in that one tower room whose size was so
+little less than that of all outdoors, and whose distant walls and roof were so
+nearly lost to sight in thin, curling mists. Earth's gods were not there, it was true.
+
+
+
+
+but of subtler and less visible presences there could be no lack. Where the mild
+gods are absent, the Other Gods are not unrepresented; and certainly, the onyx
+castle of castles was far from tenantless. In what outrageous form or forms terror
+would next reveal itself Carter could by no means imagine. He felt that his visit
+had been expected, and wondered how close a watch had all along been kept
+upon him by the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. It is Nyarlathotep, horror of
+infinite shapes and dread soul and messenger of the Other Gods, that the
+fungous moonbeasts serve; and Carter thought of the black galley that had
+vanished when the tide of battle turned against the toadlike abnormalities on the
+jagged rock in the sea.
+
+Reflecting upon these things, he was staggering to his feet in the midst of his
+nightmare company when there rang without warning through that pale-litten
+and limitless chamber the hideous blast of a daemon trumpet. Three times pealed
+that frightful brazen scream, and when the echoes of the third blast had died
+chucklingly away Randolph Carter saw that he was alone. Whither, why and
+how the ghouls and night-gaunts had been snatched from sight was not for him
+to divine. He knew only that he was suddenly alone, and that whatever unseen
+powers lurked mockingly around him were no powers of earth's friendly
+dreamland. Presently from the chamber's uttermost reaches a new sound came.
+This, too, was a rhythmic trumpeting; but of a kind far removed from the three
+raucous blasts which had dissolved his goodly cohorts. In this low fanfare
+echoed all the wonder and melody of ethereal dream; exotic vistas of
+unimagined loveliness floating from each strange chord and subtly alien
+cadence. Odours of incense came to match the golden notes; and overhead a
+great light dawned, its colours changing in cycles unknown to earth's spectrum,
+and following the song of the trumpets in weird symphonic harmonies. Torches
+flared in the distance, and the beat of drums throbbed nearer amidst waves of
+tense expectancy.
+
+Out of the thinning mists and the cloud of strange incenses filed twin columns of
+giant black slaves with loin-cloths of iridescent silk. Upon their heads were
+strapped vast helmet-like torches of glittering metal, from which the fragrance of
+obscure balsams spread in fumous spirals. In their right hands were crystal
+wands whose tips were carven into leering chimaeras, while their left hands
+grasped long thin silver trumpets which they blew in turn. Armlets and anklets
+of gold they had, and between each pair of anklets stretched a golden chain that
+held its wearer to a sober gait. That they were true black men of earth's
+dreamland was at once apparent, but it seemed less likely that their rites and
+costumes were wholly things of our earth. Ten feet from Carter the columns
+stopped, and as they did so each trumpet flew abruptly to its bearer's thick lips.
+Wild and ecstatic was the blast that followed, and wilder still the cry that
+chorused just after from dark throats somehow made shrill by strange artifice.
+
+
+
+
+Then down the wide lane betwixt the two columns a lone figure strode; a tall,
+slim figure with the young face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes
+and crowned with a golden pshent that glowed with inherent light. Close up to
+Carter strode that regal figure; whose proud carriage and smart features had in
+them the fascination of a dark god or fallen archangel, and around whose eyes
+there lurked the languid sparkle of capricious humour. It spoke, and in its
+mellow tones there rippled the wild music of Lethean streams.
+
+"Randolph Carter," said the voice, "you have come to see the Great Ones whom
+it is unlawful for men to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other
+Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled mindlessly to the sound of thin
+flutes in the black ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose name
+no lips dare speak aloud.
+
+"When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kia to see the Greater Ones dance and
+howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were
+there, and they did what was expected. Zenig of Aphorat sought to reach
+unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little
+finger of one whom I need not name.
+
+"But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth's dreamland, and
+burn still with the flame of quest. You came not as one curious, but as one
+seeking his due, nor have you failed ever in reverence toward the mild gods of
+earth. Yet have these gods kept you from the marvellous sunset city of your
+dreams, and wholly through their own small covetousness; for verily, they
+craved the weird loveliness of that which your fancy had fashioned, and vowed
+that henceforward no other spot should be their abode.
+
+"They are gone from their castle on unknown Kadath to dwell in your
+marvellous city. All through its palaces of veined marble they revel by day, and
+when the sun sets they go out in the perfumed gardens and watch the golden
+glory on temples and colonnades, arched bridges and silver-basined fountains,
+and wide streets with blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows.
+And when night comes they climb tall terraces in the dew, and sit on carved
+benches of porphyry scanning the stars, or lean over pale balustrades to gaze at
+the town's steep northward slopes, where one by one the little windows in old
+peaked gables shine softly out with the calm yellow light of homely candles.
+
+"The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more in the ways of the gods.
+They have forgotten the high places of earth, and the mountains that knew their
+youth. The earth has no longer any gods that are gods, and only the Other Ones
+from outer space hold sway on unremembered Kadath. Far away in a valley of
+your own childhood, Randolph Carter, play the heedless Great Ones. You have
+
+
+
+
+dreamed too well, O wise arch-dreamer, for you have drawn dream's gods away
+from the world of all men's visions to that which is wholly yours; having builded
+out of your boyhood's small fancies a city more lovely than all the phantoms that
+have gone before.
+
+"It is not well that earth's gods leave their thrones for the spider to spin on, and
+their realm for the Others to sway in the dark manner of Others. Fain would the
+powers from outside bring chaos and horror to you, Randolph Carter, who are
+the cause of their upsetting, but that they know it is by you alone that the gods
+may be sent back to their world. In that half-waking dreamland which is yours,
+no power of uttermost night may pursue; and only you can send the selfish Great
+Ones gently out of your marvellous sunset city, back through the northern
+twilight to their wonted place atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste.
+
+"So. Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I spare you and charge you
+to seek that sunset city which is yours, and to send thence the drowsy truant
+gods for whom the dream world waits. Not hard to find is that roseal fever of the
+gods, that fanfare of supernal trumpets and clash of immortal cymbals, that
+mystery whose place and meaning have haunted you through the halls of
+waking and the gulfs of dreaming, and tormented you with hints of vanished
+memory and the pain of lost things awesome and momentous. Not hard to find
+is that symbol and relic of your days of wonder, for truly, it is but the stable and
+eternal gem wherein all that wonder sparkles crystallised to light your evening
+path. Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that
+your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick
+sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.
+
+"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of
+what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs
+and western windows aflame with sunset, of the flower-fragrant Common and
+the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet
+valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw,
+Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and
+they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love.
+And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead
+scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the glory of Salem's towers
+and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the
+setting sun.
+
+"There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour,
+with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and
+Newport climbing wraithlike from its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there,
+with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and
+
+
+
+
+antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and
+overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean
+with tolling buoys beyond.
+
+"Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic
+New Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and
+creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves and Truro's windy willows.
+Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore,
+hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode
+Island's back country. Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the
+dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, Randolph
+Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New England bore you, and into your
+soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded,
+crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced
+wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and
+carven rail, and descend at last these endless balustraded steps to the city of
+broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the
+thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.
+
+"Look! through that window shine the stars of eternal night. Even now they are
+shining above the scenes you have known and cherished, drinking of their charm
+that they may shine more lovely over the gardens of dream. There is Antares-he
+is winking at this moment over the roofs of Tremont Street, and you could see
+him from your window on Beacon Hill. Out beyond those stars yawn the gulfs
+from whence my mindless masters have sent me. Some day you too may traverse
+them, but if you are wise you will beware such folly; for of those mortals who
+have been and returned, only one preserves a mind unshattered by the
+pounding, clawing horrors of the void. Terrors and blasphemies gnaw at one
+another for space, and there is more evil in the lesser ones than in the greater;
+even as you know from the deeds of those who sought to deliver you into my
+hands, whilst I myself harboured no wish to shatter you, and would indeed have
+helped you hither long ago had I not been elsewhere busy,and certain that you
+would yourself find the way. Shun then, the outer hells, and stick to the calm,
+lovely things of your youth. Seek out your marvellous city and drive thence the
+recreant Great Ones, sending them back gently to those scenes which are of their
+own youth, and which wait uneasy for their return.
+
+"Easier even then the way of dim memory is the way I will prepare for you. See!
+There comes hither a monstrous Shantak, led by a slave who for your peace of
+mind had best keep invisible. Mount and be ready - there! Yogash the Black will
+help you on the scaly horror. Steer for that brightest star just south of the zenith -
+it is Vega, and in two hours will be just above the terrace of your sunset city.
+Steer for it only till you hear a far-off singing in the high aether. Higher than that
+
+
+
+
+lurks madness, so rein your Shantak when the first note lures. Look then back to
+earth, and you will see shining the deathless altar-flame of Ired-Naa from the
+sacred roof of a temple. That temple is in your desiderate sunset city, so steer for
+it before you heed the singing and are lost.
+
+"When you draw nigh the city steer for the same high parapet whence of old you
+scanned the outspread glory, prodding the Shantak till he cry aloud. That cry the
+Great Ones will hear and know as they sit on their perfumed terraces, and there
+will come upon them such a homesickness that all of your city's wonders will not
+console them for the absence of Kadath's grim castle and the pshent of eternal
+stars that crowns it.
+
+"Then must you land amongst them with the Shantak, and let them see and
+touch that noisome and hippocephalic bird; meanwhile discoursing to them of
+unknown Kadath, which you will so lately have left, and telling them how its
+boundless halls are lovely and unlighted, where of old they used to leap and
+revel in supernal radiance. And the Shantak will talk to them in the manner of
+Shantaks, but it will have no powers of persuasion beyond the recalling of elder
+days.
+
+"Over and over must you speak to the wandering Great Ones of their home and
+youth, till at last they will weep and ask to be shewn the returning path they
+have forgotten. Thereat can you loose the waiting Shantak, sending him skyward
+with the homing cry of his kind; hearing which the Great Ones will prance and
+jump with antique mirth, and forthwith stride after the loathly bird in the fashion
+of gods, through the deep gulfs of heaven to Kadath's familiar towers and
+domes.
+
+"Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish and inhabit for ever,
+and once more will earth's gods rule the dreams of men from their accustomed
+seat. Go now - the casement is open and the stars await outside. Already your
+Shantak wheezes and titters with impatience. Steer for Vega through the night,
+but turn when the singing sounds. Forget not this warning, lest horrors
+unthinkable suck you into the gulf of shrieking and ululant madness. Remember
+the Other Gods; they are great and mindless and terrible, and lurk in the outer
+voids. They are good gods to shun.
+
+"Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on
+unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my
+thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am
+Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos."
+
+
+
+
+And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous Shantak, shot
+screamingly into space toward the cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but
+once behind him at the clustered and chaotic turrets of the onyx nightmare
+wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of that window above the air and the
+clouds of earth's dreamland. Great polypous horrors slid darkly past, and
+unseen bat wings beat multitudinous around him, but still he clung to the
+unwholesome mane of that loathly and hippocephalic scaled bird. The stars
+danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to form pale signs of doom that
+one might wonder one had not seen and feared before; and ever the winds of
+nether howled of vague blackness and loneliness beyond the cosmos.
+
+Then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the
+winds and horrors slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn.
+Trembling in waves that golden wisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose
+a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of
+stars knows not. And as that music grew, the Shantak raised its ears and plunged
+ahead, and Carter likewise bent to catch each lovely strain. It was a song, but not
+the song of any voice. Night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space
+and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.
+
+Faster flew the Shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk with the marvel of
+strange gulfs, and whirling in the crystal coils of outer magic. Then came too late
+the warning of the evil one, the sardonic caution of the daemon legate who had
+bidden the seeker beware the madness of that song. Only to taunt had
+Nyarlathotep marked out the way to safety and the marvellous sunset city; only
+to mock had that black messenger revealed the secret of these truant gods whose
+steps he could so easily lead back at will. For madness and the void's wild
+vengeance are Nyarlathotep's only gifts to the presumptuous; and frantick
+though the rider strove to turn his disgusting steed, that leering, tittering Shantak
+coursed on impetuous and relentless, flapping its great slippery wings in
+malignant joy and headed for those unhallowed pits whither no dreams reach;
+that last amorphous blight of nether-most confusion where bubbles and
+blasphemes at infinity's centre the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose
+name no lips dare speak aloud.
+
+Unswerving and obedient to the foul legate's orders, that hellish bird plunged
+onward through shoals of shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and
+vacuous herds of drifting entities that pawed and groped and groped and
+pawed; the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, that are like them blind and
+without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts
+
+Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the
+chuckling and hysterics into which the risen song of night and the spheres had
+
+
+
+
+turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its helpless rider; hurtling and shooting,
+cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the outermost abysses; leaving behind
+the stars and the realms of matter, and darting meteor-like through stark
+formlessness toward those inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time
+wherein Azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled,
+maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed
+flutes.
+
+Onward - onward - through the screaming, cackling, and blackly populous gulfs
+- and then from some dim blessed distance there came an image and a thought to
+Randolph Carter the doomed. Too well had Nyarlathotep planned his mocking
+and his tantalising, for he had brought up that which no gusts of icy terror could
+quite efface. Home - New England - Beacon Hill - the waking world.
+
+"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of
+what you have seen and loved in youth. . . the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and
+western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the
+great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley
+where the many -bridged Charles flows drowsily... this loveliness, moulded,
+crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced
+wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and
+carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of
+broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the
+thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood."
+
+Onward - onward - dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blackness
+where sightless feelers pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things
+tittered and tittered and tittered. But the image and the thought had come, and
+Randolph Carter knew clearly that he was dreaming and only dreaming, and
+that somewhere in the background the world of waking and the city of his
+infancy still lay. Words came again - "You need only turn back to the thoughts
+and visions of your wistful boyhood." Turn - turn - blackness on every side, but
+Randolph Carter could turn.
+
+Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Carter
+could turn and move. He could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil
+Shantak that bore him hurtlingly doomward at the orders of Nyarlathotep. He
+could leap off and dare those depths of night that yawned interminably down,
+those depths of fear whose terrors yet could not exceed the nameless doom that
+lurked waiting at chaos' core. He could turn and move and leap - he could - he
+would - he would - he would.
+
+
+
+
+Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate
+dreamer, and down through endless voids of sentient blackness he fell. Aeons
+reeled, universes died and were born again, stars became nebulae and nebulae
+became stars, and still Randolph Carter fell through those endless voids of
+sentient blackness.
+
+Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos
+churned itself into another futile completion, and all things became again as they
+were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and light were born anew as space once
+had known them; and comets, suns and worlds sprang flaming into life, though
+nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and
+always, back to no first beginning.
+
+And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the
+eyes of the falling dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and
+evil, and the shrieking of noxious night robbed of its prey. For through the
+unknown ultimate cycle had lived a thought and a vision of a dreamer's
+boyhood, and now there were remade a waking world and an old cherished city
+to body and to justify these things. Out of the void S'ngac the violet gas had
+pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was bellowing his guidance from unhinted
+deeps.
+
+Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and
+purple, and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat
+back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when
+Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his
+formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at
+last the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to
+the fair New England world that had wrought him.
+
+So to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and dawn's blaze thrown
+dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the
+hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds
+sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from
+arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel
+and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose
+yawning from hearthside sleep that his master's start and shriek had disturbed.
+And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted
+wood and the garden lands and the Cerenarian Sea and the twilight reaches of
+Inquanok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle
+atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of
+earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the
+marvellous sunset city.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Dunwich Horror
+
+Written in 1928
+
+Published in April 1929 in Weird Tales
+
+Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies -
+may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there
+before. They are transcripts, types - the archtypes are in us, and eternal. How else
+should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to
+affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered
+in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all!
+These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the
+body, they would have been the same... That the kind of fear here treated is
+purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it
+predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of
+which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and
+a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.
+
+- Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears
+
+
+
+When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the
+junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely
+and curious country.
+
+The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and
+closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest
+belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a
+luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields
+appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a
+surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.
+
+Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary
+figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-
+strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow
+confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to
+do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods,
+the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and
+symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky
+silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with
+which most of them are crowned.
+
+
+
+
+Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude
+wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there
+are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears
+at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in
+abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of
+stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper
+reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the
+domed hills among which it rises.
+
+As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-
+crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes
+they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them.
+Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream
+and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting
+gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the
+neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of
+the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church
+now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One
+dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it.
+Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about
+the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a
+relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of
+the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike.
+Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.
+
+Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of
+horror all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken down. The
+scenery, judged by an ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly
+beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two centuries ago,
+when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not
+laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our
+sensible age - since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had
+the town's and the world's welfare at heart - people shun it without knowing
+exactly why. Perhaps one reason - though it cannot apply to uninformed
+strangers - is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along
+that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They
+have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and
+physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence
+is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden
+murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity. The
+old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from
+Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though
+many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names
+
+
+
+
+remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops
+still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom
+return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors
+were born.
+
+No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just
+what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites
+and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of
+shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were
+answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the
+Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at
+Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan
+and his imps; in which he said:
+
+"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are
+Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel
+and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under Ground by
+above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a
+Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my
+House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and
+Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth could raise up, and which must needs
+have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the
+Divell unlock".
+
+Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the text, printed
+in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from
+year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.
+
+Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars,
+and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated
+points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the
+Devil's Hop Yard - a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade
+will grow. Then, too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous
+whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are
+psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their
+eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the
+fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in
+daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed
+silence.
+
+These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from
+very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old - older by far than any of the
+communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the
+
+
+
+
+cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before
+1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern
+piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the
+nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the
+great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more
+generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and
+bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on
+Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-
+places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the
+absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains
+Caucasian.
+
+II.
+
+It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set
+against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other
+dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5 a.m. on Sunday, the second of
+February, 1913. This date was recalled because it was Candlemas, which people
+in Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the
+hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently,
+throughout the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother
+was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino
+woman of thirty-five, living with an aged and half-insane father about whom the
+most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth. Lavinia
+Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region
+made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose
+ancestry the country folk might - and did - speculate as widely as they chose. On
+the contrary, she seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who
+formed such a contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard
+to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous
+future.
+
+Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone
+creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read
+the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of
+Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and wormholes. She
+had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore
+that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been
+feared because of Old Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the
+unexplained death by violence of Mrs Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years
+old had not helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange
+influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular
+
+
+
+
+occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a home
+from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared.
+
+There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the
+dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife
+presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward,
+when Old Wateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village and
+discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborne's general store.
+There seemed to be a change in the old man - an added element of furtiveness in
+the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of
+fear - though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event.
+Amidst it all he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and
+what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by many of his hearers
+years afterward.
+
+'I dun't keer what folks think - ef Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't
+look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks
+hereabouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed some things the most o' ye only
+tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good a husban' as ye kin find this side of
+Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast
+no better church weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin - some day yew folks'U
+hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!'
+
+The only person who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old
+Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer's common-
+law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her
+subsequent tales did justice to her observations; but Zechariah came to lead a
+pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley had bought of his son Curtis. This
+marked the beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's
+family which ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet
+at no time did the ramshackle Wateley barn seem overcrowded with livestock.
+There came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the
+herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old farm-house, and
+they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic, bloodless-looking
+specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from the
+unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of the filthy barn,
+caused a heavy mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores,
+having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle;
+and once or twice during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could
+discern similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven old man and his
+slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.
+
+
+
+
+In the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary rambles in the
+hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy child. Public interest in
+the Whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and no
+one bothered to comment on the swift development which that newcomer
+seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for
+within three months of his birth he had attained a size and muscular power not
+usually found in infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal
+sounds showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and no
+one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to walk unassisted,
+with falterings which another month was sufficient to remove.
+
+It was somewhat after this time - on Hallowe'en - that a great blaze was seen at
+midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like stone stands amidst
+its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop -
+of the undecayed Bishops - mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up
+that hill ahead of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas
+was rounding up a stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he
+fleetingly spied the two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted
+almost noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed
+to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterwards he could not be sure about the
+boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or
+trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without
+complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened
+disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm. His
+contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thought
+very notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.
+
+The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that 'Lavinny's black
+brat' had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech
+was somewhat remarkable both because of its difference from the ordinary
+accents of the region, and because it displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of
+which many children of three or four might well be proud. The boy was not
+talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly
+unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in
+what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked
+with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds.
+His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his
+mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose
+united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air
+of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however,
+exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something
+almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin,
+coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more
+
+
+
+
+decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all conjectures about him were
+spiced with references to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the hills
+once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a
+circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the
+boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their
+barking menace.
+
+III.
+
+Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing
+the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of
+his house - a spacious, peak-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in
+the rocky hillside, and whose three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always
+been sufficient for himself and his daughter.
+
+There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable
+him to accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly
+at times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had
+already begun as soon as Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool sheds had
+been put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now,
+in restoring the abandoned upper storey of the house, he was a no less thorough
+craftsman. His mania showed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all the
+windows in the reclaimed section - though many declared that it was a crazy
+thing to bother with the reclamation at all.
+
+Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for his new
+grandson - a room which several callers saw, though no one was ever admitted
+to the closely-boarded upper storey. This chamber he lined with tall, firm
+shelving, along which he began gradually to arrange, in apparently careful order,
+all the rotting ancient books and parts of books which during his own day had
+been heaped promiscuously in odd corners of the various rooms.
+
+'I made some use of 'em,' he would say as he tried to mend a torn black-letter
+page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, 'but the boy's fitten to make
+better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well so as he kin, for they're goin' to be
+all of his larnin'.'
+
+When Wilbur was a year and seven months old - in September of 1914 - his size
+and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as a child of
+four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker. He ran freely about the
+fields and hills, and accompanied his mother on all her wanderings. At home he
+would pore dilligently over the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's
+books, while Old Whateley would instruct and catechize him through long.
+
+
+
+
+hushed afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was finished, and
+those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made
+into a sohd plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east gable end, close
+against the hill; and no one could imagine why a cleated wooden runway was
+built up to it from the ground. About the period of this work's completion people
+noticed that the old tool-house, tightly locked and windowlessly clapboarded
+since Wilbur's birth, had been abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open,
+and when Earl Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old
+Whateley he was quite discomposed by the singular odour he encountered - such
+a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near the
+Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything sane or of
+this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been
+remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.
+
+The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone swore to a
+slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On May Eve of 1915 there
+were tremors which even the Aylesbury people felt, whilst the following
+Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling queerly synchronized with
+bursts of flame - 'them witch Whateleys' doin's' - from the summit of Sentinel
+Hill. Wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he
+entered his fourth year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less
+than formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first time
+people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in his goatish face.
+He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms
+which chilled the listener with a sense of unexplainable terror. The aversion
+displayed towards him by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and
+he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His
+occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners
+of canine guardians.
+
+The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the ground floor,
+while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up second storey. She
+would never tell what her father and the boy were doing up there, though once
+she turned pale and displayed an abnormal degree of fear when a jocose fish-
+pedlar tried the locked door leading to the stairway. That pedlar told the store
+loungers at Dunwich Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that
+floor above. The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the
+cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they recalled tales of
+Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that are called out of the earth
+when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain heathen gods. It had for
+some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole
+Whateley place as violently as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.
+
+
+
+
+In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the local draft
+board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent
+to development camp. The government, alarmed at such signs of wholesale
+regional decadence, sent several officers and medical experts to investigate;
+conducting a survey which New England newspaper readers may still recall. It
+was the publicity attending this investigation which set reporters on the track of
+the Whateleys, and caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print
+flamboyant Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness. Old Whateley's
+black magic, and the shelves of strange books, the sealed second storey of the
+ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill noises.
+Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and
+cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break.
+
+Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and
+camera men, and called their attention to the queer stench which now seemed to
+trickle down from the sealed upper spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell he
+had found in the toolshed abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and
+like the faint odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circle
+on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and
+grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers made
+so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle in gold pieces of
+extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received their visitors with ill-
+concealed distaste, though they did not dare court further publicity by a violent
+resistance or refusal to talk.
+
+IV.
+
+For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into the general
+life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and hardened to their May
+Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they would light fires on the top of
+Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblings would recur with greater
+and greater violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentous
+doings at the lonely farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to hear
+sounds in the sealed upper storey even when all the family were downstairs, and
+they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually
+sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of
+Cruelty to Animals but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never
+anxious to call the outside world's attention to themselves.
+
+About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and
+bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of
+carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the sealed upper part, and
+from bits of discarded lumber people concluded that the youth and his
+
+
+
+
+grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic floor,
+leaving only one vast open void between the ground storey and the peaked roof.
+They had torn down the great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range
+with a flimsy outside tin stove-pipe.
+
+In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of
+whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his
+window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great
+significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had
+almost come.
+
+'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he said, 'an' I guess they're
+gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin' aout, an' dun't calc'late to
+miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they
+dew, they'll keep up a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't they'll
+kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some
+pretty tough tussles sometimes.'
+
+On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by
+Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness
+and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old Whateley in a very
+grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing that told of an end not
+far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the
+bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting
+suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level
+beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds
+outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless
+message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying
+man. It was uncanny and unnatural - too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the
+whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.
+
+Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his
+wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.
+
+'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows - an' that grows faster. It'll be
+ready to serve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long
+chant that ye'U find on page 751 of the complete edition, an' then put a match to
+the prison. Fire from airth can't burn it nohaow.'
+
+He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of
+whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while some
+indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he added another
+sentence or two.
+
+
+
+
+'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow too fast fer the
+place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all
+over an' no use. Only them from beyont kin make it multiply an' work... Only
+them, the old uns as wants to come back. . .'
+
+But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the
+whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour,
+when the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew shrunken lids over the
+glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia
+sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.
+
+'They didn't git him,' he muttered in his heavy bass voice.
+
+Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-sided
+way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in distant
+places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept. He was more and
+more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain youthful
+disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was always able to
+silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-time gold which
+still, as in his grandfather's time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-
+buying. He was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having
+reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In
+1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon
+him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters
+feet tall.
+
+Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with a
+growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May Eve
+and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop of
+being afraid of him.
+
+'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,' she said, 'an'
+naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun't
+know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'
+
+That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on
+Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical
+screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed to
+be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After midnight their shrill
+notes burst into a kind of pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the
+countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they
+vanished, hurrying southward where they were fully a month overdue. What
+this meant, no one could quite be certain till later. None of the countryfolk
+
+
+
+
+seemed to have died - but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never
+seen again.
+
+In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and began
+moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterwards Earl Sawyer told the
+loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on in the Whateley
+farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows on the ground floor,
+and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and his grandfather had done
+upstairs four years before. He was living in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought
+he seemed unusually worried and tremulous. People generally suspected him of
+knowing something about his mother disappearance, and very few ever
+approached his neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than
+seven feet, and showed no signs of ceasing its development.
+
+V.
+
+The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's first trip
+outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at
+Harvard, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the University
+of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University at Arkham had failed
+to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at length he set out in
+person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at
+Miskatonic, which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall,
+and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborne's general store, this dark and
+goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume
+kept under lock and key at the college library - the hideous Necronomicon of the
+mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed in Spain
+in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before, but had no thought
+save to find his way to the university grounds; where indeed, he passed
+heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury
+and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout chaim.
+
+Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr Dee's English
+version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access to
+the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of
+discovering a certain passage which would have come on the 751st page of his
+own defective volume. This much he could not civilly refrain from telling the
+librarian - the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.D. Princeton,
+Litt.D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who now politely
+plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula
+or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to
+find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of
+determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he finally chose, Dr
+
+
+
+
+Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages; the left-hand
+one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace
+and sanity of the world.
+
+Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) that man
+is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life
+and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old
+Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene
+and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-
+Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past,
+present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke
+through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where
+They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one
+can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them
+near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of
+those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts,
+differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or
+substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the
+Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The
+wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.
+They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the
+hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man
+knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold
+stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or
+the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is
+Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. la! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness
+shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and
+Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key
+to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once;
+They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter
+summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
+
+Dr. Annitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of
+Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim,
+hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable
+matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb's cold
+clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of another
+planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black
+gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of
+force and matter, space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began
+speaking in that strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing
+organs unlike the run of mankind's.
+
+
+
+
+'Mr Armitage/ he said, 'I calc'late I've got to take that book home. They's things
+in it I've got to try under sarten conditions that I can't git here, en' it 'ud be a
+mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold me up. Let me take it along. Sir, an' I'll swar
+they wun't nobody know the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll take good keer
+of it. It wan't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is. . .'
+
+He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face, and his own goatish
+features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might make a copy of
+what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible consequences and
+checked himself. There was too much responsibility in giving such a being the
+key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley saw how things stood, and
+tried to answer lightly.
+
+'Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard won't be so fussy as
+yew be.' And without saying more he rose and strode out of the building,
+stooping at each doorway.
+
+Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied
+Whateley's gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible from the
+window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and recalled the old Sunday
+stories in the Advertiser; these things, and the lore he had picked up from
+Dunwich rustics and villagers during his one visit there. Unseen things not of
+earth - or at least not of tridimensional earth - rushed foetid and horrible through
+New England's glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain tops. Of this he
+had long felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some terrible
+part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in the black
+dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He locked away the
+Necronomicon with a shudder of disgust, but the room still reeked with an
+unholy and unidentifiable stench. 'As a foulness shall ye know them,' he quoted.
+Yes - the odour was the same as that which had sickened him at the Whateley
+farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and
+ominous, once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his
+parentage.
+
+'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. 'Great God, what
+simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a
+common Dunwich scandal! But what thing - what cursed shapeless influence on
+or off this three-dimensional earth - was Wilbur Whateley's father? Born on
+Candlemas - nine months after May Eve of 1912, when the talk about the queer
+earth noises reached clear to Arkham - what walked on the mountains that May
+night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh
+and blood?'
+
+
+
+
+During the ensuing weeks Dr Armitage set about to collect all possible data on
+Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in
+communication with Dr Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended Old
+Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the grandfather's
+last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich Village failed to bring
+out much that was new; but a close survey of the Necronomicon, in those parts
+which Wilbur had sought so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to
+the nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this
+planet. Talks with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many
+others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly through
+varied degrees of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual fear. As the summer
+drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be done about the lurking terrors
+of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to the
+human world as Wilbur Whateley.
+
+VI.
+
+The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928, and
+Dr Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue. He had
+heard, meanwhile, of Whateley' s grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his frantic
+efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at the Widener Library. Those
+efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had issued warnings of the keenest
+intensity to all librarians having charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been
+shockingly nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally
+anxious to get home again, as if he feared the results of being away long.
+
+Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hours of
+the third Dr Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce cries of the
+savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and terrible, the snarling, half-
+mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting volume, but with
+hideously significant pauses. Then there rang out a scream from a wholly
+different throat - such a scream as roused half the sleepers of Arkham and
+haunted their dreams ever afterwards - such a scream as could come from no
+being born of earth, or wholly of earth.
+
+Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn to
+the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of
+a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the library. An open window showed black
+and gaping in the moonlight. What had come had indeed completed its entrance;
+for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling
+and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned
+Armitage that what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see,
+so he brushed back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door.
+
+
+
+
+Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr Francis Morgan, men to
+whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings; and these two he
+motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful,
+droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now
+perceived with a sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the
+shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with
+the last breaths of a dying man.
+
+The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr Armitage knew too well, and
+the three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room
+whence the low whining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light,
+then Armitage summoned up his courage and snapped the switch. One of the
+three - it is not certain which - shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them
+among disordered tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he
+wholly lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.
+
+The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor
+and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the
+clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and
+spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping
+of the expectant whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of
+apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty
+canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a
+revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it
+had not been fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the
+time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could
+describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by
+anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the
+common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was
+partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the
+goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it. But the torso and
+lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous
+clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or
+uneradicated.
+
+Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog's
+rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a
+crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly
+suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it
+was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began.
+The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a
+score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
+
+
+
+
+Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some
+cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep
+set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye;
+whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple
+annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or
+throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of
+prehistoric earth's giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were
+neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles
+rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the
+non-human greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish
+appearance which alternated with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between
+the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-
+yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the
+stickiness, and left a curious discoloration behind it.
+
+As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it began to
+mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr Armitage made no written
+record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that nothing in English was
+uttered. At first the syllables defied all correlation with any speech of earth, but
+towards the last there came some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the
+Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had
+perished. These fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like 'N'gai,
+n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah: Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth ...' They trailed off
+into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical crescendos of
+unholy anticipation.
+
+Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrious
+howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the
+great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the shrilling of the
+whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering
+crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against
+the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at
+that which they had sought for prey.
+
+All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and leaped
+nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose from the
+crowd, and Dr Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one must be
+admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was thankful that the
+windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and drew the dark curtains
+carefully down over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived; and Dr
+Morgan, meeting them in the vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to
+postpone entrance to the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and
+the prostrate thing could be covered up.
+
+
+
+
+Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not
+describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before
+the eyes of Dr Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is permissible to say that, aside
+from the external appearance of face and hands, the really human element in
+Wilbur Whateley must have been very small. When the medical examiner came,
+there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous
+odour had nearly disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony
+skeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his
+unknown father.
+
+VII.
+
+Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities were
+gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from
+press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up
+property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur Whateley. They
+found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growing rumblings
+beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging,
+lapping sounds which came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by
+Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle
+during Wilbur's absence, had developed a woefully acute case of nerves. The
+officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place; and were glad
+to confine their survey of the deceased's living quarters, the newly mended
+sheds, to a single visit. They filed a ponderous report at the courthouse in
+Aylesbury, and litigations concerning heirship are said to be still in progress
+amongst the innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper
+Miskatonic valley.
+
+An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge
+ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and the variations in
+ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to those who found it on the
+old bureau which served as its owner's desk. After a week of debate it was sent
+to Miskatonic University, together with the deceased's collection of strange
+books, for study and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw
+that it was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with
+which Wilbur and Old Whateley had always paid their debts has yet been
+discovered.
+
+It was in the dark of September ninth that the horror broke loose. The hill noises
+had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs barked frantically all
+night. Early risers on the tenth noticed a peculiar stench in the air. About seven
+o'clock Luther Brown, the hired boy at George Corey's, between Cold Spring
+Glen and the village, rushed frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre
+
+
+
+
+Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled
+into the kitchen; and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing
+and lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared with
+him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs Corey.
+
+'Up thar in the rud beyont the glen. Mis' Corey - they's suthin' ben thar! It smells
+like thunder, an' all the bushes an' little trees is pushed back from the rud like
+they'd a haouse ben moved along of it. An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's
+prints in the rud. Mis' Corey - great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk
+dawon deep like a elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four feet
+could make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one was covered
+with lines spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big palm-leaf fans - twict or
+three times as big as any they is - hed of ben paounded dawon into the rud. An'
+the smell was awful, like what it is around Wizard Whateley's ol' haouse. . .'
+
+Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had sent him
+flying home. Mrs Corey, unable to extract more information, began telephoning
+the neighbours; thus starting on its rounds the overture of panic that heralded
+the major terrors. When she got Sally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the
+nearest place to Whateley's, it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for
+Sally's boy Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill towards
+Whateley's, and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the
+pasturage where Mr Bishop's cows had been left out all night.
+
+'Yes, Mis' Corey,' came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire, 'Cha'ncey he
+just come back a-postin', and couldn't half talk fer bein' scairt! He says Ol'
+Whateley's house is all bowed up, with timbers scattered raound like they'd ben
+dynamite inside; only the bottom floor ain't through, but is all covered with a
+kind o' tar-like stuff that smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto the
+graoun' whar the side timbers is blowed away. An' they's awful kinder marks in
+the yard, tew - great raound marks bigger raound than a hogshead, an' all sticky
+with stuff like is on the browed-up haouse. Cha'ncey he says they leads off into
+the medders, whar a great swath wider'n a barn is matted daown, an' all the stun
+walls tumbled every whichway wherever it goes.
+
+'An' he says, says he. Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's caows,
+frightened ez he was an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh the Devil's Hop
+Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean gone, an' nigh haff o' them that's left
+is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores on 'em like they's ben on Whateleys
+cattle ever senct Lavinny's black brat was born. Seth hes gone aout naow to look
+at 'em, though I'll vaow he won't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's!
+Cha'ncey didn't look keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter
+
+
+
+
+it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted towards the glen rud to the
+village.
+
+'I tell ye. Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be abroad, an' I for one
+think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad end he deserved, is at the
+bottom of the breedin' of it. He wa'n't all human hisself, I alius says to
+everybody; an' I think he an' OF Whateley must a raised suthin' in that there
+nailed-up haouse as ain't even so human as he was. They's alius ben unseen
+things araound Dunwich - livin' things - as ain't human an' ain't good fer human
+folks.
+
+'The graoun' was a-talkin' las' night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey he heered
+the whippoorwills so laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't sleep nun. Then he
+thought he heered another faint-like saound over towards Wizard Whateley's - a
+kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like some big box er crate was bein' opened fur
+off. What with this an' that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner
+was he up this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's the
+matter. He see enough I tell ye. Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no good, an' I think
+as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an' do suthin'. I know suthin' awful's
+abaout, an' feel my time is nigh, though only Gawd knows jest what it is.
+
+'Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No? Wal, Mis'
+Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o' the glen, an' ain't got to your
+haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into the glen itself. They would do that. I
+alius says Col' Spring Glen ain't no healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills
+an' fireflies there never did act like they was creaters o' Gawd, an' they's them as
+says ye kin hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air dawon thar ef ye
+stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den.'
+
+By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were trooping
+over the roads and meadows between the newmade Whateley ruins and Cold
+Spring Glen, examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints, the maimed Bishop
+cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse, and the bruised, matted
+vegetation of the fields and roadside. Whatever had burst loose upon the world
+had assuredly gone down into the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the
+banks were bent and broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the
+precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an
+avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical
+slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable foetor; and it
+is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge and argue,
+rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three
+dogs that were with the party had barked furiously at first, but seemed cowed
+and reluctant when near the glen. Someone telephoned the news to the
+
+
+
+
+Aylesbury Transcript; but the editor, accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich,
+did no more than concoct a humorous paragraph about it; an item soon
+afterwards reproduced by the Associated Press.
+
+That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as
+stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to remain in open
+pasturage. About two in the morning a frightful stench and the savage barking of
+the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye's, on the eastern edge of Cold
+Spring Glen, and all agreed that they could hear a sort of muffled swishing or
+lapping sound from somewhere outside. Mrs Frye proposed telephoning the
+neighbours, and Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering wood
+burst in upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was
+quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The
+dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a
+lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death to go out into that
+black farmyard. The children and the women-folk whimpered, kept from
+screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of defence which told them their
+lives depended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful
+moaning, and a great snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes,
+huddled together in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes
+died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from
+the stable and the daemoniac piping of the late whippoorwills in the glen, Selina
+Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of the second
+phase of the horror.
+
+The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed, uncommunicative
+groups came and went where the fiendish thing had occurred. Two titan swaths
+of destruction stretched from the glen to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints
+covered the bare patches of ground, and one side of the old red barn had
+completely caved in. Of the cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified.
+Some of these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot.
+Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but others
+maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a branch that
+hovered about halfway between soundness and decadence, made darkly wild
+suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on the hill-tops. He came of a
+line where tradition ran strong, and his memories of chantings in the great stone
+circles were not altogether connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.
+
+Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organize for real
+defence. In a few cases closely related families would band together and watch in
+the gloom under one roof; but in general there was only a repetition of the
+barricading of the night before, and a futile, ineffective gesture of loading
+muskets and setting pitchforks handily about. Nothing, however, occurred
+
+
+
+
+except some hill noises; and when the day came there were many who hoped
+that the new horror had gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold
+souls who proposed an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did
+not venture to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.
+
+When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less
+huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop
+households reported excitement among the dogs and vague sounds and stenches
+from afar, while early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of the monstrous
+tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road showed a
+bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst
+the conformation of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if
+the moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along
+the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed shrubbery
+saplings led steeply upwards, and the seekers gasped when they saw that even
+the most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorable trail. Whatever the
+horror was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality; and as
+the investigators climbed round to the hill's summit by safer routes they saw that
+the trail ended - or rather, reversed - there.
+
+It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and chant their
+hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May Eve and Hallowmass. Now that
+very stone formed the centre of a vast space thrashed around by the
+mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick and
+foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined
+Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and
+muttered. Then they looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had descended
+by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason,
+logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who
+was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or suggested a
+plausible explanation.
+
+Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The
+whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that
+many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party telephones rang
+tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice
+shriek out, 'Help, oh, my Gawd! ...' and some thought a crashing sound
+followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more. No one
+dared do anything, and no one knew till morning whence the call came. Then
+those who had heard it called everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes
+did not reply. The truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group
+of armed men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was
+horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous prints.
+
+
+
+
+but there was no longer any house. It had caved in Hke an egg-shell, and
+amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be discovered. Only a stench and
+a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.
+
+VIII.
+
+In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of the horror
+had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of a shelf-lined room in
+Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of Wilbur Whateley, delivered
+to Miskatonic University for translation had caused much worry and bafflement
+among the experts in language both ancient and modern; its very alphabet,
+notwithstanding a general resemblance to the heavily-shaded Arabic used in
+Mesopotamia, being absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final
+conclusion of the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet,
+giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of cryptographic
+solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on the basis of every
+tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books taken from
+Whateley's quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases
+promising to open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and
+men of science, were of no assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a
+heavy tome with an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet - this one of a
+very different cast, and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The old
+ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr Armitage, both because
+of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and because of his wide linguistic
+learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the middle ages.
+
+Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically used by
+certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times, and which have
+inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world.
+That question, however, he did not deem vital; since it would be unnecessary to
+know the origin of the symbols if, as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in
+a modern language. It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text
+involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another
+speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and incantations.
+Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the preliminary assumption that
+the bulk of it was in English.
+
+Dr Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that the riddle
+was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit
+even a trial. All through late August he fortified himself with the mass lore of
+cryptography; drawing upon the fullest resources of his own library, and wading
+night after night amidst the arcana of Trithemius' Poligraphia, Giambattista
+Porta's De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigenere's Traite des Chiffres, Falconer's
+
+
+
+
+Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys' and Thicknesse's eighteenth-century treatises,
+and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, van Marten and Kluber's script itself,
+and in time became convinced that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and
+most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding
+letters are arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with
+arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed
+rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that the code
+of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed down through a
+long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he seemed near daylight, only
+to be set back by some unforeseen obstacle. Then, as September approached, the
+clouds began to clear. Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript,
+emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was
+indeed in English.
+
+On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way, and Dr
+Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley's
+annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style
+clearly showing the mixed occult erudition and general illiteracy of the strange
+being who wrote it. Almost the first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an
+entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was
+written,he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of
+twelve or thirteen.
+
+Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being
+answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me
+than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot
+Elam Hutchins's collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would
+kill me if he dast. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula
+last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to
+those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can't break through with the Dho-
+Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be
+years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then,
+so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between
+the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body
+without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a
+little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it
+is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I
+wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings
+on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being
+much of outside to work on.
+
+Morning found Dr Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful
+concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under
+
+
+
+
+the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could
+decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be
+home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely
+dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted
+maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and
+dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward
+the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a
+tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man's
+existence that he had uncovered.
+
+On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr Morgan insisted on
+seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he
+went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Wednesday - the next day - he was back at
+the manuscript, and began to take copious notes both from the current sections
+and from those he had already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he
+slept a little in a easy chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before
+dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr Hartwell, called to see him and
+insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vital
+importance for him to complete the reading of the diary and promising an
+explanation in due course of time. That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished
+his terrible perusal and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner,
+found him in a half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off
+with a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken.
+Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a great
+envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had
+sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr
+Hartwell was summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only
+mutter over and over again, 'But what, in God's name, can we do?'
+
+Dr Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no
+explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative
+need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were
+very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up
+farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation
+of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some
+terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the
+world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away
+from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of
+entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he
+would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius,
+in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he
+conjured up.
+
+
+
+
+'Stop them, stop theml' he would shout. 'Those Whateleys meant to let them in,
+and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do something - it's a
+blind business, but I know how to make the powder... It hasn't been fed since
+the second of August, when Wilbur came here to his death, and at that rate. . .'
+
+But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and slept off
+his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He woke late Friday,
+clear of head, though sober with a gnawing fear and tremendous sense of
+responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt able to go over to the library and
+summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and the rest of that day and evening
+the three men tortured their brains in the wildest speculation and the most
+desperate debate. Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the
+stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae
+were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of scepticism
+there was none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the
+floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them could feel
+even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman's raving.
+
+Opinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State Police, and the
+negative finally won. There were things involved which simply could not be
+believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was made clear during
+certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the conference disbanded
+without having developed a definite plan, but all day Sunday Armitage was
+busy comparing formulae and mixing chemicals obtained from the college
+laboratory. The more he reflected on the hellish diary, the more he was inclined
+to doubt the efficacy of any material agent in stamping out the entity which
+Wilbur Whateley had left behind him - the earth threatening entity which,
+unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable
+Dunwich horror.
+
+Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr Armitage, for the task in hand
+required an infinity of research and experiment. Further consultations of the
+monstrous diary brought about various changes of plan, and he knew that even
+in the end a large amount of uncertainty must remain. By Tuesday he had a
+definite line of action mapped out, and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich
+within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely
+away in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the
+Associated Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of
+Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for Rice
+and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day was a
+whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he would be
+meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the
+deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich,
+arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even
+in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about
+the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of the stricken region.
+Now and then on some mountain top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed
+against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew
+something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the
+Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around
+Dunwich, questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing
+for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with their
+lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard,
+the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed
+vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to
+Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister
+altar-like stone on the summit.
+
+At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from
+Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye
+tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and compare notes as far as practicable.
+This, however, they found more easily planned than performed; since no sign of
+the party could be found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car,
+but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all of
+whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as Armitage
+and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned
+pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep hollow that yawned
+close by.
+
+'Gawd,' he gasped, 'I felled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I never
+thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the whippoorwills
+a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday. . .'
+
+A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear seemed
+strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. Armitage, now that he
+had actually come upon the horror and its monstrous work, trembled with the
+responsibility he felt to be his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the
+mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium
+perambuians in tenebris... The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had
+memorized, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had not
+memorized. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, beside
+him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating insects;
+
+
+
+
+whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he reHed despite his
+colleague's warnings that no material weapon would be of help.
+
+Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind of a
+manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the Dunwich people
+by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might be conquered without any
+revelation to the world of the monstrous thing it had escaped. As the shadows
+gathered, the natives commenced to disperse homeward, anxious to bar
+themselves indoors despite the present evidence that all human locks and bolts
+were useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose.
+They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near
+the glen; and, as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.
+
+There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills piped
+threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold Spring Glen,
+would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the heavy night air; such a foetor as all
+three of the watchers had smelled once before, when they stood above a dying
+thing that had passed for fifteen years and a half as a human being. But the
+looked-for terror did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was
+biding its time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to
+attack it in the dark.
+
+Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey, bleak day,
+with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier clouds seemed to
+be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the north-west. The men from
+Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the increasing rainfall
+beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom
+of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of
+their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and
+distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered,
+and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed
+glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the storm
+would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.
+
+It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel
+of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened
+group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering
+hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out words, and the Arkham men
+started violently when those words developed a coherent form.
+
+'Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,' the voice choked out. 'It's a-goin' agin, an' this time
+by day! It's aout - it's aout an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord
+knows when it'll be on us all!'
+
+
+
+
+The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.
+
+'Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heered the 'phone a-ringin', an' it was
+Mis' Corey, George's wife, that hves daown by the junction. She says the hired
+boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the storm arter the big boh, when
+he see all the trees a-bendin' at the maouth o' the glen - opposite side ter this - an'
+smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las'
+Monday mornin'. An' she says he says they was a swishin' lappin' saound, more
+nor what the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the trees
+along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful stompin' an'
+splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see nothin' at all, only just
+the bendin' trees an' underbrush.
+
+'Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a awful
+creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the saound o' wood a-
+startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he never see a thing, only them trees
+an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the swishin' saound got very fur off - on the rud
+towards Wizard Whateley's an' Sentinel Hill - Luther he had the guts ter step up
+whar he'd heerd it fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the
+sky was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be;
+but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees hed moved, they was still some
+o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen Monday.'
+
+At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.
+
+'But that ain't the trouble naow - that was only the start. Zeb here was callin'
+folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from Seth Bishop's cut in.
+His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit to kill - she'd jest seed the trees a-
+bendin' beside the rud, an' says they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a
+elephant puffin' an' treadin', a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke
+suddent of a fearful smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it
+was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the
+dogs was barkin' an' whinin' awful.
+
+'An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud had jest
+caved in like the storm bed blowed it over, only the wind w'an't strong enough
+to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' we could hear lots o' folks on the wire
+a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled again, an' says the front yard picket fence
+hed just crumbled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then
+everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' old Seth Bishop a-yellin' tew, an'
+Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse - not lightnin'
+nor nothin', but suthin' heavy again' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin
+
+
+
+
+an' agin, though ye couldn't see nothin' aout the front winders. An' then... an'
+then...'
+
+Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had
+barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.
+
+'An' then.... Sally she yelled aout, "O help, the haouse is a-cavin' in... an' on the
+wire we could hear a turrible crashin' an' a hull flock o' screaming... jes like
+when Elmer Frye's place was took, only wuss. . .'
+
+The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.
+
+'That's all - not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest still-like. We
+that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' rounded up as many able-bodied
+men-folks as we could git, at Corey's place, an' come up here ter see what yew
+thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it's the Lord's jedgment fer our
+iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside.'
+
+Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to
+the faltering group of frightened rustics.
+
+'We must follow it, boys.' He made his voice as reassuring as possible. 'I believe
+there's a chance of putting it out of business. You men know that those
+Whateleys were wizards - well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put
+down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary and read some of
+the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell
+to recite to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can
+always take a chance. It's invisible - 1 knew it would be - but there's powder in
+this long-distance sprayer that might make it show up for a second. Later on
+we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn't as bad as what Wilbur
+would have let in if he'd lived longer. You'll never know what the world
+escaped. Now we've only this one thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can,
+though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it.
+
+'We must follow it - and the way to begin is to go to the place that has just been
+wrecked. Let somebody lead the way - I don't know your roads very well, but
+I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots. How about it?'
+
+The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly, pointing
+with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.
+
+'I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' across the lower medder
+here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin' through Carrier's mowin'
+
+
+
+
+an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's -
+a leetle t'other side.'
+
+Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction indicated; and
+most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and there
+were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When Armitage inadvertently
+took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him and walked ahead to show the
+right one. Courage and confidence were mounting, though the twilight of the
+almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay towards the end of their short cut,
+and among whose fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder,
+put these qualities to a severe test.
+
+At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They were
+a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable
+tracks showed what had passed by. Only a few moments were consumed in
+surveying the ruins just round the bend. It was the Frye incident all over again,
+and nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed shells which had
+been the Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench
+and tarry stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints
+leading on towards the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned
+slopes of Sentinel Hill.
+
+As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered visibly,
+and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down
+something as big as a house that one could not see, but that had all the vicious
+malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the
+road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath
+marking the monster's former route to and from the summit.
+
+Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the
+steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose
+sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried out sharply, passing
+the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the slope with his finger.
+Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but
+eventually focused the lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was
+less restrained than Morgan's had been.
+
+'Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a'movin'! It's a-goin' up - slow-like -
+creepin' - up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!'
+
+Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to
+chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right -
+but suppose they weren't? Voices began questioning Armitage about what he
+
+
+
+
+knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel
+himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden and
+wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.
+
+X.
+
+In the end the three men from Arkham - old, white-bearded Dr Armitage, stocky,
+iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr Morgan, ascended the mountain
+alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focusing and use, they left the
+telescope with the frightened group that remained in the road; and as they
+climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed
+round. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High
+above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker repassed
+with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the pursuers were
+gaining.
+
+Curtis Whateley - of the undecayed branch - was holding the telescope when the
+Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the
+men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the
+swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending.
+This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor
+elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.
+
+Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was
+adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to
+happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that his sprayer was expected to
+give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes,
+but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained his vision to the
+utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party's point of advantage above and behind
+the entity, had an excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with
+marvellous effect.
+
+Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey cloud - a cloud
+about the size of a moderately large building - near the top of the mountain.
+Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-
+deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumbled to the ground had
+not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-
+inaudibly.
+
+'Oh, oh, great Gawd. . . that. . . that. . .'
+
+
+
+
+There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to
+rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all
+coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.
+
+'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a
+hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up
+when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit
+wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or
+twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an
+all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings...
+an' Gawd it Heaven - that haff face on top. . .'
+
+This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he
+collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins
+carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler,
+trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might.
+Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running
+towards the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these - nothing
+more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley
+behind, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of
+unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a
+note of tense and evil expectancy.
+
+Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing on
+the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable
+distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its
+head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the
+crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud
+chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak
+must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no
+observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,'
+whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were
+piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of
+the visible ritual.
+
+Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any
+discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked
+by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely
+with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed
+aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The
+chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw
+through the glass that they were all raising their arms in the rhythmic
+incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.
+
+
+
+
+The change in the quahty of the dayhght increased, and the crowd gazed about
+the horizon in wonder. A purpHsh darkness, born of nothing more than a
+spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the rumbling hills.
+Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowd
+fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the
+distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The
+whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich
+braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the
+atmosphere seemed surcharged.
+
+Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will
+never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any
+human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic
+perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the pit itself, had not
+their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost
+erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass
+timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet
+one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-
+articulate words. They were loud - loud as the rumblings and the thunder above
+which they echoed - yet did they come from no visible being. And because
+imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible
+beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and
+winced as if in expectation of a blow.
+
+'Ygnailh... ygnaiih... thflthkh'ngha.... Yog-Sothoth ...' rang the hideous
+croaking out of space. 'Y'bthnk. . . h'ehye - n'grkdl'lh. . .'
+
+The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle
+were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the
+three grotesquely silhouetted human figures on the peak, all moving their arms
+furiously in strange gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From
+what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of
+extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-
+articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed
+force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.
+
+'Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah - e'yayayaaaa... ngh'aaaaa... ngh'aaa... h'yuh... h'yuh...
+HELP! HELP! . . .ff - ff - ff - FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!. . .'
+
+But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably
+English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the
+frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such
+syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which
+
+
+
+
+seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it
+inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot
+from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force
+and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees,
+grass, and under-brush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at
+the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to
+asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the
+distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over
+field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.
+
+The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day
+there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around that
+fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness when the
+Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once
+more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by
+memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the
+group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions
+they only shook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.
+
+'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up into what it
+was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a
+normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It
+was like its father - and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or
+dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only
+the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a
+moment on the hills.'
+
+There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis
+Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to
+his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and
+the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon him again.
+
+'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top of it... that face with the
+red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateley s... It was a
+octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face
+on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards
+acrost....'
+
+He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a bewilderment
+not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who
+wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent heretofore,
+spoke aloud.
+
+
+
+
+'Fifteen year' gone/ he rambled, 'I heered OY Whateley say as haow some day
+we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel
+Hill...'
+
+But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.
+
+'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it aout o'
+the air it come from?'
+
+Armitage chose his words very carefully.
+
+'It was - well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of
+space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than
+those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from
+outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There
+was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself - enough to make a devil and a
+precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight.
+I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite
+that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on the
+other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateley s were so
+fond of - the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race
+and drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.
+
+'But as to this thing we've just sent back - the Whateley s raised it for a terrible
+part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason
+that Wilbur grew fast and big - but it beat him because it had a greater share of
+the outsideness in it. You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He
+didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than
+he did.'
+
+
+
+
+The Evil Clergyman
+
+Written in 1937
+
+Published in April of 1939 in Weird Tales
+
+I was shown into the attic chamber by a grave, intelligent-looking man with quiet
+clothes and an iron-gray beard, who spoke to me in this fashion:
+
+"Yes, he lived here- but I don't advise your doing anything. Your curiosity
+makes you irresponsible. We never come here at night, and it's only because of
+his will that we keep it this way. You know what he did. That abominable society
+took charge at last, and we don't know where he is buried. There was no way the
+law or anything else could reach the society.
+
+"I hope you won't stay till after dark. And I beg of you to let that thing on the
+table- the thing that looks like a match-box- alone. We don't know what it is, but
+we suspect it has something to do with what he did. We even avoid looking at it
+very steadily."
+
+After a time the man left me alone in the attic room. It was very dingy and dusty,
+and only primitively furnished, but it had a neatness which showed it was not a
+slum-denizen's quarters. There were shelves full of theological and classical
+books, and another bookcase containing treatises on magic- Paracelsus, Albertus
+Magnus, Trithemius, Hermes Trismegistus, Borellus, and others in a strange
+alphabet whose titles I could not decipher. The furniture was very plain. There
+was a door, but it led only into a closet. The only egress was the aperture in the
+floor up to which the crude, steep staircase led. The windows were of bull's-eye
+pattern, and the black oak beams bespoke unbelievable antiquity. Plainly, this
+house was of the Old World. I seemed to know where I was, but cannot recall
+what I then knew. Certainly the town was not London. My impression is of a
+small seaport.
+
+The small object on the table fascinated me intensely. I seemed to know what to
+do with it, for I drew a pocket electric light- or what looked like one- out of my
+pocket and nervously tested its flashes. The light was not white but violet, and
+seemed less like true light than like some radioactive bombardment. I recall that I
+did not regard it as a common flashlight- indeed, I had a common flashlight in
+another pocket.
+
+It was getting dark, and the ancient roofs and chimney-pots outside looked very
+queer through the bull's-eye window-panes. Finally I summoned up courage and
+propped the small object up on the table against a book- then turned the rays of
+
+
+
+
+the peculiar violet light upon it. The light seemed now to be more like a rain of
+hail or small violet particles than like a continuous beam. As the particles struck
+the glassy surface at the center of the strange device, they seemed to produce a
+crackling noise like the sputtering of a vacuum tube through which sparks are
+passed. The dark glassy surface displayed a pinkish glow, and a vague white
+shape seemed to be taking form at its center. Then I noticed that I was not alone
+in the room- and put the ray-projector back in my pocket.
+
+But the newcomer did not speak- nor did I hear any sound whatever during all
+the immediately following moments. Everything was shadowy pantomime, as if
+seen at a vast distance through some intervening haze- although on the other
+hand the newcomer and all subsequent comers loomed large and close, as if both
+near and distant, according to some abnormal geometry.
+
+The newcomer was a thin, dark man of medium height attired in the clerical garb
+of the Anglican church. He was apparently about thirty years old, with a sallow,
+olive complexion and fairly good features, but an abnormally high forehead. His
+black hair was well cut and neatly brushed, and he was clean-shaven though
+blue-chinned with a heavy growth of beard. He wore rimless spectacles with
+steel bows. His build and lower facial features were like other clergymen I had
+seen, but he had a vastly higher forehead, and was darker and more intelligent-
+looking- also more subtly and concealedly evil-looking. At the present moment-
+having just lighted a faint oil lamp- he looked nervous, and before I knew it he
+was casting all his magical books into a fireplace on the window side of the room
+(where the wall slanted sharply) which I had not noticed before. The flames
+devoured the volumes greedily- leaping up in strange colors and emitting
+indescribably hideous odors as the strangely hieroglyphed leaves and wormy
+bindings succumbed to the devastating element. All at once I saw there were
+others in the room- grave-looking men in clerical costume, one of whom wore
+the bands and knee-breeches of a bishop. Though I could hear nothing, I could
+see that they were bringing a decision of vast import to the first-comer. They
+seemed to hate and fear him at the same time, and he seemed to return these
+sentiments. His face set itself into a grim expression, but I could see his right
+hand shaking as he tried to grip the back of a chair. The bishop pointed to the
+empty case and to the fireplace (where the flames had died down amidst a
+charred, non-committal mass), and seemed filled with a peculiar loathing. The
+first-comer then gave a wry smile and reached out with his left hand toward the
+small object on the table. Everyone then seemed frightened. The procession of
+clerics began filing down the steep stairs through the trapdoor in the floor,
+turning and making menacing gestures as they left. The bishop was last to go.
+
+The first-comer now went to a cupboard on the inner side of the room and
+extracted a coil of rope. Mounting a chair, he attached one end of the rope to a
+
+
+
+
+hook in the great exposed central beam of black oak, and began making a noose
+with the other end. Realizing he was about to hang himself, I started forward to
+dissuade or save him. He saw me and ceased his preparations, looking at me
+with a kind of triumph which puzzled and disturbed me. He slowly stepped
+down from the chair and began gliding toward me with a positively wolfish grin
+on his dark, thin-lipped face.
+
+I felt somehow in deadly peril, and drew out the peculiar ray-projector as a
+weapon of defense. Why I thought it could help me, I do not know. I turned it
+on- full in his face, and saw the sallow features glow first with violet and then
+with pinkish light. His expression of wolfish exultation began to be crowded
+aside by a look of profound fear- which did not, however, wholly displace the
+exultation. He stopped in his tracks- then, flailing his arms wildly in the air,
+began to stagger backwards. I saw he was edging toward the open stair-well in
+the floor, and tried to shout a warning, but he did not hear me. In another instant
+he had lurched backward through the opening and was lost to view.
+
+I found difficulty in moving toward the stair-well, but when I did get there I
+found no crushed body on the floor below. Instead there was a clatter of people
+coming up with lanterns, for the spell of phantasmal silence had broken, and I
+once more heard sounds and saw figures as normally tri-dimensional. Something
+had evidently drawn a crowd to this place. Had there been a noise I had not
+heard?
+
+Presently the two people (simple villagers, apparently) farthest in the lead saw
+me- and stood paralyzed. One of them shrieked loudly and reverberantly:
+
+" Ahrrh! ... It be'ee, zur? Again?"
+
+Then they all turned and fled frantically. All, that is, but one. When the crowd
+was gone I saw the grave-bearded man who had brought me to this place-
+standing alone with a lantern. He was gazing at me gaspingly and fascinatedly,
+but did not seem afraid. Then he began to ascend the stairs, and joined me in the
+attic. He spoke:
+
+"So you didn't let it alone! I'm sorry. I know what has happened. It happened
+once before, but the man got frightened and shot himself. You ought not to have
+made him come back. You know what he wants. But you mustn't get frightened
+like the other man he got. Something very strange and terrible has happened to
+you, but it didn't get far enough to hurt your mind and personality. If you'll keep
+cool, and accept the need for making certain radical readjustments in your life,
+you can keep right on enjoying the world, and the fruits of your scholarship. But
+
+
+
+
+you can't live here- and I don't think you'll wish to go back to London. I'd advise
+America.
+
+"You mustn't try anything more with that- thing. Nothing can be put back now.
+It would only make matters worse to do- or summon- anything. You are not as
+badly off as you might be- but you must get out of here at once and stay away.
+You'd better thank Heaven it didn't go further. . .
+
+"I'm going to prepare you as bluntly as I can. There's been a certain change- in
+your personal appearance. He always causes that. But in a new country you can
+get used to it. There's a mirror up at the other end of the room, and I'm going to
+take you to it. You'll get a shock- though you will see nothing repulsive."
+
+I was now shaking with a deadly fear, and the bearded man almost had to hold
+me up as he walked me across the room to the mirror, the faint lamp (i.e., that
+formerly on the table, not the still fainter lantern he had brought) in his free
+hand. This is what I saw in the glass:
+
+A thin, dark man of medium stature attired in the clerical garb of the Anglican
+church, apparently about thirty, and with rimless, steel-bowed glasses glistening
+beneath a sallow, olive forehead of abnormal height.
+
+It was the silent first-comer who had burned his books.
+
+For all the rest of my life, in outward form, I was to be that man
+
+
+
+
+The Festival
+
+
+
+Written in October of 1923
+
+Published in January of 1925 in Weird Tales
+
+Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda
+hominibus exhibeant.
+
+(Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were real.)
+
+- Lacantius
+
+I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight
+I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the
+twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening.
+And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on
+through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to
+where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I
+had never seen but often dreamed of.
+
+It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is
+older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the
+Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had
+dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also
+they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the
+memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and
+were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they
+were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern
+gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of
+the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals
+of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came
+back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the
+lonely remember.
+
+Then beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming;
+snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-
+pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless
+labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central
+peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and
+scattered at all angles and levels like a child's disordered blocks; antiquity
+hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs;
+fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to
+
+
+
+
+join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea
+pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the
+elder time.
+
+Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I
+saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly
+through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless
+road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible
+creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for
+witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.
+
+As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds of a
+village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and felt
+that these old Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange to me,
+and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for merriment or
+look for wayfarers, kept on down past the hushed lighted farmhouses and
+shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea taverns creaked
+in the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways glistened
+along deserted unpaved lanes in the light of little, curtained windows.
+
+I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my people. It
+was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives long; so I
+hastened through Back Street to Circle Court, and across the fresh snow on the
+one full flagstone pavement in the town, to where Green Lane leads off behind
+the Market House. The old maps still held good, and I had no trouble; though at
+Arkham they must have lied when they said the trolleys ran to this place, since I
+saw not a wire overhead. Snow would have hid the rails in any case. I was glad I
+had chosen to walk, for the white village had seemed very beautiful from the hill;
+and now I was eager to knock at the door of my people, the seventh house on the
+left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second storey, all
+built before 1650.
+
+There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from the
+diamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close to its antique
+state. The upper part overhung the narrow grass-grown street and nearly met the
+over-hanging part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in a tunnel, with
+the low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no sidewalk, but many
+houses had high doors reached by double flights of steps with iron railings. It
+was an odd scene, and because I was strange to New England I had never known
+its like before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there had
+been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a few windows
+without drawn curtains.
+
+
+
+
+When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been
+gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the
+bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the silence in that aged town of
+curious customs. And when my knock was answered I was fully afraid, because I
+had not heard any footsteps before the door creaked open. But I was not afraid
+long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that
+reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a quaint
+and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.
+
+He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters and
+dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there,
+for not an attribute was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and a spinning-
+wheel at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat
+back toward me, silently spinning despite the festive season. An indefinite
+dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled that no fire should be blazing.
+The high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and
+seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like everything about
+what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This fear grew stronger from what
+had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the old man's bland face the more
+its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too
+much like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning
+mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially on the tablet and
+told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the place of the festival.
+
+Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left the room; and
+when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that
+they included old Morryster's wild Marvels of Science, the terrible Saducismus
+Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreja
+of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable
+Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden
+Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard
+monstrous things whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking
+of signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old
+woman continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the
+books and the people very morbid and disquieting, but because an old tradition
+of my fathers had summoned me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect queer
+things. So I tried to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I
+found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous for
+sanity or consciousness, but I disliked it when I fancied I heard the closing of one
+of the windows that the settle faced, as if it had been stealthily opened. It had
+seemed to follow a whirring that was not of the old woman's spinning-wheel.
+This was not much, though, for the old woman was spinning very hard, and the
+aged clock had been striking. After that I lost the feeling that there were persons
+
+
+
+
+on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderingly when the old man came
+back booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on that very
+bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous waiting, and the
+blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so. When eleven struck,
+however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive carved chest in a corner, and
+got two hooded cloaks; one of which he donned, and the other of which he
+draped round the old woman, who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then
+they both started for the outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old
+man, after picking up the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he
+drew his hood over that unmoving face or mask.
+
+We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient
+town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one,
+and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured
+silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this street
+and that, past the creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and
+diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses
+overlapped and crumbled together; gliding across open courts and churchyards
+where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.
+
+Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows
+that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that
+seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and hearing never a word. Up,
+up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I saw that all the travellers were
+converging as they flowed near a sort of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high
+hill in the centre of the town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it
+from the road's crest when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had
+made me shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment on
+the ghostly spire.
+
+There was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with spectral
+shafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow by the wind,
+and lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having peaked roofs and
+overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the tombs, revealing gruesome
+vistas, though queerly failing to cast any shadows. Past the churchyard, where
+there were no houses, I could see over the hill's summit and watch the glimmer
+of stars on the harbour, though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a
+while a lantern bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to overtake
+the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited till the
+crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all the stragglers had followed.
+The old man was pulling at my sleeve, but I was determined to be the last.
+Crossing the threshold into the swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turned
+once to look at the outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a
+
+
+
+
+sickly glow on the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered. For though the
+wind had not left much snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the
+door; and in that fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled eyes that they
+bore no mark of passing feet, not even mine.
+
+The church was scarce lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered it, for most of
+the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the aisle between the
+high pews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just
+before the pulpit, and were now squinning noiselessly in. I followed dumbly
+down the foot-worn steps and into the dark, suffocating crypt. The tail of that
+sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them
+wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed
+that the tomb's floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and in
+a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn stone; a
+narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that wound endlessly
+down into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks
+and crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a
+horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as if chiselled
+out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad footfalls
+made no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw some
+side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness to this
+shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous, like impious
+catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odour of decay grew quite
+unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through the mountain and
+beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so
+aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.
+
+Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious lapping of
+sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the things that the night had
+brought, and wished bitterly that no forefather had summoned me to this primal
+rite. As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard another sound, the thin,
+whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out before me the
+boundless vista of an inner world- a vast fungous shore litten by a belching
+column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from
+abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.
+
+Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools,
+leprous fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle
+around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to
+survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring's promise beyond the
+snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the stygian grotto I
+saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water
+handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the
+
+
+
+
+chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far away
+from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I thought I
+heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not see.
+But what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically
+from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy flame
+should, and coating the nitrous stone with a nasty, venomous verdigris. For in all
+that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of death and
+corruption.
+
+The man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside the
+hideous flame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semi-circle he faced. At
+certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when he held
+above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken with him; and I
+shared all the obeisances because I had been summoned to this festival by the
+writings of my forefathers. Then the old man made a signal to the half-seen flute-
+player in the darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a
+scarce louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror
+unthinkable and unexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth,
+transfixed with a dread not of this or any world, but only of the mad spaces
+between the stars.
+
+Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold
+flame, out of the tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny,
+unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained,
+hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain
+ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor
+buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but
+something I cannot and must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with
+their webbed feet and half with their membranous wings; and as they reached
+the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode
+off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of
+panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.
+
+The old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man remained
+only because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an animal and ride like
+the rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that the amorphous flute-player had
+rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts were patiently standing by. As I
+hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that he was the
+true deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient
+place; that it had been decreed I should come back, and that the most secret
+mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient hand, and
+when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a watch, both
+with my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But it was a hideous
+
+
+
+
+proof, because I knew from old papers that that watch had been buried with my
+great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.
+
+Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblance
+in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a
+devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly at the
+lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless himself. When one of
+the things began to waddle and edge away, he turned quickly to stop it; so that
+the suddenness of his motion dislodged the waxen mask from what should have
+been his head. And then, because that nightmare's position barred me from the
+stone staircase down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily
+underground river that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; flung myself
+into that putrescent juice of earth's inner horrors before the madness of my
+screams could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might
+conceal.
+
+At the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport Harbour
+at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told me
+I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night before, and fallen over the
+cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced from prints found in the snow. There
+was nothing I could say, because everything was wrong. Everything was wrong,
+with the broad windows showing a sea of roofs in which only about one in five
+was ancient, and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below. They
+insisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I went delirious
+at hearing that the hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central Hill, they
+sent me to St Mary's Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked
+it there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me their influence in
+obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred's objectionable Necronomicon
+from the library of Miskatonic University. They said something about a
+"psychosis" and agreed I had better get any harassing obsessions off my mind.
+
+So I read that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeed not
+new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it
+was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no one- in waking hours- who
+could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with terror, because of phrases I
+dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I can
+make from the awkward Low Latin.
+
+"The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming of
+eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where
+dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no
+head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard
+hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of
+
+
+
+
+old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but
+fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life
+springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell
+monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought
+to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."
+
+
+
+
+The Haunter Of The Dark
+
+Written in November of 1935
+
+Published in December of 1936 in Weird Tales
+
+I have seen the dark universe yawning
+
+Where the black planets roll without aim.
+
+Where they roll in their horror unheeded.
+Without knowledge or lustre or name.
+
+Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert
+Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from
+an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but
+nature has shown herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression
+on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated
+to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a
+fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old
+matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the deserted
+church of Federal Hill- the shrewd analyst is not slow in attributing them to
+some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of which Blake
+was secretly connected.
+
+For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of
+myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects
+of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city -a visit to a strange old man
+as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he- had ended amidst death and
+flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from
+his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his
+statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the
+bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.
+
+Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence,
+there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They
+are inclined to take much of Blake's diary at its face value, and point significantly
+to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the
+verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to
+1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M.
+Lillibridge in 1893, and- above all- the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on
+the face of the young writer when he died. It was one of these believers who,
+moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and
+its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple- the black
+
+
+
+
+windowless steeple, and not the tower where Blake's diary said those things
+originally were. Though widely censured both officially and unofficially, this
+man- a reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore- averred that he had rid
+the earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.
+
+Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The
+papers have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others
+the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw it- or thought he saw it- or
+pretended to see it. Now studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at
+leisure, let us summarize the dark chain of events from the expressed point of
+view of their chief actor.
+
+Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking the upper
+floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street- on the crest of
+the great eastward hill near the Brown University campus and behind the marble
+John Hay Library. It was a cosy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of
+village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a
+convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof, classic doorway
+with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarks of early
+nineteenth century workmanship. Inside were six-panelled doors, wide floor-
+boards, a curving colonial staircase, white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set
+of rooms three steps below the general level.
+
+Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one
+side, while its west windows- before one of which he had his desk- faced off
+from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town's
+outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far
+horizon were the open countryside's purple slopes. Against these, some two
+miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs
+and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms
+as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious
+sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or
+might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person.
+
+Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique furniture
+suitable for his quarters and settled down to write and paint- living alone, and
+attending to the simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic room,
+where the panes of the monitor roof furnished admirable lighting. During that
+first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories- The Burrower
+Beneath, The Stairs in the Crypt, Shaggai, In the Vale of Pnath, and The Feaster
+from the Stars- and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman
+monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes.
+
+
+
+
+At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at the outspread
+west- the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house
+belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown section, and that shimmering, spire-
+crowned mound in the distance whose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables
+so potently provoked his fancy. From his few local aquaintances he learned that
+the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were
+remnant of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his field-
+glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking
+out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating upon the
+bizarre and curious mysteries they might house. Even with optical aid Federal
+Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible
+marvels of Blake's own tales and pictures. The feeling would persist long after
+the hill had faded into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house
+floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night
+grotesque.
+
+Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most
+fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the
+day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against
+the flaming sky. It seemed to rest on especially high ground; for the grimy
+fagade, and the obliquely seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great
+pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and
+chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of stone,
+stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century and more. The
+style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest experimental form of
+Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some of
+the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around
+1810 or 1815.
+
+As months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an oddly
+mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never lighted, he knew that it
+must be vacant. The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at
+length he began to fancy curious things. He believed that a vague, singular aura
+of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows
+shunned its smoky eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would
+reveal great flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he
+thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several friends,
+but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed the faintest notion
+of what the church was or had been.
+
+In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his long-planned
+novel- based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine- but was
+strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more he would sit at his
+
+
+
+
+westward window and gaze at the distant hill and the black, frowning steeple
+shunned by the birds. When the delicate leaves came out on the garden boughs
+the world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely
+increased. It was then that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing
+bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream.
+
+Late in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his
+first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown streets and
+the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon the ascending avenue
+of century -worn steps, sagging Doric porches, and blear-paned cupolas which he
+felt must lead up to the long-known, unreachable world beyond the mists. There
+were dingy blue-and-white street signs which meant nothing to him, and
+presently he noted the strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign
+signs over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere could
+he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once more he half fancied
+that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-world never to be trod by
+living human feet.
+
+Now and then a battered church fagade or crumbling spire came in sight, but
+never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a
+great stone church the man smiled and shook his head, though he spoke English
+freely. As Blake climbed higher, the region seemed stranger and stranger, with
+bewildering mazes of brooding brown alleys leading eternally off to the south.
+He crossed two or three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar
+tower. Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this
+time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The dark man's
+face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake saw him make a curious
+sign with his right hand.
+
+Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his left, above
+the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly alleys. Blake knew at once
+what it was, and plunged toward it through the squalid, unpaved lanes that
+climbed from the avenue. Twice he lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask
+any of the patriarchs or housewives who sat on their doorsteps, or any of the
+children who shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes.
+
+At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge stone bulk rose
+darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in a wind-swept open square,
+quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This was the
+end of his quest; for upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the
+wall supported- a separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the
+surrounding streets- there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite
+Blake's new perspective, was beyond dispute.
+
+
+
+
+The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone
+buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown,
+neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken,
+though many of the stone muUions were missing. Blake wondered how the
+obscurely painted panes could have survived so well, in view of the known
+habits of small boys the world over. The massive doors were intact and tightly
+closed. Around the top of the bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty
+iron fence whose gate- at the head of a flight of steps from the square- was
+visibly padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely
+overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and in the
+birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of the dimly sinister
+beyond his power to define.
+
+There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at the
+northerly end and approached him with questions about the church. He was a
+great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he would do little more than
+make the sign of the cross and mutter that people never spoke of that building.
+When Blake pressed him he said very hurriedly that the Italian priest warned
+everybody against it, vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left
+its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled
+certain sounds and rumours from his boyhood.
+
+There had been a bad sect there in the old days- an outlaw sect that called up
+awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to
+exorcise what had come, though there did be those who said that merely the
+light could do it. If Father O'Malley were alive there would be many a thing he
+could tell. But now there was nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now,
+and those that owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after
+the threatening talk in '77 , when people began to mind the way folks vanished
+now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day the city would step in and take
+the property for lack of heirs, but little good would come of anybody's touching
+it. Better it be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to
+rest forever in their black abyss.
+
+After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled pile. It
+excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister to others as to him, and
+he wondered what grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the bluecoat had
+repeated. Probably they were mere legends evoked by the evil look of the place,
+but even so, they were like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories.
+
+The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed unable
+to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on its high
+plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had not touched the brown, withered
+
+
+
+
+growths in the raised, iron-fenced yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the
+raised area and examining the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of
+ingress. There was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be
+resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but round on the north side
+were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk round on the narrow
+coping outside the fence till he came to the gap. If the people feared the place so
+wildly, he would encounter no interference.
+
+He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed
+him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square edging away and
+making the same sign with their right hands that the shopkeeper in the avenue
+had made. Several windows were slammed down, and a fat woman darted into
+the street and pulled some small children inside a rickety, unpainted house. The
+gap in the fence was very easy to pass through, and before long Blake found
+himself wading amidst the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here
+and there the worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been
+burials in the field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The sheer
+bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it, but he conquered
+his mood and approached to try the three great doors in the fagade. All were
+securely locked, so he began a circuit of the Cyclopean building in quest of some
+minor and more penetrable opening. Even then he could not be sure that he
+wished to enter that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its
+strangeness dragged him on automatically.
+
+A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the needed
+aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs and dust faintly
+litten by the western sun's filtered rays. Debris, old barrels, and ruined boxes and
+furniture of numerous sorts met his eye, though over everything lay a shroud of
+dust which softened all sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace
+showed that the building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-
+Victorian times.
+
+Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the window
+and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strewn concrete floor. The
+vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions; and in a corner far to the right,
+amid dense shadows, he saw a black archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt
+a peculiar sense of oppression at being actually within the great spectral
+building, but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about- finding a still-intact
+barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open window to provide for his
+exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the wide, cobweb-festooned space toward
+the arch. Half-choked with the omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly
+gossamer fibres, he reached and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose
+into the darkness. He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a
+
+
+
+
+sharp turn he feh a closed door ahead, and a httle fumbHng revealed its ancient
+latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined corridor lined
+with worm-eaten panelling.
+
+Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion. All the inner
+doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room to room. The colossal
+nave was an almost eldritch place with its drifts and mountains of dust over box
+pews, altar, hour-glass pulpit, and sounding-board and its titanic ropes of
+cobweb stretching among the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the
+clustered Gothic columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous
+leaden light as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange, half-
+blackened panes of the great apsidal windows.
+
+The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake could
+scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little he could make
+out he did not like them. The designs were largely conventional, and his
+knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much concerning some of the ancient
+patterns. The few saints depicted bore expressions distinctly open to criticism,
+while one of the windows seemed to show merely a dark space with spirals of
+curious luminosity scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake
+noticed that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind,
+but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt.
+
+In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-high
+shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a
+positive shock of objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much.
+They were the black, forbidden things which most sane people have never even
+heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and
+dreaded repositories of equivocal secret and immemorial formulae which have
+trickled down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the dim,
+fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them- a Latin
+version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous
+Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von
+Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others
+he had known merely by reputation or not at all- the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the
+Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling volume of wholly unidentifiable characters yet
+with certain symbols and diagrams shuddering recognizable to the occult
+student. Clearly, the lingering local rumours had not lied. This place had once
+been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe.
+
+In the ruined desk was a small leatherbound record-book filled with entries in
+some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the
+common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and anciently in alchemy.
+
+
+
+
+astrology, and other dubious arts- the devices of the sun, moon, planets, aspects,
+and zodiacal signs- here massed in solid pages of text, with divisions and
+paragraphings suggesting that each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.
+
+In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this volume in his coat
+pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and
+he felt tempted to borrow them at some later time. He wondered how they could
+have remained undisturbed so long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching,
+pervasive fear which had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place
+from visitors?
+
+Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again
+through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen a
+door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened tower and steeple-
+objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The ascent was a choking
+experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders had done their worst in this
+constricted place. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow wooden treads,
+and now and then Blake passed a clouded window looking dizzily out over the
+city. Though he had seen no ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of
+bells in the tower whose narrow, louvre-boarded lancet windows his field-glass
+had studied so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment; for when he
+attained the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and
+clearly devoted to vastly different purposes.
+
+The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet windows,
+one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of decayed louvre-
+boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the latter
+were now largely rotted away. In the centre of the dust-laden floor rose a
+curiously angled stone pillar home four feet in height and two in average
+diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised and wholly
+unrecognizable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly
+asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what
+looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly
+spherical object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle
+were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them,
+ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling,
+black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else the cryptic carven
+megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner of the cobw ebbed chamber a
+ladder was built into the wall, leading up to the closed trap door of the
+windowless steeple above.
+
+As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the
+strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to clear the dust
+
+
+
+
+away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that the figurings were of a
+monstrous and utterly ahen kind; depicting entities which, though seemingly
+alive, resembled no known life-form ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch
+seeming sphere turned out to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with
+many irregular flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort or an
+artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did not touch the
+bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of a metal band around its
+centre, with seven queerly-designed supports extending horizontally to angles of
+the box's inner wall near the top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake
+an almost alarming fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he
+looked at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with half-
+formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of alien orbs
+with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life,
+and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses told of the
+presence of consciousness and will.
+
+When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of dust in
+the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took his attention he
+could not tell, but something in its contours carried a message to his unconscious
+mind. Ploughing toward it, and brushing aside the hanging cobwebs as he went,
+he began to discern something grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon
+revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was
+a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing
+was in shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man's grey
+suit. There were other bits of evidence- shoes, metal clasps, huge buttons for
+round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's badge with the name of the
+old Providence Telegram, and a crumbling leather pocketbook. Blake examined
+the latter with care, finding within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid
+advertising calendar for 1893, some cards with the name "Edwin M. Lillibridge",
+and a paper covered with pencilled memoranda.
+
+This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully at the dim
+westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases as the following:
+
+Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844 - buys old Free-Will Church in
+July - his archaeological work & studies in occult well known.
+
+Dr Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon 29 Dec. 1844.
+
+Congregation 97 by end of '45.
+
+1846 - 3 disappearances - first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.
+
+
+
+
+7 disappearances 1848 - stories of blood sacrifice begin.
+
+Investigation 1853 comes to nothing - stories of sounds.
+
+Fr O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins - says
+they call up something that can't exist in light. Flees a little light, and banished
+by strong light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably got this from
+deathbed confession of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49.
+These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shows them heaven & other
+worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way.
+
+Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a
+secret language of their own.
+
+200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front.
+
+Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance.
+
+Veiled article in J. 14 March '72, but people don't talk about it.
+
+6 disappearances 1876 - secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle.
+
+Action promised Feb. 1877 - church closes in April.
+
+Gang - Federal Hill Boys - threaten Dr - and vestrymen in May.
+
+181 persons leave city before end of '77 - mention no names.
+
+Ghost stories begin around 1880 - try to ascertain truth of report that no human
+being has entered church since 1877.
+
+Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851. . .
+
+Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blake
+turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes
+were clear, and there could be no doubt but that this man had come to the
+deserted edifice forty-two years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which
+no one else had been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of
+his plan - who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some
+bravely-suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden heart-
+failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their peculiar state.
+Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed oddly dissolved at the
+ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague suggestions of charring. This
+charring extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very
+
+
+
+
+peculiar state - stained yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some
+powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the
+skeleton during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not
+imagine.
+
+Before he realized it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curious
+influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed,
+hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and looked on endless leagues
+of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching monoliths. He saw towers and walls in
+nighted depths under the sea, and vortices of space where wisps of black mist
+floated before thin shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he
+glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semisolid forms were
+known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to
+superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the paradoxes and arcana
+of the worlds we know.
+
+Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing, indeterminate
+panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some
+formless alien presence close to him and watching him with horrible intentness.
+He felt entangled with something- something which was not in the stone, but
+which had looked through it at him- something which would ceaselessly follow
+him with a cognition that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting
+on his nerves- as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was
+waning, too, and since he had no illuininant with him he knew he would have to
+be leaving soon.
+
+It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a faint trace of
+luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but
+some obscure compulsion drew his eyes hack. Was there a subtle
+phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead
+man 's notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? What, anyway, was
+this abandoned lair of cosmic evil? What had been done here, and what might
+still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive
+touch of foetor had arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not
+apparent. Blake seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It
+moved easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably
+glowing stone.
+
+At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come from the
+steeple's eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without
+question- the only living things to reveal their presence in this accursed pile since
+he had entered it. And yet that stirring in the steeple frightened him horribly, so
+that he plunged almost wildly down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave.
+
+
+
+
+into the vaulted basement, out amidst the gathering dust of the deserted square,
+and down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal Hill
+towards the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks of the college
+district.
+
+During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition. Instead, he
+read much in certain books, examined long years of newspaper files downtown,
+and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in that leather volume from the
+cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon saw, was no simple one; and after a
+long period of endeavour he felt sure that its language could not be English,
+Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to
+draw upon the deepest wells of his strange erudition.
+
+Every evening the old impulse to gaze westwards returned, and he saw the black
+steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and half-fabulous
+world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He knew the heritage of evil
+lore it masked, and with the knowledge his vision ran riot in queer new ways.
+The birds of spring were returning, and as he watched their sunset flights he
+fancied they avoided the gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them
+approached it, he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion- and
+he could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across the
+intervening miles.
+
+It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the cryptogram. The text
+was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity,
+and known to him in a halting way through previous researches. The diary is
+strangely reticent about what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and
+disconcerted by his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked
+by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the
+black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding
+all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of Blake's entries
+show fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as summoned, stalk abroad;
+though he adds that the streetlights form a bulwark which cannot be crossed.
+
+Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time
+and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark
+Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and
+placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their
+ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the
+first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with
+Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy
+merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a
+temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be
+
+
+
+
+stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil
+fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver's spade
+once more brought it forth to curse mankind.
+
+Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though in so
+brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general attention to their
+contribution. It appears that a new fear had been growing on Federal Hill since a
+stranger had entered the dreaded church. The Italians whispered of
+unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapings in the dark windowless
+steeple, and called on their priests to banish an entity which haunted their
+dreams. Something, they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were
+dark enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the longstanding local
+superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background of the
+horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no antiquarians. In
+writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses a curious kind of remorse,
+and talks of the duty of burying the Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing
+what he had evoked by letting daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the
+same time, however, he displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and
+admits a morbid longing- pervading even his dreams- to visit the accursed tower
+and gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone.
+
+Then something in the Journal on the morning of 17 July threw the diarist into a
+veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the other half-humorous items
+about the Federal hill restlessness, but to Blake it was somehow very terrible
+indeed. In the night a thunderstorm had put the city's lighting-system out of
+commission for a full hour, and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone
+mad with fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing
+in the steeple had taken advantage of the street lamps' absence and gone down
+into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in a viscous,
+altogether dreadful way. Towards the last it had bumped up to the tower, where
+there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It could go wherever the darkness
+reached, but light would always send it fleeing.
+
+When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion in the
+tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the grime-blackened, louvre-
+boarded windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and slithered up
+into its tenebrous steeple just in time- for a long dose of light would have sent it
+back into the abyss whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour
+praying crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles
+and lamps somehow shielded with folded paper and umbrellas- a guard of light
+to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness. Once, those nearest
+the church declared, the outer door had rattled hideously.
+
+
+
+
+But even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blake read of what
+the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical news value of the
+scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds of Italians and crawled into
+the church through the cellar window after trying the doors in vain. They found
+the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave ploughed up in a singular way,
+with pits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around.
+There was a bad odour everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain
+and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the tower, and
+pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above, they found the
+narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean.
+
+In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They spoke of the
+heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs, and the bizarre plaster
+images; though strangely enough the metal box and the old mutilated skeleton
+were not mentioned. What disturbed Blake the most- except for the hints of
+stains and charring and bad odours- was the final detail that explained the
+crashing glass. Every one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of
+them had been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin
+pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting exterior
+louvre-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair lay scattered
+around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been interrupted in the act of
+restoring the tower to the absolute blackness of its tightly curtained days.
+
+Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the
+windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the horizontally-
+sliding trap-door and shot a feeble flashlight beam into the black and strangely
+foetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and a heterogeneous litter of
+shapeless fragments near the aperture. The verdict, of course, was charlatanry.
+Somebody had played a joke on the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some
+fanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or
+perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an
+elaborate hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the
+police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession found ways
+of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very reluctantly and returned
+very soon without adding to the account given by the reporters.
+
+From this point onwards Blake's diary shows a mounting tide of insidious horror
+and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for not doing something, and
+speculates wildly on the consequences of another electrical breakdown. It had
+been verified that on three occasions- during thunderstorms- he telephoned the
+electric light company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions
+against a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries show concern over
+the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the strangely
+
+
+
+
+marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower room. He assumed
+that these things had been removed- whither, and by whom or what, he could
+only guess. But his worst fears concerned himself, and the kind of unholy
+rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror in the distant
+steeple- that monstrous thing of night which his rashness had called out of the
+ultimate black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and
+callers of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and
+stare out of the west window at that far-off spire-bristling mound beyond the
+swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on certain terrible
+dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport in his sleep. There is
+mention of a night when he awakened to find himself fully dressed, outdoors,
+and headed automatically down College Hill towards the west. Again and again
+he dwells on the fact that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him.
+
+The week following 30 July is recalled as the time of Blake's partial breakdown.
+He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors remarked the
+cords he kept near his bed, and he said that sleep-walking had forced him to
+bind his ankles every night with knots which would probably hold or else waken
+him with the labour of untying. In his diary he told of the hideous experience
+which had brought the collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th, he had
+suddenly found himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see
+were short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an
+overpowering foetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds above him.
+Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each noise there would
+come a sort of answering sound from above- a vague stirring, mixed with the
+cautious sliding of wood on wood.
+
+Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top, whilst
+later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built into the wall, and
+fumbling his uncertain way upwards towards some region of intenser stench
+where a hot, searing blast beat down against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic
+range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the
+picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of
+an even profounder blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate
+Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things,
+encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled
+by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in nameless paws.
+
+Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused
+him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew-
+perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard all summer on
+Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron saints, or the saints of their
+native villages in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from
+
+
+
+
+the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost
+lightless chamber that encompassed him.
+
+He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiral
+staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a nightmare
+flight through a vast cobw ebbed nave whose ghostly arches readied up to realms
+of leering shadow, a sightless scramble through a littered basement, a climb to
+regions of air and street lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of
+gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and up the steep
+eastward precipice to his own ancient door.
+
+On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on his study
+floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every inch of his body
+seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he saw that his hair was
+badly scorched while a trace of strange evil odour seemed to cling to his upper
+outer clothing. It was then that his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging
+exhaustedly about in a dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west
+window, shiver at the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary.
+
+The great storm broke just before midnight on 8 August. Lightning struck
+repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable fireballs were reported.
+The rain was torrential, while a constant fusillade of thunder brought
+sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting
+system, and tried to telephone the company around 1 A.M. though by that time
+service had been temporarily cut off in the interests of safety. He recorded
+everything in his diary- the large, nervous, and often undecipherable,
+hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and of entries
+scrawled blindly in the dark.
+
+He had to keep the house dark in order to see out of the window, and it appears
+that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain
+across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the constellation of distant
+lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he would fumblingly make an entry
+in his diary, so that detached phrases such as "The lights must not go"; "It knows
+where I am"; "I must destroy it"; and "it is calling to me, but perhaps it means no
+injury this time"; are found scattered down two of the pages.
+
+Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2.12 A.M. according to
+power-house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication of the time. The entry
+is merely, "Lights out- God help me." On Federal Hill there were watchers as
+anxious as he, and rain-soaked knots of men paraded the square and alleys
+around the evil church with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil
+lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern
+
+
+
+
+Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs of fear with
+their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the flashes to lessen and finally
+to cease altogether. A rising wind blew out most of the candles, so that the scene
+grew threatening dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo
+Church, and he hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful
+syllables he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower,
+there could be no doubt whatever.
+
+For what happened at 2.35 we have the testimony of the priest, a young,
+intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J. Monohan of the
+Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability who had paused at that part of
+his beat to inspect the crowd; and of most of the seventy-eight men who had
+gathered around the church's high bank wall- especially those in the square
+where the eastward fagade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can
+be proved as being outside the order of Nature. The possible causes of such an
+event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical
+processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted building of
+heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapours- spontaneous combustion- pressure of
+gases born of long decay- any one of numberless phenomena might be
+responsible. And then, of course, the factor of conscious charlatanry can by no
+means be excluded. The thing was really quite simple in itself, and covered less
+than three minutes of actual time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked
+at his watch repeatedly.
+
+It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside the black
+tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of strange, evil odours
+from the church, and this had now become emphatic and offensive. Then at last
+there was a sound of splintering wood and a large, heavy object crashed down in
+the yard beneath the frowning easterly fagade. The tower was invisible now that
+the candles would not burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew
+that it was the smoke-grimed louvre-boarding of that tower's east window.
+
+Immediately afterwards an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the
+unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost
+prostrating those in the square. At the same time the air trembled with a
+vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden east-blowing wind more violent
+than any previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping
+umbrellas from the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the candleless
+night, though some upward-looking spectators thought they glimpsed a great
+spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky- something like a
+formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteorlike speed towards the east.
+
+
+
+
+That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort,
+and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing
+what had happened, they did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they sent
+up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting
+crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped,
+and in fifteen minutes more the street lights sprang on again, sending the weary,
+bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes.
+
+The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connection with the
+general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and deafening
+explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence were even more
+tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular foetor was likewise
+noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College Hill, where the crash
+awakened all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a bewildered round of
+speculations. Of those who were already awake only a few saw the anomalous
+blaze of light near the top of the hill, or noticed the inexplicable upward rush of
+air which almost stripped the leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the
+gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck
+somewhere in this neighbourhood, though no trace of its striking could
+afterwards be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw
+a grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary flash
+burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few observers,
+however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the flood of intolerable
+stench which preceded the belated stroke, whilst evidence concerning the
+momentary burned odour after the stroke is equally general.
+
+These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable connection
+with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear
+windows looked into Blake's study, noticed the blurred white face at the
+westward window on the morning of the ninth, and wondered what was wrong
+with the expression. When they saw the same face in the same position that
+evening, they felt worried, and watched for the lights to come up in his
+apartment. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat, and finally had a
+policeman force the door.
+
+The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the
+intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright
+on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterwards
+the coroner's physician made an examination, and despite the unbroken window
+reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by electrical discharge, as
+the cause of death. The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a
+not improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of such
+abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these latter
+
+
+
+
+qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in the apartment, and
+from the bhndly scrawled entries in the diary on the desk. Blake had prolonged
+his frenzied jottings to the last, and the broken-pointed pencil was found
+clutched in his spasmodically contracted right hand.
+
+The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed, and legible only
+in part. From them certain investigators have drawn conclusions differing
+greatly from the materialistic official verdict, but such speculations have little
+chance for belief among the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists
+has not been helped by the action of superstitious Doctor Dexter, who threw the
+curious box and angled stone- an object certainly self-luminous as seen in the
+black windowless steeple where it was found- into the deepest channel of
+Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and neurotic unbalance on Blake's part,
+aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult whose startling traces he had
+uncovered, form the dominant interpretation given those final frenzied jottings.
+These are the entries- or all that can be made of them:
+
+Lights still out- must be five minutes now. Everything depends on lightning.
+Yaddith grant it will keep up!... Some influence seems beating through it... Rain
+and thunder and wind deafen. . . The thing is taking hold of my mind. . .
+
+Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and other
+galaxies. . . Dark. . . The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light. . .
+
+It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be
+retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their
+candles if the lightning stops!
+
+What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and
+shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more
+distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets. . .
+
+The long, winging flight through the void. . . cannot cross the universe of light . . .
+re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron. . . send it
+through the horrible abysses of radiance. . .
+
+My name is Blake- Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee,
+Wisconsin. . . I am on this planet. . .
+
+Azathoth have mercy!- the lightning no longer flashes- horrible- I can see
+everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight- light is dark and dark is
+light. . . those people on the hill. . . guard. . . candles and charms. . . their priests. . .
+
+
+
+
+Sense of distance gone -far is near and near is far. No light - no glass - see that
+steeple - that tower - window - can hear - Roderick Usher - am mad or going mad
+- the thing is stirring and fumbling in the tower.
+
+I am it and it is I - I want to get out... must get out and unify the forces... it
+knows where I am. . .
+
+I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odour...
+senses transfigured. . . boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way. . .
+Ia...ngai...ygg...
+
+I see it - coming here - hell-wind - titan blue - black wing - Yog Sothoth save me -
+the three-lobed burning eye. . .
+
+
+
+
+The Horror at Red Hook
+
+Written in August of 1925
+
+Published in September of 1926 in Weird Tales
+
+
+Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a
+tall, heavily built, and wholesome-looking pedestrian furnished much
+speculation by a singular lapse of behaviour. He had, it appears, been
+descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering the compact
+section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest
+business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible
+provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at
+the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified,
+hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall
+at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to
+be conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous
+attack. He muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had
+undergone, and with downcast glance turned back up the Chepachet road,
+trudging out of sight without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident
+to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the
+strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognised
+him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.
+
+He was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone,
+now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after some
+disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which accident had
+made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick buildings during a
+raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both
+of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he
+had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely
+suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental specialists
+forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police surgeon
+with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden
+colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither
+the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets
+of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he
+was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and
+the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.
+
+
+
+
+So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much, also, the
+most learned specialists believed. But Malone had at first told the specialists
+much more, ceasing only when he saw that utter incredulity was his portion.
+Thereafter he held his peace, protesting not at all when it was generally agreed
+that the collapse of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of
+Brooklyn, and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his
+nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all said, it trying to clean up those
+nests of disorder and violence; certain features were shocking enough, in all
+conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was the last straw. This was a simple
+explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a
+simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice. To hint to
+unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception - a horror of
+houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder
+worlds - would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful rustication,
+and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt's far
+vision of weird and hidden things, but the logician's quick eye for the outwardly
+unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two years of
+his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a
+Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.
+
+And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and apprehended,
+Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what could reduce a
+dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could make old brick slums and
+seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not
+be the first time his sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted - for was
+not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's underworld a
+freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of the antique
+witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison
+cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and
+perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of secret
+wonder in this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy,
+and had smiled gently when all the New-Yorkers he knew scoffed at his
+experiment in police work. They had been very witty and cynical, deriding his
+fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in these days
+New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had wagered
+him a heavy sum that he could not - despite many poignant things to his credit in
+the Dublin Review - even write a truly interesting story of New York low life;
+and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified the
+prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as
+glimpsed at last, could not make a story - for like the book cited by Poe's
+Germany authority, 'es lasst sich nicht lesen - it does not permit itself to be read.'
+
+
+To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth
+he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but
+poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he
+had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had fur him
+come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and
+leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting
+terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less
+obvious work of Gustave Dore. He would often regard it as merciful that most
+persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if
+superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by
+ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck
+the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was
+no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it.
+Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden
+visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him
+into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.
+
+He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when
+the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor
+near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island, with dirty highways
+climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed
+lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses
+are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth
+century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique
+flavour which conventional reading leads us to call 'Dickensian'. The population
+is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements
+impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts
+lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries
+to answer the lapping oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ
+litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with
+clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where
+the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in
+the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the
+evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn
+flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative columns or
+pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. The
+houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then a many-windowed
+cupola arises to tell of days when the households of captains and ship-owners
+watched the sea.
+
+From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an
+hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing
+along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish
+
+
+
+
+lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from
+windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or
+reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the
+contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and
+such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offences are as
+varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and
+prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to
+murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs
+are not more frequent is not to the neighbourhood's credit, unless the power of
+concealment be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave
+it - or at least, than leave it by the landward side - and those who are not
+loquacious are the likeliest to leave.
+
+Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than
+any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and
+philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific
+knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to
+repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half- ape savagery in their
+daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an
+anthropologist's shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and
+pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours
+of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering
+vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap
+instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues
+around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering
+converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and
+closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he
+dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some
+monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient
+pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts
+listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt
+inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of
+debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their
+coherence and definiteness suggested it, and it shewed in the singular suspicion
+of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read in vain
+such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up
+to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a
+frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark
+religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black
+Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-
+Asiatic magic and fertility cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a
+moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much
+blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.
+
+
+
+
+
+It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of things in
+Red Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch family, possessed
+originally of barely independent means, and inhabiting the spacious but ill-
+preserved mansion which his grandfather had built in Flatbush when that village
+was little more than a pleasant group of colonial cottages surrounding the
+steepled and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of
+Netherlandish gravestones. In his lonely house, set back from Martense Street
+amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and brooded for some six
+decades except for a period a generation before, when he had sailed for the old
+world and remained there out of sight for eight years. He could afford no
+servants, and would admit but few visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing
+close friendships and receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-
+floor rooms which he kept in order - a vast, high-ceiled library whose walls were
+solidly packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic, and vaguely repellent
+aspect. The growth of the town and its final absorption in the Brooklyn district
+had meant nothing to Suydam, and he had come to mean less and less to the
+town. Elderly people still pointed him out on the streets, but to most of the recent
+population he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose unkempt white
+hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes, and gold-headed cane earned him an
+amused glance and nothing more. Malone did not know him by sight till duty
+called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as a really profound
+authority on mediaeval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up an out-
+of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend
+had quoted from memory.
+
+Suydam became a case when his distant and only relatives sought court
+pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to the outside world,
+but was really undertaken only after prolonged observation and sorrowful
+debate. It was based on certain odd changes in his speech and habits; wild
+references to impending wonders, and unaccountable hauntings of disreputable
+Brooklyn neighbourhoods. He had been growing shabbier and shabbier with the
+years, and now prowled about like a veritable mendicant; seen occasionally by
+humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering on the benches around
+Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers.
+When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp,
+and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical words or names as 'Sephiroth',
+'Ashmodai', and 'Samael'. The court action revealed that he was using up his
+income and wasting his principal in the purchase of curious tomes imported
+from London and Paris, and in the maintenance of a squalid basement flat in the
+Red Hook district where he spent nearly every night, receiving odd delegations
+of mixed rowdies and foreigners, and apparently conducting some kind of
+
+
+
+
+ceremonial service behind the green bHnds of secretive windows. Detectives
+assigned to follow him reported strange cries and chants and prancing of feet
+filtering out from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy
+and abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden section.
+When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed to preserve his
+liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and reasonable, and he freely
+admitted the queerness of demeanour and extravagant cast of language into
+which he had fallen through excessive devotion to study and research. He was,
+he said, engaged in the investigation of certain details of European tradition
+which required the closest contact with foreign groups and their songs and folk
+dances. The notion that any low secret society was preying upon him, as hinted
+by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and shewed how sadly limited was their
+understanding of him and his work. Triumphing with his calm explanations, he
+was suffered to depart unhindered; and the paid detectives of the Suydams,
+Corlears, and Van Brunts were withdrawn in resigned disgust.
+
+It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone with them,
+entered the case. The law had watched the Suydam action with interest, and had
+in many instances been called upon to aid the private detectives. In this work it
+developed that Suydam's new associates were among the blackest and most
+vicious criminals of Red Hook's devious lanes, and that at least a third of them
+were known and repeated offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the
+importation of illegal immigrants. Indeed, it would not have been too much to
+say that the old scholar's particular circle coincided almost perfectly with the
+worst of the organized cliques which smuggled ashore certain nameless and
+unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming
+rookeries of Parker Place - since renamed - where Suydam had his basement flat,
+there had grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who
+used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great mass of
+Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been deported for
+lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not disturb Red
+Hook unless publicity forces one to.
+
+These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays as a
+dance-hall, which reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest part of the
+waterfront. It was nominally Catholic; but priests throughout Brooklyn denied
+the place all standing and authenticity, and policemen agreed with them when
+they listened to the noises it emitted at night. Malone used to fancy he heard
+terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far underground when the
+church stood empty and unlighted, whilst all observers dreaded the shrieking
+and drumming which accompanied the visible services. Suydam, when
+questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian
+Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. Most of the people, he
+
+
+
+
+conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near
+Kurdistan - and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the
+Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers. However this may have
+been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it certain that these unauthorised
+newcomers were flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers; entering through
+some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue officers and harbour police,
+overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading up the hill, and welcomed with
+curious fraternalism by the other assorted denizens of the region. Their squat
+figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with
+flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the
+loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at length it was
+deemed necessary to compute their numbers, ascertain their sources and
+occupations, and find if possible a way to round them up and deliver them to the
+proper immigration authorities. To this task Malone was assigned by agreement
+of Federal and city forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt
+poised upon the brink of nameless terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure of
+Robert Suydam as arch-fiend and adversary.
+
+
+Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through unostentatious
+rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed offers of hip-pocket liquor,
+and judicious dialogues with frightened prisoners, learned many isolated facts
+about the movement whose aspect had become so menacing. The newcomers
+were indeed Kurds, but of a dialect obscure and puzzling to exact philology.
+Such of them as worked lived mostly as dock-hands and unlicenced pedlars,
+though frequently serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner news stands.
+Most of them, however, had no visible means of support; and were obviously
+connected with underworld pursuits, of which smuggling and 'bootlegging'
+were the least indescribable. They had come in steamships, apparently tramp
+freighters, and had been unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats
+which stole under a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal to a secret
+subterranean pool beneath a house. This wharf, canal, and house Malone could
+not locate, for the memories of his informants were exceedingly confused, while
+their speech was to a great extent beyond even the ablest interpreters; nor could
+he gain any real data on the reasons for their systematic importation. They were
+reticent about the exact spot from which they had come, and were never
+sufficiently off guard to reveal the agencies which had sought them out and
+directed their course. Indeed, they developed something like acute fright when
+asked the reasons for their presence. Gangsters of other breeds were equally
+taciturn, and she most that could be gathered was that some god or great
+priesthood had promised them unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and
+rulerships in a strange land.
+
+
+
+
+The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's closely
+guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police soon learned that
+the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats to accommodate such guests as
+knew his password; at last occupying three entire houses and permanently
+harbouring many of his queer companions. He spent but little time now at his
+Flatbush home, apparently going and coming only to obtain and return books;
+and his face and manner had attained an appalling pitch of wildness. Malone
+twice interviewed him, but was each time brusquely repulsed. He knew nothing,
+he said, of any mysterious plots or movements; and had no idea how the Kurds
+could have entered or what they wanted. His business was to study undisturbed
+the folklore of all the immigrants of the district; a business with which policemen
+had no legitimate concern. Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old
+brochure on the Kabbalah and other myths, but the old man's softening was only
+momentary. He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no uncertain
+way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other channels of
+information.
+
+What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously on the
+case, we shall never know. As it was, a stupid conflict between city and Federal
+authority suspended the investigations for several months, during which the
+detective was busy with other assignments. But at no time did he lose interest, or
+fail to stand amazed at what began to happen to Robert Suydam. Just at the time
+when a wave of kidnappings and disappearances spread its excitement over
+New York, the unkempt scholar embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as
+it was absurd. One day he was seen near Borough Hall with clean-shaved face,
+well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate attire, and on every day thereafter
+some obscure improvement was noticed in him. He maintained his new
+fastidiousness without interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle of eye and
+crispness of speech, and began little by little to shed the corpulence which had so
+long deformed him. Now frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired an
+elasticity of step and buoyancy of demeanour to match the new tradition, and
+shewed a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye. As
+the months passed, he commenced to dress less and less conservatively, and
+finally astonished his new friends by renovating and redecorating his Flatbush
+mansion, which he threw open in a series of receptions, summoning all the
+acquaintances he could remember, and extending a special welcome to the fully
+forgiven relatives who had so lately sought his restraint. Some attended through
+curiosity, others through duty; but all were suddenly charmed by the dawning
+grace and urbanity of the former hermit. He had, he asserted, accomplished most
+of his allotted work; and having just inherited some property from a half-
+forgotten European friend, was about to spend his remaining years in a brighter
+second youth which ease, care, and diet had made possible to him. Less and less
+was he seen at Red Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to
+
+
+
+
+which he was born. PoHcemen noted a tendency of the gangsters to congregate at
+the old stone church and dance-hall instead of at the basement flat in Parker
+Place, though the latter and its recent annexes still overflowed with noxious life.
+
+Then two incidents occurred - wide enough apart, but both of intense interest in
+the case as Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet announcement in the Eagle of
+Robert Suydam's engagement to Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young
+woman of excellent position, and distantly related to the elderly bridegroom-
+elect; whilst the other was a raid on the dance-hall church by city police, after a
+report that the face of a kidnapped child had been seen for a second at one of the
+basement windows. Malone had participated in this raid, and studied the place
+with much care when inside. Nothing was found - in fact, the building was
+entirely deserted when visited - but the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by
+many things about the interior. There were crudely painted panels he did not
+like - panels which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic
+expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a layman's sense of
+decorum could scarcely countenance. Then, too, he did not relish the Greek
+inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an ancient incantation which he had
+once stumbled upon in Dublin college days, and which read, literally translated,
+
+'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and
+spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest
+for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon,
+look favourably on our sacrifices!'
+
+When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked bass organ
+notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on certain nights. He
+shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a metal basin which stood on the
+altar, and paused nervously when his nostrils seemed to detect a curious and
+ghastly stench from somewhere in the neighbourhood. That organ memory
+haunted him, and he explored the basement with particular assiduity before he
+left. The place was very hateful to him; yet after all, were the blasphemous panels
+and inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated by the ignorant?
+
+By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become a
+popular newspaper scandal. Most of the victims were young children of the
+lowest classes, but the increasing number of disappearances had worked up a
+sentiment of the strongest fury. Journals clamoured for action from the police,
+and once more the Butler Street Station sent its men over Red Hook for clues,
+discoveries, and criminals. Malone was glad to be on the trail again, and took
+pride in a raid on one of Suydam's Parker Place houses. There, indeed, no stolen
+child was found, despite the tales of screams and the red sash picked up in the
+areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the peeling walls of most of
+
+
+
+
+the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in the attic, all helped to
+convince the detective that he was on the track of something tremendous. The
+paintings were appalling - hideous monsters of every shape and size, and
+parodies on human outlines which cannot be described. The writing was in red,
+and varied from Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not
+read much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabbalistic
+enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a Sort of Hebraised Hellenistic
+Greek, and suggested the most terrible daemon-evocations of the Alexandrian
+decadence:
+
+'HEL • HELOYM • SOTHER • EMMANVEL • SABAOTH • AGLA •
+TETRAGRAMMATON • AGYROS • OTHEOS • ISCHYROS • ATHANATOS •
+lEHOVA • VA • ADONAI • SADAY • HOMOVSION • MESSIAS •
+ESCHEREHEYE.'
+
+Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the
+strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here. In the cellar,
+however, the strangest thing was found - a pile of genuine gold ingots covered
+carelessly with a piece of burlap, and bearing upon their shining surfaces the
+same weird hieroglyphics which also adorned the walls. During the raid the
+police encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals that
+swarmed from every door. Finding nothing relevant, they had to leave all as it
+was; but the precinct captain wrote Suydam a note advising him to look closely
+to the character of his tenants and proteges in view of the growing public
+clamour.
+
+
+Then came the June wedding and the great sensation. Flatbush was gay for the
+hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the streets near the old
+Dutch church where an awning stretched from door to highway. No local event
+ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen nuptials in tone and scale, and the party
+which escorted bride and groom to the Cunard Pier was, if not exactly the
+smartest, at least a solid page from the Social Register. At five o'clock adieux
+were waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly
+turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for the widening water
+spaces that led to old world wonders. By night the outer harbour was cleared,
+and late passengers watched the stars twinkling above an unpolluted ocean.
+
+Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention, no one can
+say. Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use to calculate. The scream
+came from the Suydam stateroom, and the sailor who broke down the door
+could perhaps have told frightful things if he had not forthwith gone completely
+
+
+
+
+mad - as it is, he shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran
+simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons. The ship's doctor who
+entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a moment later did not go mad,
+but told nobody what he saw till afterward, when he corresponded with Malone
+in Chepachet. It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-
+mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any
+other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in
+hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been
+nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need
+not mention these things because they vanished so quickly - as for Suydam, one
+could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The
+doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole,
+just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain
+phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside
+the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no real outline met the eye. As
+proof, the doctor points to his continued sanity.
+
+Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a horde of
+swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard the temporarily halted
+Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or his body - they had known of his trip, and
+for certain reasons were sure he would die. The captain's deck was almost a
+pandemonium; for at the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom
+and the demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest
+seaman could think what to do. Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an
+Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and
+handed it to the captain. It was signed by Robert Suydam, and bore the following
+odd message.
+
+In case of sudden or unexplained accident or death on my part, please deliver me
+or my body unquestioningly into the hands of the bearer and his associates.
+Everything, for me, and perhaps for you, depends on absolute compliance.
+Explanations can come later - do not fail me now.
+
+- ROBERT SUYDAM
+
+Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered something to
+the former. Finally they nodded rather helplessly and led the way to the Suydam
+stateroom. The doctor directed the captain's glance away as he unlocked the
+door and admitted the strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily till they filed
+out with their burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation. It was
+wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that the outlines
+were not very revealing. Somehow the men got the thing over the side and away
+to their tramp steamer without uncovering it. The Cunarder started again, and
+
+
+
+
+the doctor and a ship's undertaker sought out the Suydam stateroom to perform
+what last services they could. Once more the physician was forced to reticence
+and even to mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the undertaker
+asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he neglected to
+affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the vacant bottle-spaces on the
+rack, or to the odour in the sink which shewed the hasty disposition of the
+bottles' original contents. The pockets of those men - if men they were - had
+bulged damnably when they left the ship. Two hours later, and the world knew
+by radio all that it ought to know of the horrible affair.
+
+
+That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea, Malone was
+desperately busy among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir seemed to
+permeate the place, and as if apprised by 'grapevine telegraph' of something
+singular, the denizens clustered expectantly around the dance-hall church and
+the houses in Parker Place. Three children had just disappeared - blue-eyed
+Norwegians from the streets toward Gowanus - and there were rumours of a
+mob forming among the sturdy Vikings of that section. Malone had for weeks
+been urging his colleagues to attempt a general cleanup; and at last, moved by
+conditions more obvious to their common sense than the conjectures of a Dublin
+dreamer, they had agreed upon a final stroke. The unrest and menace of this
+evening had been the deciding factor, and just about midnight a raiding party
+recruited from three stations descended upon Parker Place and its environs.
+Doors were battered in, stragglers arrested, and candlelighted rooms forced to
+disgorge unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, mitres, and
+other inexplicable devices. Much was lost in the melee, for objects were thrown
+hastily down unexpected shafts, and betraying odours deadened by the sudden
+kindling of pungent incense. But spattered blood was everywhere, and Malone
+shuddered whenever he saw a brazier or altar from which the smoke was still
+rising.
+
+He wanted to be in several places at once, and decided on Suydam's basement
+flat only after a messenger had reported the complete emptiness of the
+dilapidated dance-hall church. The flat, he thought, must hold some due to a cult
+of which the occult scholar had so obviously become the centre and leader; and it
+was with real expectancy that he ransacked the musty rooms, noted their
+vaguely charnel odour, and examined the curious books, instruments, gold
+ingots, and glass-stoppered bottles scattered carelessly here and there. Once a
+lean, black-and-white cat edged between his feet and tripped him, overturning at
+the same time a beaker half full of a red liquid. The shock was severe, and to this
+day Malone is not certain of what he saw; but in dreams he still pictures that cat
+as it scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities. Then
+
+
+
+
+came the locked cellar door, and the search for something to break it down. A
+heavy stool stood near, and its tough seat was more than enough for the antique
+panels. A crack formed and enlarged, and the whole door gave way - but from
+the other side; whence poured a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the
+stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth
+or heaven, which, coiling sentiently about the paralysed detective, dragged him
+through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and
+wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.
+
+Of course it was a dream. All the specialists have told him so, and he has nothing
+to prove the contrary. Indeed, he would rather have it thus; for then the sight of
+old brick slums and dark foreign faces would not eat so deeply into his soul. But
+at the time it was all horribly real, and nothing can ever efface the memory of
+those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed shapes of hell
+that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten things whose still surviving
+portions screamed for mercy or laughed with madness. Odours of incense and
+corruption joined in sickening concert, and the black air was alive with the
+cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes. Somewhere
+dark sticky water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of
+raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked phosphorescent
+thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat
+leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background.
+
+Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might
+fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities,
+and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had
+entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of
+death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's
+holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless
+childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and
+succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the
+Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and ^gypans
+chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads.
+Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation
+the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas
+of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to
+mould. The world and Nature were helpless against such assaults from unsealed
+wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer check the Walpurgis-riot of horror
+which had come when a sage with the hateful key had stumbled on a horde with
+the locked and brimming coffer of transmitted daemon-lore.
+
+Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these phantasms, and Malone
+heard the sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that should be dead. A
+
+
+
+
+boat with a lantern in its prow darted into sight, made fast to an iron ring in the
+sHmy stone pier, and vomited forth several dark men bearing a long burden
+swathed in bedding. They took it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the
+carved golden pedestal, and the thing tittered and pawed at the bedding. Then
+they unswathed it, and propped upright before the pedestal the gangrenous
+corpse of a corpulent old man with stubbly beard and unkempt white hair. The
+phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced bottles from their
+pockets and anointed its feet with red, whilst they afterward gave the bottles to
+the thing to drink from.
+
+All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there came the
+daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out
+the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass. In an instant every moving
+entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the
+nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound - goat, satyr, and ^gypan,
+incubus, succubus and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced
+howler and silent strutter in darkness - all led by the abominable naked
+phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that
+now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent
+old man. The strange dark men danced in the rear, and the whole column
+skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury. Malone staggered after them a few
+steps, delirious and hazy, and doubtful of his place in this or in any world. Then
+he turned, faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping and
+shivering as the daemon organ croaked on, and the howling and drumming and
+tinkling of the mad procession grew fainter and fainter.
+
+Vaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors and shocking croakings afar off.
+Now and then a wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would float to him
+through the black arcade, whilst eventually there rose the dreadful Greek
+incantation whose text he had read above the pulpit of that dance-hall church.
+
+'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs (here
+a hideous howl bust forth) and spilt blood (here nameless sounds vied with
+morbid shriekings) who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs,
+(here a whistling sigh occurred) who longest for blood and bringest terror to
+mortals, (short, sharp cries from myriad throats) Gorgo, (repeated as response)
+Mormo, (repeated with ecstasy) thousand-faced moon, (sighs and flute notes)
+look favourably on our sacrifices!'
+
+As the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds nearly
+drowned the croaking of the cracked bass organ. Then a gasp as from many
+throats, and a babel of barked and bleated words - 'Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the
+Bridegroom!' More cries, a clamour of rioting, and the sharp, clicking footfalls of
+
+
+
+
+a running figure. The footfalls approached, and Malone raised himself to his
+elbow to look.
+
+The luminosity of the crypt, lately diminished, had now slightly increased; and
+in that devil-light there appeared the fleeing form of that which should not flee
+or feel or breathe - the glassy-eyed, gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man,
+now needing no support, but animated by some infernal sorcery of the rite just
+closed. After it raced the naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged on
+the carven pedestal, and still farther behind panted the dark men, and all the
+dread crew of sentient loathsomenesses. The corpse was gaining on its pursuers,
+and seemed bent on a definite object, straining with every rotting muscle toward
+the carved golden pedestal, whose necromantic importance was evidently so
+great. Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst the trailing throng
+laboured on with more frantic speed. But they were too late, for in one final spurt
+of strength which ripped tendon from tendon and sent its noisome bulk
+floundering to the floor in a state of jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which
+had been Robert Suydam achieved its object and its triumph. The push had been
+tremendous, but the force had held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a muddy
+blotch of corruption the pedestal he had pushed tottered, tipped, and finally
+careened from its onyx base into the thick waters below, sending up a parting
+gleam of carven gold as it sank heavily to undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus.
+In that instant, too, the whole scene of horror faded to nothingness before
+Malone's eyes; and he fainted amidst a thunderous crash which seemed to blot
+out all the evil universe.
+
+
+Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death and
+transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some odd realities of the case;
+though that is no reason why anyone should believe it. The three old houses in
+Parker Place, doubtless long rotten with decay in its most insidious form,
+collapsed without visible cause while half the raiders and most of the prisoners
+were inside; and of both the greater number were instantly killed. Only in the
+basements and cellars was there much saving of life, and Malone was lucky to
+have been deep below the house of Robert Suydam. For he really was there, as
+no one is disposed to deny. They found him unconscious by the edge of a night-
+black pool, with a grotesquely horrible jumble of decay and bone, identifiable
+through dental work as the body of Suydam, a few feet away. The case was
+plain, for it was hither that the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men
+who took Suydam from the ship had brought him home. They themselves were
+never found, or at least never identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied
+with the simple certitudes of the police.
+
+
+
+
+Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations, for the
+canal to his house was but one of several subterranean channels and tunnels in
+the neighbourhood. There was a tunnel from this house to a crypt beneath the
+dance-hall church; a crypt accessible from the church only through a narrow
+secret passage in the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and
+terrible things were discovered. The croaking organ was there, as well as a vast
+arched chapel with wooden benches and a strangely figured altar. The walls
+were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which - hideous to relate - solitary
+prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained, including four
+mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon
+after exposure to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather
+merciful. Nobody but Malone, among those who inspected them, remembered
+the sombre question of old Delrio: 'An sint unquam daemones incubi et
+succubae, et an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat?'
+
+Before the canals were filled up they were thoroughly dredged, and yielded forth
+a sensational array of sawed and split bones of all sizes. The kidnapping
+epidemic, very clearly, had been traced home; though only two of the surviving
+prisoners could by any legal thread be connected with it. These men are now in
+prison, since they failed of conviction as accessories in the actual murders. The
+carved golden pedestal or throne so often mentioned by Malone as of primary
+occult importance was never brought to light, though at one place under the
+Suydam house the canal was observed to sink into a well too deep for dredging.
+It was choked up at the mouth and cemented over when the cellars of the new
+houses were made, but Malone often speculates on what lies beneath. The police,
+satisfied that they had shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and man-
+smugglers, turned over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who
+befure their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidi clan of
+devil-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an elusive mystery,
+though cynical detectives are once more ready to combat its smugging and rum-
+running ventures. Malone thinks these detectives shew a sadly limited
+perspective in their lack of wonder at the myriad unexplainable details, and the
+suggestive obscurity of the whole case; though he is just as critical of the
+newspapers, which saw only a morbid sensation and gloated over a minor sadist
+cult which they might have proclaimed a horror from the universe's very heart.
+But he is content to rest silent in Chepachet, calming his nervous system and
+praying that time may gradually transfer his terrible experience from the realm
+of present reality to that of picturesque and semi-mythical remoteness.
+
+Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No funeral was
+held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are grateful for the swift
+oblivion which overtook the case as a whole. The scholar's connexion with the
+Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never emblazoned by legal proof; since his death
+
+
+
+
+forestalled the inquiry he would otherwise have faced. His own end is not much
+mentioned, and the Suydams hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle
+recluse who dabbled in harmless magic and folklore.
+
+As for Red Hook - it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror
+gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on
+amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and prowling bands still parade
+on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces
+unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a hydra with a thousand
+heads, and the cults of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well
+of Democritus, The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red
+Hook's legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl
+as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by
+blind laws of biology which they may never understand. As of old, more people
+enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side, and there are already
+rumours of new canals running underground to certain centres of traffic in liquor
+and less mentionable things.
+
+The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and queer faces have
+appeared at night at the windows. Lately a policeman expressed the belief that
+the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and for no simply explainable
+purpose. Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? Apes
+danced in Asia to those horrors, and the cancer lurks secure and spreading
+where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.
+
+Malone does not shudder without cause - for only the other day an officer
+overheard a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some whispered patois
+in the shadow of an areaway. He listened, and thought it very strange when he
+heard her repeat over and over again,
+
+'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and
+spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest
+for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon,
+look favourably on our sacrifices!'
+
+
+
+
+The Horror in the Museum
+
+
+IT WAS languid curiousity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers'
+Museum. Someone had told him about the queer underground place in
+Southwark Street across the river, where waxen things so much more horrible
+than the worst effigies at Madame Tussaud's were shown, and he had strolled in
+one April day to see how disappointing he would find it. Oddly, he was not
+disappointed. There was something different and distinctive here, after all. Of
+course, the usual gory commonplaces were present-Landru, Doctor Crippen,
+Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey, endless maimed victims of war and
+revolution, and monsters like Gilles de Rais and Marquis de Sade-but there were
+other things which had made him breathe faster and stay till the ringing of the
+closing bell. The man who had fashioned this collection could be no ordinary
+mountebank. There was imagination-even a kind of diseased genius-in some of
+this stuff.
+
+Later he had learned about George Rogers. The man had been on the Tussaud
+staff, but some trouble had developed which led to his discharge. There were
+aspersions on his sanity and tales of his crazy forms of secret worship-though
+latterly his success with his own basement museum had dulled the edge of some
+criticisms while sharpening the insidious point of others. Teratology and the
+iconography of nightmare were his hobbies, and even he had had the prudence
+to screen off some of his worst effigies in a special alcolve for adults only. It was
+this alcolve which had fascinated Jones so much. There were lumpish hybrid
+things which only fantasy could spawn, molded with devilish skill, and colored
+in a horribly life-like fashion.
+
+Some were the figures of well-known myth-gorgons, chimeras, dragons, Cyclops,
+and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more
+furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend-black, formless Tsathoggua,
+many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumored
+blasphemies from forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or
+the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt. But the worst were wholly original
+with Rogers, and represented shapes which no tale of antiquity had ever dared
+to suggest. Several were hideous parodies on forms of organic life we know,
+while others seemed to be taken from feverish dreams of other planets and
+galaxies. The wilder painted of Clark Ashton Smith might suggest a few-but
+nothing could suggest the effect of poignant, loathsome terror created by their
+great size and fiendishly cunning workmanship, and by the diabolically clever
+lighting conditions under which they were exhibited.
+
+
+
+
+Stephen Jones, as a leisurely connoisseur of the bizarre in art, had sought out
+Rogers himself in the dingy office and workroom behind the vaulted museum
+chamber-an evil-looking crypt lighted dimly by dusty windows set slit-like and
+horizontal in the brick wall on a level with the ancient cobblestones of a hidden
+courtyard. It was here that the images were repaired-here, too, where some of
+them had been made. Waxen arms, legs, heads and torsos lay in grotesque array
+on various benches, while on high tiers of shelves matted wigs, ravenous-looking
+teeth, and glassy, staring eyes were indiscriminately scattered. Costumes of all
+sorts hung from hooks, and in one alcove were great piles of flesh-colored wax-
+cakes and shelves filled with paint-cans and brushes of every description. In the
+center of the room was a large melting-furnace used to prepare the wax for
+molding, its fire-box topped by a huge iron container on hinges, with a spout
+which permitted the pouring of melted wax with the merest touch of a finger.
+
+Other things in the dismal crypt were less describable-isolated parts of
+problematical entities whose assembled forms were the phantoms of delerium.
+At one end was a door of heavy plank, fastened by an unusually large padlock
+and with a very peculiar symbol painted over it. Jone, who had once had access
+to the dreaded Necronomicon, shivered involuntarily as he recognized that
+symbol. This showman, he reflected, must indeed be a person of disconcertingly
+wide scholarship in dark and dubious fields.
+
+Nor did the conversation of Rogers disappoint him. The man was tall, lean, and
+rather unkempt, with large black eyes which gazed combustively from a pallid
+and usually stubble-covered face. He did not resent Jones' intrusion, but seemed
+to welcome the chance of unburdening himself to an interested person. His voice
+was of singular depth and resonance, and harbored a sort of repressed intensity
+bordering on the feverish. Jones did not wonder that many had thought him
+mad.
+
+With every successive call-and such calls became a habit as the weeks went by-
+Jones had found Rogers more communicative and confidential. From the first
+there had been hints of strange faiths and practices on the showman's part, and
+later on those hints expanded into tales-despite a few odd corroborative
+photographs-whose extravagence was almost comic. It was some time in June,
+on a night when Jones had brought a bottle of good whisky and plied his host
+somewhat freely, that the really demented talk first appeared. Before that there
+had been wild enough stories-accounts of mysterious trips to Tibet, the African
+interior, the Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska, and certain little-known
+islands of the South Pacific, plus claims of having read such monstrous and half-
+fabulous books as the prehistoric Pnakotic fragments and the Dhol chants
+attributed to malign and non-human Leng-but nothing in all this had been so
+
+
+
+
+unmistakably insane as what had cropped out that June evening under the spell
+of the whisky.
+
+To be plain, Rogers began making vauge boasts of having found certain things in
+nature that no one had found before, and of having brought back tangible
+evidences of such discoveries. According to his bibulous harangue, he had gone
+farther than anyone else in interpreting the obscure and primal books he studied,
+and had been directed by them to certain remote places where strange survivals
+are hidden-survivals of aeons and life-cycles earlier than mankind, and in some
+case connected with other dimensions and other worlds, communication with
+which was frequent in the forgotten pre-human days. Jones marvelled at the
+fancy which could conjure up such notions, and wondered just what Rogers'
+mental history had been. Had his work amidst the morbid grotesequeries of
+Madame Tussaud's been the start of his imaginative flights, or was the tendency
+innate, so that his choice of occupation was merely one of its manifestations? At
+any rate, the man's work was merely [?] very closely linked with his notions.
+Even now there was no mistaking the trend of his blackest hints about the
+nightmare monstrosities in the screened-off "Adults only" alcove. Heedless of
+ridicule, he was trying to imply that not all of these demoniac abnormalities were
+artificial.
+
+It was Jones' frank scepticism and amusement at these irresponsible claims
+which broke up the growing cordiality. Rogers, it was clear, took himself very
+seriously; for he now became morose and resentful, continuing to tolerate Jones
+only through a dogged urge to break down his wall of urbane and complacent
+incredulity. Wild tales and suggestions of rites and sacrifices to nameless elder
+gods continued, and now and then Rogers would lead his guest to one of the
+hideous blashphemies in the screen-off alcolve and point out features difficult to
+reconcile with even the finest human craftsmanship. Jones continued his visits
+through sheer fascination, though he knew he had forfeited his host's regards. At
+times he would humor Rogers with pretended assent to some mad hint or
+assertion, but the gaunt showman was seldom to be deceived by such tactics.
+
+The tension came to a head later in September. Jones had casually dropped into
+the museum one afternoon, and was wandering through the dim corridors
+whose horror were now so familiar, when he heard a very peculiar sound from
+the general direction of Rogers' workroom. Others heard it too, and started
+nervously as the echoes reverberated through the great vaulted basement. The
+three attendants exchanged odd glances; and one of them, a dark, taciturn,
+foreign-looking fellow who always served Rogers as a repairer and assistant
+designer, smiled in a way which seemed to puzzle his colleagues and which
+grated very harshly on some facet of Jones' sensibilities. It was the yelp or scream
+of a dog, and was such a sound as could be made only under conditions of the
+
+
+
+
+utmost fright and agony combined. Its stark, anguised frenzy was appalling to
+hear, and in this setting of grotesque abnormality it held a double hideousness.
+Jones remembered that no dogs were allowed in the museum.
+
+He was about to go to the door leading into the workroom, when the dark
+attendant stopped him with a word and a gesture. Mr. Rogers, the man said in a
+soft, somewhat accented voice at once apologetic and vaguely sardonic, was out,
+and there were standing orders to admit no one to the workroom during his
+absence. As for that yelp, it was undoubtedly something out in the courtyard
+behind the museum. This neighborhood was full of stray mongrels, and their
+fights were sometimes shockingly noisy. There were no dogs in any part of the
+museum. But if Mr. Jones wished to see Mr. Rogers he might find him just before
+closing-time.
+
+After this Jones climbed the old stone steps to the street outside and examined
+the squalid neighborhood curiously. The leaning, decrepit buildings-once
+dwellings but now largely shops and warehouses-were very ancient indeed.
+Some of them were of a gabled type seeming to go back to Tudor times, and a
+faint miasmatic stench hung subtly about the whole region. Beside the dingy
+house whose basement held the museum was a low archway pierced by a dark
+cobbled alley, and this Jones entered in a vague wish to find the courtyard
+behind the workroom and settle the affair of the dog comfortably in his mind.
+The courtyard was dim in the late afternoon light, hemmed in by rear walls even
+uglier and more intangibly menacing than the crumbling facades of the evil old
+houses. Not a dog was in sight, and Jones wondered how the aftermath of such a
+frantic turmoil could have completely vanished so soon.
+
+Despite the assistant's statement that no dog had been in the museum, Jones
+glanced nervously at the three small windows of the basement workroom-
+narrow, horizontal rectangles close to the grass-grown pavement, with grimy
+panes that stared repulsively and incuriously like the eyes of dead fish. To their
+left a worn flight of stairs led to an opaque and heavily bolted door. Some
+impulse urged him to crouch low on the damp, broken cobblestones and peer in,
+on the chance that the thick green shades, worked by long cords that hung down
+to a reachable level, might not be drawn. The outer surfaces were thick with dirt,
+but as he rubbed them with his handkerchief he saw there was no obscuring
+curtain in the way of his vision.
+
+So shadowed was the cellar from the inside that not much could be made out,
+but the grotesque working paraphernalia now and then loomed up spectrally as
+Jones tried each of the windows in turn. It seemed evident at first that no one
+was within; yet when he peered through the extreme right-hand window-the
+one nearest the entrance alley-he saw a glow of light at the farther end of the
+
+
+
+
+apartment which made him pause in bewilderment. There was no reason why
+any hght should be there. It was an inner side of the room, and he could not
+recall any gas or electric fixture near that point. Another look defined the glow as
+a large vertical rectangle, and a though occurred to him. It was in that direction
+that he had always noticed the heavy plank door with the abnormally large
+padlock-the door which was never opened, and above which was crudely
+smeared that hideous cryptic symbol from the fragmentary records of forbidden
+elder magic. It must be open now-and there was a light inside. All his former
+speculation as to where that door led, and as to what lay behind it, were now
+renewed with trebly disquieting force.
+
+Jones wandered aimlessly around the dismal locality till close to six o'clock,
+when he returned to the museum to make the call on Rogers. He could hardly
+tell why he wished so especially to see the man just then, but there must have
+been some subconscious misgivings about that terribly unplaceable canine
+scream of the afternnon, and about the glow of light in that disturbing and
+usually unopened inner doorway with the heavy padlock. The attendants were
+leaving as he arrived, and he thought that Orabona-the dark foreign-looking
+assistant-eyed him with something like sly, repressed amusement. He did not
+relish that look-even though he had seen the fellow turn it on his employer
+many times.
+
+The vaulted exhibition room was ghoulish in its desertion, but he strode quickly
+through it and rapped at the door of the office and workroom. Response was
+slow in coming, though there were footsteps inside. Finally, in response to a
+second knock, the lock rattled, and the ancient six-panelled portal creaked
+reluctantly open to reveal the slouching, feverish-eyed form of George Rogers.
+From the first it was clear that the showman was in an unusual mood. There was
+a curious mixture of reluctance and actual gloating in his welcome, and his talk
+at once veered to extravagances of the most hideous and incredible sort.
+
+Surviving elder gods-nameless sacrifices-the other than artificial nature of some
+of the alcove horrors-all the usual boasts, but uttered in a tone of peculiarly
+increasing confidence. Obviously, Jones reflected, the poor fellow's madness was
+gaining on him. From time to time Rogers would send furtive glances toward the
+heavy, padlocked inner door at the end of the room, or toward a piece of coarse
+burlap on the floor not far from it, beneath which some small object appeared to
+be lying. Jones grew more nervous as the moments passed, and began to feel as
+hesitant about mentioning the afternoon's oddities as he had formerly been
+anxious to do so.
+
+Rogers' sepulchrally resonant bass almost cracked under the excitement of his
+fevered rambling.
+
+
+
+
+"Do you remember/' he shouted, "what I told you about that ruined city in Indo-
+China where the Tcho-Tchos hved? You had to admit I'd been there when you
+saw the photographs, even if you did think I made that oblong swimmer in
+darkness out of wax. If you'd seen it writhing in the underground pools as I did.
+
+
+
+"Well, this is bigger still. I never told you about this, because I wanted to work
+out the later parts before making any claim. When you see the snapshots you'll
+know the geography couldn't have been faked, and I fancy I have another way of
+proving It isn't any waxed concoction of mine. You've never seen it, for the
+experiments wouldn't let me keep It on exhibition."
+
+The showman glanced queerly at the padlocked door.
+
+"It all comes from that long ritual in the eighth Pnakotic fragment. When I got it
+figured out I saw it could only have one meaning. There were things in the north
+before the land of Lomar-before mankind existed-and this was one of them. It
+took us all the way to Alaska, and up the Nootak from Fort Morton, but the thing
+was there as we knew it would be. Great cyclopean ruins, acres of them. There
+was less left than we had hoped for, but after three million years what could one
+expect? And weren't the Eskimo legends all in the right direction? We couldn't
+get one of the beggars to go with us, and had to sledge all the way back to Nome
+for Americans. Orabona was no good up in that climate-it made him sullen and
+hateful.
+
+"I'll tell you later how we found It. When we got the ice blasted out of the pylons
+of the central ruin the stairway was just as we knew it would be. Some carvings
+still there, and it was no trouble keeping the Yankees from following us in.
+Orabona shivered like a leaf-you'd never think it from the damned insolent way
+he struts around here. He knew enough of the Elder Lore to be properly afraid.
+The eternal light was gone, but our torches showed enough. We saw the bones of
+others who had been before us-aeons ago, when the climate was warm. Some of
+those bones were of things you couldn't even imagine. At the third level down
+we found the ivory throne the fragments said so much about-and I may as well
+tell you it wasn't empty.
+
+"The thing on the throne didn't move-and we knew then that It needed the
+nourishment of sacrifice. But we didn't want to wake It then. Better to get It to
+London first. Orabona and I went to the surface for the big box, but when we had
+packed it we couldn't get It up the three flights of steps. These steps weren't
+made for human beings, and their size bothered us. Anyway, it was devilish
+heavy. We had to have the Americans down to get It out. They weren't anxious
+to go into the place, but of course the worst thing was safely inside the box. We
+
+
+
+
+told them it was a batch of ivory carving-archeological stuff; and after seeing the
+carved throne they probably believed us. It's a wonder they didn't suspect
+hidden treasure and demand a share. They must have told queer tales around
+Nome later on; though I doubt if they ever went back to those ruins, even for the
+ivory throne."
+
+Rogers paused, felt around in his desk, and produced an envelope of good-sized
+photographic prints. Extracting one and laying it face down before him, he
+handed the rest to Jones. The set was certainly an odd one: ice-clad hills, dog
+sledges, men in furs, and vast tumbled ruins against a background of snow-ruins
+whose bizarre outlines and enormous stone blocks could hardly be accounted
+for. One flashlight view showed an incredible interior chamber with wild
+carvings and a curious throne whose proportions could not have been designed
+for a human occupant. The carvings of the gigantic masonry-high walls and
+peculiar vaulting overhead-were mainly symbolic, and involved both wholly
+unknown designs and certain hieroglyphs darkly cited in obscene legends. Over
+the throne loomed the same dreadful symbol which was now painted on the
+workroom wall above the padlocked plank door. Jones darted a nervous glance
+at the closed portal. Assuredly, Rogers had been to strange places and had seen
+strange things. Yet this mad interior picture might easily be a fraud-taken from a
+very clever stage setting. One must not be too credulous. But Rogers was
+continuing:
+
+"Well, we shipped the box from Nome and got to London without any trouble.
+That was the first time we'd ever brought back anything that had a chance of
+coming alive. I didn't put It on display, because there were more important
+things to do for It. It needed the nourishment of sacrifice, for It was a god. Of
+course I couldn't get It the sort of sacrifices which It used to have in Its day, for
+such things don't exist now. But there were other things which might do. The
+blood is the life, you know. Even the lemures and elementals that are older than
+the earth will come when the blood of men or beasts is offered under the right
+conditions."
+
+The expression on the narrator's face was growing very alarming and repulsive,
+so that Jones fidgeted involuntarily in his chair. Rogers seemed to notice his
+guest's nervousness, and continued with a distinctly evil smile.
+
+"It was last year that I got It, and ever since then I've been trying rites and
+sacrifices. Orabona hasn't been much help, for he was always against the idea of
+waking It. He hates It-probably because he's afraid of what It will come to mean.
+He carries a pistol all the time to protect himself-fool, as if there were human
+protection against It! If I ever see him draw that pistol, I'll strangle him. He
+wanted me to kill It and make an effigy of It. But I've stuck by my plans, and I'm
+
+
+
+
+coming out on top in spite of all the cowards like Orabona and damned
+sniggering skeptics like you, Jones! I've chanted the rites and made certain
+sacrifices, and last week the transition came. The sacrifice was-received and
+enjoyed!"
+
+Rogers actually licked his lips, while Jones held himsef uneasily rigid. The
+showman paused and rose, crossing the room to the piece of burlap at which he
+had glanced so often. Bending down, he took hold of one corner as he spoke
+again.
+
+"You've laughed enough at my work-now it's time for you to get some facts.
+Orabona tells me you heard a dog screaming around here this afternoon. Do you
+know what that meant?"
+
+Jones started. For all his curiousity he would have been glad to get out without
+further light on the point which had so puzzled him. But Rogers was inexorable,
+and began to lift the square of burlap. Beneath it lay a crushed, almost shapeless
+mass which Jones was slow to classify. Was it a once-living thing which some
+agency had flattened, sucked dry of blood, punctured in a thousand places, and
+wrung into a limp, broken-boned heap of grotesqeness? After a moment Jones
+realized what it must be. It was what was left of a dog-a dog, perhaps of
+considerable size and whitish color. Its breed was past recognition, for distortion
+had come in nameless and hideous ways. Most of the hair was burned off as by
+some pungent acid, and the exposed, bloodless skin was riddled by innumerable
+circular wounds or incisions. The form of torture necessary to cause such results
+was past imagining.
+
+Electrified with a pure loathing which conquered his mounting disgust, Jones
+sprang with a cry.
+
+"You damned sadist-you madman-you do a thing like this and dare to speak to
+a decent man!"
+
+Rogers dropped the burlap with a malignant sneer and faced his oncoming
+guest. His words held an unnatural calm.
+
+"Why, you fool, do you think I did this? What of it? It is not human and does not
+pretend to be. To sacrifice is merely to offer. I gave the dog to It. What happened
+is It's work, not mine. It needed the nourishment of the offering, and took it in Its
+own way. But let me show you what It looks like."
+
+As Jones stood hesitating, the speaker had returned to his desk and took up the
+photograph he had laid face down without showing. Now he extended it with a
+
+
+
+
+curious look. Jones took it and glanced at in in an almost mechanical way. After a
+moment the visitor's glance became sharper and more absorbed, for the utterly
+Satanic force of the object depicted had an almost hypnotic effect. Certainly,
+Rogers had outdone himself in modeling the eldritch nightmare which the
+camera had caught. The thing was a work of sheer, infernal genius, and Jones
+wondered how the public would react when it was placed on exhibition. So
+hideous a thing had no right to exist-probably the mere contemplation of it, after
+it was done, had completed the unhinging of its maker's mind and led him to
+worship it with brutal sacrifices. Only a stout sanity could resist the insidious
+suggestion that the blasphemy was-or had once been-some morbid and exotic
+form of actual life.
+
+The thing in the picture squatted or was balanced on what appeared to be a
+clever reproduction of the monstrously carved throne in the other curious
+photograph. To describe it with any ordinary vocabulary would be impossible,
+for nothing even roughly corresponding to it has ever come within the
+imagination of sane mankind. It represented something meant perhaps to be
+roughly connected with the vertebrates of this planet-though one could not be
+too sure of that. Its bulk was cyclopean, for even squatted it towered to almost
+twice the height of Orabona, who was shown beside it. Looking sharply, one
+might trace its approximations toward the bodily features of the higher
+vertebrates.
+
+There was an almost globular torso, with six long, sinuous limbs terminating in
+crab-like claws. From the upper end a subsidiary globe bulged forth bubble-like;
+its triangle of three staring, fishy eyes, its foot-long and evidently flexible
+proboscis, and a distended lateral system analogous to gills, suggesting that it
+was a head. Most of the body was covered with what at first appeared to be fur,
+but which on closer examination proved to be a dense growth of dark, slender
+tentacles or sucking filaments, each tipped with a mouth suggesting the head of
+an asp. On the head and below the proboscis the tentacles tended to be longer
+and thicker, marked with spiral stripes-suggesting the traditional serpent-locks
+of Medusa. To suggest that such a thing could have an expression seems
+paradoxical; yet Jones felt that that triangle of bulging fish eyes and that
+obliquely poised proboscis all bespoke a blend of hate, greed and sheer cruelty
+incomprehensible to mankind because it was mixed with other emotions not of
+the world or this solar system. Into this bestial abnormality, he reflected, Rogers
+must have poured at once all his malignant insanity and all his uncanny
+sculptural genius. The thing was incredible-and yet the photograph proved that
+it existed.
+
+Rogers interrupted his reveries.
+
+
+
+
+"Well-what do you think of It? Now do you wonder what crushed the dog and
+sucked it dry with a milHon mouths? It needed nourishment-and It will need
+more. It is a god, and I am the first priest of Its latter-day hierarchy. la! Shub-
+Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!"
+
+Jones lowered the photograph in disgust and pity.
+
+"See here, Rogers, this won't do. There are limits, you know. It's a great piece of
+work, and all that, but it isn't good for you. Better not see it any more-let
+Orabona break it up, and try to forget about it. And let me tear this beastly
+picture up, too."
+
+With a snarl, Rogers snatched the photograph and returned it to the desk.
+
+"Idiot-you-and you still think It's a fraud! You still think I made It, and you still
+think my figures are nothing but lifeless wax! Why, damn you, you're going to
+know. Not just now, for It is resting after the sacrifice-but later. Oh, yes-you will
+not doubt the power of It then."
+
+As Rogers glanced toward the padlocked inner door Jones retrieved his hat and
+stick from a near-by bench.
+
+"Very well, Rogers, let it be later. I must be going now, but I'll call round
+tomorrow afternoon. Think my advice over and see if it doesn't sound sensible.
+Ask Orabona what he thinks, too."
+
+Rogers bared his teeth in wild-beast fashion.
+
+"Must be going now, eh? Afraid, after all! Afraid, for all your bold talk! You say
+the effigies are only wax, and yet you run away when I begin to prove that they
+aren't. You're like the fellows who take my standing bet that they daren't spend
+the night in the museum-they come boldly enough, but after an hour they shriek
+and hammer to get out! Want me to ask Orabona, eh? You two-always against
+me! You want to break down the coming earthly reign of It!"
+
+Jones preserved his calm.
+
+"No, Rogers-there's nobody against you. And I'm not afraid of your figures,
+either, much as I admire your skill. But we're both a bit nervous tonight, and I
+fancy some rest will do us good."
+
+Again Rogers checked his guest's departure.
+
+
+
+
+"Not afraid, eh?-then why are you so anxious to go? Look here-do you or don't
+you dare to stay alone here in the dark? What's your hurry if you don't beheve in
+It?"
+
+Some new idea seemed to have struck Rogers, and Jones eyed him closely.
+
+"Why, I've no special hurry-but what would be gained by my staying here
+alone? What would it prove? My only objection is that it isn't very comfortable
+for sleeping. What good would it do either of us?"
+
+This time it was Jones who was struck with an idea. He continued in a tone of
+conciliation.
+
+"See here, Rogers-I've just asked you what it would prove if I stayed, when we
+both knew. It would prove that your effigies are just effigies, and that you
+oughtn't to let your imagination go the way it's been going lately. Suppose I do
+stay. If I stick it out till morning, will you agree to take a new view of things-go
+on a vacation for three months or so and let Orabona destroy that new thing of
+yours? Come, now-isn't that fair?"
+
+The expression on the showman's face was hard to read. It was obvious that he
+was thinking quickly, and that of sundry conflicting emotions, malign triumph
+was getting the upper hand. His voice held a choking quality as he replied.
+
+"Fair enough! If you do stick it out, I'll take your advice. We'll go out for dinner
+and come back. I'll lock you in the display room and go home. In the morning I'll
+come down ahead of Orabona-he comes half an hour before the rest-and see
+how you are. But don't try it unless you are very sure of your skepticism. Others
+have backed out-you have that chance. And I suppose a pounding on the outer
+door would always bring a constable. You may not like it so well after a while-
+you'U be in the same building, though not in the same room with It."
+
+As they left the rear door into the dingy courtyard, Rogers took with him the
+piece of burlap-weighted with a gruesome burden. Near the center of the court
+was a manhole, whose cover the showman lifted quietly, and with a
+shuddersome suggestion of familiarity. Burlap and all, the burden went down to
+the oblivion of a cloacal labyrinth. Jones shuddered, and almost shrank from the
+gaunt figure at his side as they emerged into the street.
+
+By unspoken mutual consent, they did not dine together, but agreed to meet in
+front of the museum at eleven.
+
+Jones hailed a cab, and breathed more freely when he had crossed Waterloo
+Bridge and was approaching the brilliantly lighted Strand. He dined at a quite
+
+
+
+
+cafe, and subsequently went to his home in Portland Place to bathe and get a few
+things. Idly he wondered what Rogers was doing. He had heard that the man
+had a vast, dismal house in the Walworth Road, full of obscure and forbidden
+books, occult paraphernalia, and wax images which he did not choose to place
+on exhibition. Orabona, he understood, lived in separate quarters in the same
+house.
+
+At eleven Jones found Rogers waiting by the basement door in Southwark Street.
+Their words were few, but each seemed taut with a menacing tension. They
+agreed that the vaulted exhibition room alone should form the scene of the vigil,
+and Rogers did not insist that the watcher sit in the special adult alcove of
+supreme horrors. The showman, having extinguished all the lights with switches
+in the workroom, locked the door of that crypt with one of the keys on his
+crowded ring. Without shaking hands he passed out the street door, locked it
+after him, and passed up the worn steps to the sidewalk outside. As his tread
+receded, Jones realized that the long, tedious vigil had commenced.
+
+
+
+Later, in the utter blackness of the great arched cellar, Jones cursed the childish
+naivete which had brought him there. For the first half-hour he had kept flashing
+his pocket-light at intervals, but now just sitting in the dark on one of the visitor's
+benches had become a more nerve-wracking thing. Every time the beam shot out
+it lighted up some morbid, grotesque object-a guillotine, a nameless hybrid
+monster, a pasty-bearded face crafty with evil, a body with red torrents
+streaming from a severed throat. Jones knew that no sinister reality was attached
+to these things, but after that first half-hour he preferred not to see them.
+
+Why he had bothered to humor that madman he could scarcely imagine. It
+would have been much simpler merely to have let him alone, or to have called in
+a mental specialist. Probably, he reflected, it was the fellow-feeling of one artist
+for another. There was so much genius in Rogers that he deserved every possible
+chance to be helped quietly out of his growing mania. Any man who could
+imagine and construct the incredibly life-like things that he had produced was
+not far from actual greatness. He had the fancy of a Sime or a Dore joined to the
+minute, scientific craftsmanship of a Blatschka. Indeed, he had done for the
+world of nightmare what the Blatschkas with their marvelously accurate plant
+models of finely wrought and coloured glass had done for the world of botany.
+
+At midnight the strokes of a distant clock filtered through the darkness, and
+Jones felt cheered by the message from a still-surviving outside world. The
+vaulted museum chamber was like a tomb-ghastly in its utter solitude. Even a
+mouse would be cheering company; yet Rogers had once boasted that-for
+
+
+
+
+"certain reasons/' as he said-no mice or even insects ever came near the place.
+That was very curious, yet it seemed to be true. The deadness and silence were
+virtually complete. If only something would make a sound! He shuffled his feet,
+and the echoes came spectrally out of the absolute stillness. He coughed, but
+there was something mocking in the staccato reverberations. He could not, he
+vowed, begin talking to himself. That meant nervous disintergration. Time
+seemed to pass with abnormal and disconcerting slowness. He could have sworn
+that hours had elapsed since he last flashed the light on his watch, yet here was
+only the stroke of midnight.
+
+He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen. Something in the
+darkness and stillness seemed to have sharpened them, so that they responded to
+faint intimations hardly strong enough to be called true impressions. His ears
+seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive susurrus which could not quite be
+identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalid streets outside, and he thought
+of vague, irrelevant things like the music of the spheres and the unknown,
+inaccessible life of alien dimensions pressing on our own. Rogers often
+speculated about such things.
+
+The floating specks of light in his blackness-drowned eyes seemed inclined to
+take on curious symmetries of pattern and motion. He had often wondered about
+those strange rays from the unplumbed abyss which scintillate before us in the
+absence of all earthly illumination, but he had never known any that behaved
+just as these were behaving. They lacked the restful aimlessness of ordinary
+light-specks-suggesting some will and purpose remote from any terrestrial
+conception.
+
+Then there was that suggestion of odd stirrings. Nothing was open, yet in spite
+of the general draftlessness Jones felt that the air was not uniformly quiet. There
+were intangible variations in pressure-not quite decided enough to suggest the
+loathsome pawings of unseen elementals. It was abnormally chilly, too. He did
+not like any of this. The air tested salty, as if it were mixed with the brine of dark
+subterrene waters, and there was a bare hint of some odor of ineffable mustiness.
+In the daytime he had never noticed that the waxen figures had an odor. Even
+now that half-received hint was not the way wax figures ought to smell. It was
+more like the faint smell of specimens in a natural-history museum. Curious, in
+view of Rogers' claims that his figures were not all artificial-indeed, it was
+probably that claim which made one's imagination conjure up the olfactory
+suspicion. One must guard against excesses of imagination-had not such things
+driven poor Rogers mad?
+
+But the utter loneliness of this place was frightful. Even the distant chimes
+seemed to come from across cosmic gulfs. It made Jones think of that insane
+
+
+
+
+picture which Rogers had showed him-the wildly carved chamber with the
+cryptic throne which the fellow had claimed was part of a three-million-year-old
+ruin in the shunned and inaccessible solitudes of the Arctic. Perhaps Rogers had
+been to Alaska, but that picture was certainly nothing but stage scenery. It
+couldn't normally be otherwise, with all that carving and those terrible symbols.
+And that monstrous shape supposed to have been found on that throne-what a
+flight of diseased fancy! Jones wondered just how far he actually was from the
+insane masterpiece in wax-probably it was kept behind that heavy, padlocked
+plank door leading somewhere out of the workroom. But it would never do to
+brood about a waxen image. Was not the present room full of such things, some
+of them scarcely less horrible than the dreadful "IT"? And beyond a thin canvas
+screen on the left was the "Adults only" alcove with its nameless phantoms of
+delerium.
+
+The proximity of the numberless waxen shapes began to get on Jones' nerves
+more and more as the quarter-hours wore on. He knew the museum so well that
+he could not get rid of their usual images even in the total darkness. Indeed, the
+darkness had the effect of adding to the remembered images certain very
+disturbing imginative overtones. The guillotine seemed to creak, and the bearded
+face of Landru-slayer of his fifty wives-twisted itself into expressions of
+monstrous menace. From the severed throat of Madame Demers a hideous
+bubbling sound seemed to emanate, while the headless, legless victim of a trunk
+murder tried to edge closer and closer on its gory stumps. Jones began shutting
+his eyes to see if that would dim the images, but found it was useless. Besides,
+when he shut his eyes the strange, purposeful patterns of light-specks became
+more disturbingly pronounced.
+
+Then suddenly he began trying to keep the hideous images he had formerly been
+trying to banish. He tried to keep them because they were giving place to still
+more hideous ones. In spite of himself his memory began reconstructing the
+utterly non-human blasphemies that lurked in the obscurer corners, and these
+lumpish hybrid growths oozed and wriggled toward him as though huting him
+down in a circle. Black Tsathoggua molded itself from a toad-like gargoyle to a
+long, sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet, and a lean, rubbery night-
+gaunt spread its wings as if to advance and smother the watcher. Jones braced
+himself to keep from screaming. He knew he was reverting to the traditional
+terrors of his childhood, and resolved to use his adult reason to keep the
+phantoms at bay. It helped a bit, he found, to flash the light again. Frightful as
+were the images it showed, these were not as bad as what his fancy called out of
+the utter blackness.
+
+But there were drawbacks. Even in the light of his torch he could not help
+suspecting a slight, furtive trembling on the part of the canvas partition
+
+
+
+
+screening off the terrible "Adults only" alcove. He knew what lay beyond, and
+shivered. Imagination called up the shocking forms of fabulous Yog-Sothoth-
+only a congeries of iridescent globes, yet stupendous in its malign
+suggestiveness. What was this accursed mass slowly floating toward him and
+bumping on the partition that stood in the way? A small bulge in the canvas far
+to the right suggested the sharp horn of Gnoph-keh, the hairy myth-thing of the
+Greenland ice, that walked sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, and
+sometimes on six. To get this stuff out of his head Jones walked boldly toward
+the hellish alcove with torch burning steadily. Of course, none of his fears was
+true. Yet were not the long, facial tentalces of great Cthulhu actually swaying,
+slowly and insidiously? He knew they were flexible, but he had not realised that
+the draft caused by his advance was enough to set them in motion.
+
+Returning to his former seat outside the alcove, he shut his eyes and let the
+symmetrical light-specks do their worst. The distant clock boomed a single
+stroke. Could it be only one? He flashed the light on his watch and saw that it
+was precisely that hour. It would be hard indeed waiting for the morning. Rogers
+would be down at about eight o'clock, ahead of even Orabona. It would be light
+outside in the main basement long before that, but none of it could penetrate
+here. All the windows in this basement had been bricked up but the three small
+ones facing the court. A pretty bad wait, all told.
+
+His ears were getting most of the hallucinations now-for he could swear he
+heard stealthy, plodding footsteps in the workroom beyond the closed and
+locked door. He had no business thinking of that unexhibited horror which
+Rogers called "It." The thing was a contamination-it had driven its maker mad,
+and now even its picture was calling up imaginative terrors. It was very
+obviously beyond that padlocked door of heavy planking. Those steps were
+certainly pure imagination.
+
+Then he thought he heard the key turn in the workroom door. Flashing on his
+torch, he saw nothing but the ancient six-paneled portla in its proper position.
+Again he tried darkness and closed his eyes, but there followed a harrowing
+illusion of creaking-not the guillotine this time, but the slow, furtive opening of
+the workroom door. He would not scream. Once he screamed, he would be lost.
+There was a sort of padding or shuffling audible now, and it was slowly
+advancing toward him. He must retain command of himself. Had he not done so
+when the nameless brain-shaped tried to close in on him? The shuffling crept
+nearer, and his resolution failed. He did not scream but merely gulped out a
+challenge.
+
+"Who goes there? Who are you? What do you want?"
+
+
+
+
+There was no answer, but the shuffling kept on. Jones did not know which he
+feared most to do-turn on his flashhght or stay in the dark while the thing crept
+upon him. This thing was different, he felt profoundly, from the other terrors of
+the evening. His fingers and throat worked spasmodically. Silence was
+impossible, and the suspense of utter blackness was beginning to be the most
+intolerable of all conditions. Again he cried out hysterically-"Halt! Who goes
+there?"-as he switched on the revealing beam of his torch. Then, paralyzed by
+what he saw, he dropped the flashlight and screamed-not once but many times.
+
+Shuffling toward him in the darkness was the gigantic, blasphemous form of a
+black thing not wholly ape and not wholly insect. Its hide hung loosely upon its
+frame, and its rugose, dead-eyed rudiment of a head swayed drunkenly from
+side to side. Its forepaws were extended, with talons spread wide, and its whole
+body was taut with murderous malignity despite its utter lack of facial
+expression. After the screams and the final coming of darkness it leaped, and in a
+moment had Jones pinned to the floor. There was no struggle for the watcher had
+fainted.
+
+Jones' fainting spell could not have lasted more than a moment, for the nameless
+thing was apishly dragging him through the darkness when he began recovering
+consciousness. What started him fully awake were the sounds which the thing
+was making-or rather, the voice with which it was making them. That voice was
+human, and it was familiar. Only one living being could be behind the hoarse,
+feverish accents which were chanting to an unknown horror.
+
+"la! la!" it was howling. "I am coming, O Rhan-Tegoth, coming with the
+nourishment. You have waited long and fed ill, but now you shall have what
+was promised. That and more, for instead of Orabona it will be one of high
+degree who has doubted you. You shall crush and drain him, with all his doubts,
+and grow strong thereby. And ever after among men he shall be shown as a
+monument to your glory. Rhan-Tegoth, infinite and invincible, I am your slave
+and high-priest. You are hungry, and I shall provide. I read the sign and have led
+you forth. I shall feed you with blood, and you shall feed me with power. la!
+Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!"
+
+In an instant all the terrors of the night dropped from Jones like a discarded
+cloak. He was again master of his mind, for he knew the very earthly and
+material peril he had to deal with. This was no monster of fable, but a dangerous
+madman. It was Rogers, dressed in some nightmare covering of his own insane
+designing, and about to make a frightful sacrifice to the devil-god he had
+fashioned out of wax. Clearly, he must have entered the workroom from the read
+courtyard, donned his disguise, and then advance to seize his neatly-trapped and
+fear-broken victim. His strength was prodigious, and if he was to be thwarted.
+
+
+
+
+one must act quickly. Counting on the madman's confidence in his
+unconsciousness he determined to take him by surprise, while his grip was
+relatively lax. The feel of a threshold told him he was crossing into the pitch-
+black workroom.
+
+With the strength of mortal fear Jones made a sudden spring from the half-
+recumbent posture in which he was being dragged. For an instant he was free of
+the astonished maniac's hands, and in another instant a lucky lunge in the dark
+had put his own hands at his captor's weirdly concealed throat. Simultaneously
+Rogers gripped him again, and without further preliminaries the two were
+locked in a desperate struggle of life and death. Jones' athletic training, without
+doubt, was his sole salvation; for his mad assailant, freed from every inhibition
+of fair play, decency, or even self-preservation, was an engine of savage
+destruction as formidable as a wolf or panther.
+
+Guttural cries sometimes punctured the hideous tussle in the dark. Blood
+spurted, clothing ripped, and Jones at last felt the actual throat of the maniac,
+shorn of its spectral mask. He spoke not a word, but put every ounce of energy
+into the defence of his life. Rogers kicked, gouged, butted, bit, clawed, and spat-
+yet found strength to yelp out actual sentences at times. Most of his speech was
+in a ritualistic jargon full of references to "It" or "Rhan-Tegoth," and to Jones'
+overwrought nerves it seemed as if the cries echoed from an infinite distance of
+demoniac snortics and hayings. Toward the last they were rolling on the floor,
+overturning benches or striking against the walls and the brick foundations of
+the central melting-furnace. Up to the very end Jones could not be certain of
+saving himself, but chance finally intervened in his favor. A jab of his knee
+against Rogers' chest produced a general relaxation, and a moment later he knew
+he had won.
+
+Though hardly able to hold himself up, Jones rose and stumbled about the walls
+seeking the light-switch-for his flashlight was gone, together with most of his
+clothing. As he lurched along he dragged his limp opponent with him, fearing a
+sudden attack when the madman came to. Finding the switch-box, he fumbled
+till he had the right handle. Then, as the wildly disordered workroom burst into
+sudden radiance, he set about binding Rogers with such cords and belts as he
+could easily find. The fellow's disguise-or what was left of it-seemed to be made
+of a puzzling queer sort of leather. For some reason it made Jones' flesh crawl to
+touch it, and there seemed to be an alien, rusty odor about it. In the normal
+clothes beneath it was Rogers' key-ring, and this the exhausted victor seized as
+his final passport to freedom. The shades at the small, slit-like windows were all
+securely drawn, and he let them remain so.
+
+
+
+
+Washing off the blood of battle at a convenient sink, Jones donned the most
+ordinary-looking and least ill-fitting clothes he could find on the costume hooks.
+Testing the door to the courtyard, he found it fastened with a spring-lock which
+did not require a key from the inside. He kept the key-ring, however, to admit
+him on his return with aid-for plainly, the thing to do was to call in an alienist.
+There was no telephone in the museum, but it would not take long to find an all-
+night restaurant or chemist's shop where one could be had. He had almost
+opened the door when a torrent of hideous abuse from across the room told him
+that Rogers-whose visible injuries were confined to a long, deep scratch down
+the left cheek-had regained consciousness.
+
+"Fool! Spawn of Noth-Yidik and effluvium of K'thun! Son of the dogs that howl
+in the maelstrom of Azathoth! You would have been sacred and immortal, and
+now you are betraying It and Its priest! Beware-for It is hungry! It would have
+been Orabona-that damned treacherous dog ready to turn against me and It-but
+I give you the honor instead. Now you must both beware, for It is not gentle
+without Its priest.
+
+"la! la! Vengeance is at hand! Do you know you would have been immortal?
+Look at the furnace! There is a fire ready to light, and there is wax in the kettle. I
+would have done with you as I have done with other once living forms. Hei!
+You, who have vowed all my effigies are waxen, would have become a waxen
+effigy yourself! The furnace was already! When It had had its fill, and you were
+like that dog I showed you, I would have made your flattened, punctured
+fragments immortal! Wax would have done it. Haven't you said I'm a great
+artist? Wax in every pore-wax over every square inch of you-Ia! la! And ever
+after the world would have looked at your mangled carcass and wondered how I
+ever imagined and made such a thing! Hei! and Orabona would have come next,
+and others after him-and thus would my waxen family have grown!
+
+"Dog-do you still thing I made all my effigies? Why not say preserved? You
+know by this time the strange places I've been to, and the strange things I've
+brought back. Coward-you could never face the dimensional shambler whose
+hide I put on to scare you-the mere sight of it alive, or even the full-fledged
+thought of it, would kill you instantly with fright! la! la! It waits hungry for the
+blood that is the life!"
+
+Rogers, propped against the wall, swayed to and fro in his bonds.
+
+"See here, Jones-if I let you go will you let me go? It must be taken care of by Its
+high priest. Orabona will be enough to keep It alive-and when he is finished I
+will make his fragments immortal in wax for the world to see. It could have been
+you, but you have rejected the honor. I won't bother you again. Let me go, and I
+
+
+
+
+will share with you the power that It will bring me. la! la! Great is Rhan-Tegoth!
+Let me go! Let me go! It is starving down there beyond that door, and if It dies
+the Old Ones can never come back. Hei! Hei! Let me go!"
+
+Jones merely shook his head, though the hideousness of the showman's
+imaginings revolted him. Rogers, now staring wildly at the padlocked plank
+door, thumped his head again and again against the brick wall and kicked with
+his tightly bound ankles. Jones was afraid he would injure himself, and
+advanced to bind him more firmly to some stationary object. Writhing, Rogers
+edged away from him and set up a series of frenetic ululations whose utter,
+monstrous unhumanness was appalling, and whose sheer volume was almost
+incredible. It seemed impossible that any human throat could produce noises so
+loud and piercing, and Jones felt that if this continued there would be no need to
+telephone for aid. It could not be long before a constable would investigate, even
+granting that there were no listening neighbors in this deserted warehouse
+district.
+
+"Wza-y'ei! Wza-y'ei!" howled the madman. "Y'kaa haa ho-ii, Rhan-Tegoth-
+Cthulhu fthagn-Ei! Ei! Ei! Ei!-Rhan-Teogth. Rhan-Tegoth, Rhan-Tegoth!"
+
+The tautly trussed creature, who had started squirming his way across the
+littered floor, now reached the padlocked plank door and commenced knocking
+his head thunderously against it. Jones dreaded the task of binding him further,
+and wished he were not so exhausted from his previous struggle. This violent
+aftermath was getting hideously on his nerves, and he began to feel a return of
+the nameless qualms he had felt in the dark. Everything about Rogers and his
+museum was so hellishly morbid and suggestive of black vistas beyond life! It
+was loathsome to think of the waxen masterpiece of abnormal genius which
+must at this very moment be lurking close at hand in the blackness beyond the
+heavy, padlocked door.
+
+At now something happened which sent an addition chill down Jones' spine, and
+caused every hair-even the tiny growth on the backs of his hands-to bristle with
+a vague fright beyond classification. Rogers had suddenly stopped screaming
+and beating his head against the stout plank door, and was straining up to a
+sitting position, head cocked on one side as if listening intently for something.
+All at once a smile of devilish triumph overspread his face, and he began
+speaking intelligibly again-this time in a hoarse whisper contrasting oddly with
+his former stentorian howling.
+
+"Listen, fool! Listen hard! It has heard me, and is coming. Can't you hear It
+splashing out of Its tank down there at the end of the runway? I dug it deep,
+because there was nothing too good for It. It is amphibious, you know-you saw
+
+
+
+
+the gills in the picture. It came to the earth from lead-gray Yuggoth, where the
+cities are under the warm deep sea. It can't stand up in there-too tail-has to sit
+down or crouch. Let me get my keys-we must let It out and kneel down before it.
+Then we will go out and find a dog or cat-or perhaps a drunken man-to give It
+the nourishment It needs."
+
+It was not what the madman said, but the way he said it, that disorganized Jones
+so badly. The utter, insane confidence and sincerity in that crazed whisper were
+damnably contagious. Imagination, such a stimulus, could find an active menace
+in the devilish wax figure that lurked unseen just beyond the heavy planking.
+Eyeing the door in unholy fascination, Jones notices that it bore several distinct
+cracks, though no marks of violent treatment were visible on this side. He
+wondered how large a room or closet lay behind it, and how the waxen figure
+was arranged. The maniac's idea of a tank and runway was as clever as all his
+other imaginings.
+
+Then, in one terrible instant, Jones completely lost the power to draw a breath.
+The leather belt he had seized for Rogers' further strapping fell from his limp
+hands, and a spasm of shivering convulsed him from head to foot. He might
+have known the place would drive him mad as it had driven Rogers-and now he
+was mad. He was mad, for he now harbored hallucinations more weird than any
+which had assailed him earlier that night. The madman was bidding him hear
+the splashing of a mythical monster in a tank beyond the door-and now, God
+help him, he did hear it!
+
+Rogers saw the spasm of horror reach Jones' face and transform it to a staring
+mask of fear. He cackled.
+
+"At last, fool, you believe! At last you know! You hear It and It comes! Get me
+my keys, fool-we must do homage and serve It!"
+
+But Jones was past paying attention to any human words, mad or sane. Phobic
+paralysis held him immobile and half conscious, with wild images racing
+fantasmagorically though his helpless imagination. There was a splashing. There
+was padding or shuffling, as of great wet paws on a solid surface. Something was
+approaching. Into his nostrils, from the cracks in that nightmare plank door,
+poured a noisome animal stench like and yet unlike that of the mammal cages at
+the zoological gardens in Regent's Park.
+
+He did not known where Rogers was talking or not. Everything real had faded
+away, and he was a statue obsessed with dreams and hallucinations so unnatural
+that they became almost objective and remote from him. He thought he heard a
+sniffing or snorting from the unknown gulf beyond the door, and when a sudden
+
+
+
+
+baying, trumpeting noise assailed his ears he could not feel sure that it came
+from the tightly bound maniac whose image swam uncertainly in his shaken
+vision. The photograph of that accursed, unseen wax thing persisted in floating
+through his consciousness. Such a thing had no right to exist. Had it not driven
+him mad?
+
+Even as he reflected, a fresh evidence of madness beset him. Something, he
+thought, was fumbling with the latch of the heavy padlocked door. It was patting
+and pawing and pushing at the planks. There was a thudding on the stout wood,
+which grew louder and louder. The stench was horrible. And now the assault on
+that door from the inside was a malign, determined pounding like the strokes of
+a battering-ram. There was an ominous cracking-a splintering-a welling fetor-a
+falling plank-a black paw ending in a crab-like claw. . . .
+
+"Help! Help! God help me! . . . Aaaaaaa! . . ."
+
+With intense effort Jones is today able to recall a sudden bursting of his fear-
+paralysis into the liberation of frenzied automatic flight. What he evidently did
+must have paralleled curiously the wild, plunging flights of maddest nightmares;
+for he seems to have leaped across the disordered crypt at almost a single bound,
+yanked open the outside door, which closed and locked itself after him with a
+clatter, sprung up the worn stone steps three at a time, and raced frantically and
+aimlessly out of that dark cobblestoned court and through the squalid streets of
+Southwark.
+
+Here the memory ends. Jones does not know how he got home, and there is no
+evidence of his having hired a cab. Probably he raced all the way by blind
+instinct-over Waterloo Bridge, along the Strand and Charing Cross and up
+Haymarket and Regent Street to his own neighborhood. He still had on the queer
+melange of museum costumes when he grew conscious enough to call the
+doctor.
+
+A week later the nerve specialists allowed him to leave his bed and walk in the
+open air.
+
+But he had not told the specialists much. Over his whole experience hung a pall
+of madness and nightmare, and he felt that silence was the only course. When he
+was up, he scanned intently all the papers which had accumulated since that
+hideous night, but found no reference to anything queer at the museum. How
+much, after all, had been reality? Where did reality end and morbid dream
+begin? Had his mind gone wholly to pieces in that dark exhibition chamber, and
+had the whole fight with Rogers been a fantasm of fever? It would help to put
+him on his feet if he could settle some of these maddening points. He must have
+
+
+
+
+seen that damnable photograph of the wax image called "It," for no brain but
+Rogers' could ever have conceived such a blasphemy.
+
+It was a fortnight before he dared to enter Southwark Street again. He went in
+the middle of the morning, when there was the greatest amount of sane,
+wholesome activity around the ancient, crumbling shops and warehouses. The
+museum's sign was still there, and as he approached he saw that the place was
+still open. The gateman nodded in pleasant recognition as he summoned up the
+courage to enter, and in the vaulted chamber below an attendant touched his cap
+cheerfully. Perhaps everything had been a dream. Would he dare to knock at the
+door of the workroom and look for Rogers?
+
+Then Orabona advanced to greet him. His dark, sleek face was a trifle sardonic,
+but Jones felt that he was not unfriendly. He spoke with a trace of accent.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Jones. It is some time since we have seen you here. Did you
+wish Mr. Rogers? I'm sorry, but he is away. He had word of business in America,
+and had to go. Yes, it was very sudden. I am in charge now-here, and at the
+house. I try to maintain Mr. Rogers' high standard-till he is back."
+
+The foreigner smiled-perhaps from affability alone. Jones scarcely knew how to
+reply, but managed to mumble out a few inquiries about the day after his last
+visit. Orabona seemed greatly amused by the questions, and took considerable
+care in framing his replies.
+
+"Oh, yes, Mr. Jones-the 28th of last month. I remember it for many reasons. In
+the morning-before Mr. Rogers got here, you understand-I found the workroom
+in quite a mess. There was a great deal of-cleaning up-to do. There had been-
+late work, you see. Important new specimen given its secondary baking process.
+I took complete charge when I came.
+
+"It was a hard specimen to prepare-but of course Mr. Rogers had taught me a
+great deal. He is, as you know, a very great artist. When he came he helped me
+complete the specimen-helped very materially, I assure you-but he left soon
+without even greeting the men. As I tell you, he was called away suddenly.
+There were important chemical reactions involved. They made loud noises-in
+fact, some teamsters in the court outside fancy they heard several pistol shots-
+very amusing idea!
+
+"As for the new specimen-that matter is very unforutnate. It is a great
+masterpiece-designed and made, you understand, by Mr. Rogers. He will see
+about it when he gets back."
+
+
+
+
+Again Orabona smiled.
+
+"The police, you know. We put it on display a week ago, and there were two or
+three faintings. One poor fellow had an epileptic fit in front of it. You see, it a
+trifle-stronger-than the rest. Larger, for one thing. Of course, it was in the adult
+alcove. The next day a couple of men from Scotland Yard looked it over and said
+it was too morbid to be shown. Said we'd have to remove it. It was a tremendous
+shame-such a masterpiece of art-but I didn't deel justified in appealing to the
+courts in Mr. Rogers' absence. He would not like so much publicity with the
+police now-but when he gets back-when he gets back-."
+
+For some reason or other Jones felt a mounting tide of uneasiness and repulsion.
+But Orabona was continuing.
+
+"You are a connoisseur, Mr. Jones. I am sure I violate no law in offering you a
+private view. It may be-subject of course, to Mr. Rogers' wishes-that we shall
+destroy the specimen some day-but that would be a crime."
+
+Jones had a powerful impulse to refuse the sight and flee precipitately, but
+Orabona was leading him forward by the arm with an artist's enthusiasm. The
+adult alcove, crowded with nameless horrors, held no visitors. In the farther
+corner a large niche had been curtained off, and to this the smiling assistant
+advanced.
+
+"You must know, Mr. Jones, that the title of this specimen is 'The Sacrifice to
+Rhan-Tegoth.' "
+
+Jones started violently, but Orabona appeared not to notice.
+
+"The shapeless, colossal god is a feature in certain obscure legends which Mr.
+Rogers had studied. All nonsense, of course, as you've so often assured Mr.
+Rogers. It is supposed to have come from outer space, and to have lived in the
+Arctic three million years ago. It trated its sacrifices rather peculiarly and
+horribly, as you shall see. Mr. Rogers had made it fiendishly life-like-even to the
+face of the victim."
+
+Now trembling violently, Jones clund to the brass railing in front of the curtained
+niche. He almost reached out to stop Orabona when he saw the curtain
+beginning to swing aside, but some conflicting impulse held him back. The
+foreigner smiled triumphantly.
+
+"Behold!"
+
+Jones reeled in spite of his grip on the railing.
+
+
+"God!-great god!"
+
+Fully ten feet high despite a shambling, crouching attitude expressive of infinite
+cosmic malignancy, a monstrosity of unbelievable horror was shown starting
+forward from a Cyclopean ivory throne covered with grotesque carvings. In the
+central pair of its six legs it bore a crushed, flattened, distorted, bloodless thing,
+riddled with a million punctures, and in places seared as with some pungent
+acid. Only the mangled head of the victim, lolling upside down at one side,
+revealed that it represented something once human.
+
+The monster itself needed no title for one who had seen a certain hellish
+photograph. That damnable print had been all too faithful; yet it could not carry
+the full horror which lay in the gigantic actuality. The globular torso-the bubble-
+like suggestion of a head-the three fishy eyes-the foot-long proboscis-the
+bulging gills-the monstrous capillation of asp-like suckers-the six sinuous limbs
+with their black paws and crab-like claws-God! the familiarity of the black paw
+ending in a crab-like claw! . . .
+
+Orabona's smile was utterly damnable. Jones choked, and stared at the hideous
+exhibit with a mounting fascination which perplexed and disturbed him. What
+half-revealed horror was holding and forcing him to look longer and search out
+details? This had driven Rogers mad . . . Rogers, supreme artist . . . said they
+weren't artificial. . . .
+
+Then he localized the thing that held him. It was the crushed waxen victim's
+lolling head, and something that it implied. This head was not entirely devoid of
+a face, and that face was familiar. It was like the mad face of poor Rogers. Jones
+peered closer, hardly knowing why he was driven to do so. Wasn't it natural for
+a mad egotist to mold his own features into his masterpiece? Was there anything
+more that subconscious vision had seized on and suppressed in sheer terror?
+
+The wax of the mangled face had been handled with boundless dexterity. Those
+punctures-how perfectly they reproduced the myriad wounds somehow
+inflicted on that poor dog! But there was something more. On the left cheek one
+could trace an irregularity which seemed outside the general scheme-as if the
+sculptor had sought to cover up a defect of his first modelling. The more Jones
+looked at it, the more mysteriously it horrified him-and then, suddenly, he
+remembered a circumstance which brought his horror to a head. That night of
+hideousness-the tussle-the bound madman-and the long, deep scratch down the
+left cheek of the actual living Rogers. . . .
+
+Jones, releasing his desperate clutch on the railing, sank in a total faint.
+
+
+
+
+Orabona continued to smile.
+
+
+
+
+The Hound
+
+
+
+Written in September of 1922
+
+Published in February of 1924 in Weird Tales
+
+In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and
+flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream - it
+is not, I fear, even madness - for too much has already happened to give me these
+merciful doubts.
+
+St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I
+am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way.
+Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldrith phantasy sweeps the black,
+shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.
+
+May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a
+fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of
+romance and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed
+enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised
+respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the
+ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood
+was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal.
+
+Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found
+potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations.
+Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there
+remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences
+and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to
+that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and
+timidity - that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of
+grave-robbing.
+
+I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly
+the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the
+great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum
+was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic
+virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded
+sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far, underground; where huge winged
+daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird
+green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic
+dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in
+
+
+
+
+voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odors our
+moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the
+narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes -
+how I shudder to recall it! - the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the
+uncovered-grave.
+
+Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies
+alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the
+taxidermist's art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of
+the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads
+preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald
+pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-
+buried children.
+
+Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St
+John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain
+unknown and unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had
+perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical
+instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St John and I sometimes
+produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness;
+whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and
+unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and
+perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak - thank God I had
+the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself!
+
+The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures
+were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but
+worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment,
+weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite
+form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care.
+An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the
+damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which
+followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our
+quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate - St John
+was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking,
+accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.
+
+By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I
+think it was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried for five
+centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent
+thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments - the
+pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the
+grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling
+
+
+
+
+slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the
+antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the
+phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant
+corner; the odors of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled
+feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of all, the
+faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor
+definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered,
+remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries
+before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the claws and
+teeth of some unspeakable beast.
+
+I remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and how we
+thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the
+horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the
+dancing death-fires, the sickening odors, the gently moaning night-wind, and the
+strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could
+scarcely be sure.
+
+Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting
+oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. It
+was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and
+feasted our eyes on what it held.
+
+Much - amazingly much - was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred
+years. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had
+killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean
+white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed
+with a charnel fever like our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and
+exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. It was
+the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with
+a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a
+small piece of green jade. The expression of its features was repellent in the
+extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence. Around the base
+was an inscription in characters which neither St John nor I could identify; and
+on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.
+
+Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that
+this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its
+outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but as we looked more
+closely we saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar. Alien it indeed was to all art
+and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as
+the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
+Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng,
+
+
+
+
+in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the
+old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure
+supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the
+dead.
+
+Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-
+eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened
+from the abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we thought we
+saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking
+for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak
+and pale, and we could not be sure.
+
+So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought
+we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But
+the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure.
+
+Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen.
+We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and without servants in a few
+rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our
+doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of the visitor.
+
+Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in
+the night, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well
+as lower. Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library
+window when the moon was shining against it, and another time we thought we
+heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. On each occasion investigation
+revealed nothing, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which
+still prolonged in our ears the faint far baying we thought we had heard in the
+Holland churchyard. The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum,
+and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. We read much in
+Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghosts'
+souls to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read.
+
+Then terror came.
+
+On the night of September 24, 19-, I heard a knock at my chamber door.
+Fancying it St John's, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrill
+laugh. There was no one in the corridor. When I aroused St John from his sleep,
+he professed entire ignorance of the event, and became as worried as I. It was the
+night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to us a certain and
+dreaded reality.
+
+
+
+
+Four days later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum, there came a low,
+cautious scratching at the single door which led to the secret library staircase.
+Our alarm was now divided, for, besides our fear of the unknown, we had
+always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered.
+Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the door and threw it suddenly open;
+whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and heard, as if receding far
+away, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether
+we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to determine. We only
+realized, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied
+chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.
+
+After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Mostly we held to the
+theory that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements,
+but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some
+creeping and appalling doom. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to
+count. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the presence of some malign
+being whose nature we could not guess, and every night that daemoniac baying
+rolled over the wind-swept moor, always louder and louder. On October 29 we
+found in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints
+utterly impossible to describe. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats
+which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.
+
+The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John, walking home
+after dark from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful
+carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. His screams had reached the house, and I
+had hastened to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague
+black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon.
+
+My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently.
+All he could do was to whisper, "The amulet - that damned thing -"
+
+Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.
+
+I buried him the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens, and mumbled
+over his body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And as I
+pronounced the last daemoniac sentence I heard afar on the moor the faint
+baying of some gigantic hound. The moon was up, but I dared not look at it. And
+when I saw on the dim-lighted moor a wide-nebulous shadow sweeping from
+mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground.
+When I arose, trembling, I know not how much later, I staggered into the house
+and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade.
+
+
+
+
+Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on
+the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire
+and burial the rest of the impious collection in the museum. But after three nights
+I heard the baying again, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me
+whenever it was dark. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for
+some needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one of the reflections of the lamps
+in the water. A wind, stronger than the night-wind, rushed by, and I knew that
+what had befallen St John must soon befall me.
+
+The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland.
+What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I
+knew not; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. What the hound
+was, and why it had pursued me, were questions still vague; but I had first heard
+the baying in that ancient churchyard, and every subsequent event including St
+John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the stealing of the
+amulet. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an
+inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means
+of salvation.
+
+The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed
+in the vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil
+tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the
+neighborhood. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds
+by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard all night a
+faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.
+
+So at last I stood again in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter
+moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the
+withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering
+finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from over
+frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it ceased
+altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and frightened
+away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been hovering curiously
+around it.
+
+I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and
+apologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I
+attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a
+dominating will outside myself. Excavation was much easier than I expected,
+though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture
+darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth until I
+killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and
+removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last rational act I ever performed.
+
+
+
+
+For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a closepacked nightmare
+retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had
+robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked
+blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with
+phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in
+mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a
+deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory
+filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely screamed and ran
+away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.
+
+Madness rides the star-wind... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of
+corpses... dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of
+buried temples of Belial. . . Now, as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity
+grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those
+accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion
+which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable.
+
+
+
+
+The Music OF Erich Zann
+
+Written in December of 1921
+
+Published in March of 1922 in The National Amateur
+
+I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again
+found the Rue d'Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I
+know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the
+antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever
+name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d'Auseil. But
+despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the
+house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my
+impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music
+of Erich Zann.
+
+That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental,
+was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue
+d'Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I
+cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a
+half-hour's walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which
+could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a
+person who has seen the Rue d'Auseil.
+
+The Rue d'Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-
+windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was
+always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut
+out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I
+have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since
+I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets
+with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the
+Rue d'Auseil was reached.
+
+I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d'Auseil. It was
+almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of ffights of steps,
+and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes
+stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling
+greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old,
+and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite
+pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and
+certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few
+overhead bridges from house to house across the street.
+
+
+
+
+The inhabitants of that street impressed me pecuharly; At first I thought it was
+because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they
+were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not
+myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always
+evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the
+Rue d'Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of
+the street, and by far the tallest of them all.
+
+My rcom was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house
+was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard Strang music from the peaked
+garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was
+an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich
+Zann, and who played eve nings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann's
+desire to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had
+chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the
+only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at
+the declivity and panorama beyond.
+
+Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was
+haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet
+certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before;
+and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I
+listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old
+man's acquaintance.
+
+One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway
+and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He
+was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque,
+satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered
+and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he
+grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic
+stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west
+side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was
+very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary barrenness and
+neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash-stand,
+a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned
+chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of
+bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of
+dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently
+Erich Zann's world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.
+
+Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large
+wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him.
+
+
+
+
+He now removed his viol from its motheaten covering, and taking it, seated
+himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-
+rack, but, offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over
+an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of
+his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed
+in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most
+captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird
+notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.
+
+Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled
+inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked
+him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled
+satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and
+seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had
+noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use
+persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to
+awaken my host's weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had
+listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a
+moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew
+suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long,
+cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude
+imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a
+startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some
+intruder— a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible
+above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street,
+as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the
+summit.
+
+The old man's glance brought Blandot's remark to my mind, and with a certain
+capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of
+moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in the
+Rue d'Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window
+and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened
+rage even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time
+motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me
+thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him
+to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw
+my disgust and offense, his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his
+relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair; then
+with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote
+many words with a pencil, in the labored French of a foreigner.
+
+
+
+
+The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and
+forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears
+and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had
+enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind
+his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and
+could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in
+his room touched by an-other. He had not known until our hallway conversation
+that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would
+arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the
+night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
+
+As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man.
+He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my
+metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight
+sound from the window — the shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and
+for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had
+finished reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.
+
+The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor,
+between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable
+upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.
+
+It was not long before I found that Zann's eagerness for my company was not as
+great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth
+story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy
+and played listlessly. This was always at night— in the day he slept and would
+admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the
+weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to
+look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the
+glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the
+garret during theater hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.
+
+What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb
+old man. At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold
+enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the
+narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard
+sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread — the dread of vague wonder
+and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were
+not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and
+that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly
+conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild
+power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician
+acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now
+
+
+
+
+refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the
+stairs.
+
+Then one night as I hstened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a
+chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my
+own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous
+proof that the horror was real — the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can
+utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I
+knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in
+the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician's
+feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just
+conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out
+my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both
+shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to
+admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted
+face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its
+mother's skirts.
+
+Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into
+another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for
+some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of
+intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and
+crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned
+to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored
+me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I
+was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors
+which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man's pencil flew.
+
+It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician's
+feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from
+the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained
+window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself;
+though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely
+distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or in
+some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look.
+Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose,
+seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had
+ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.
+
+It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night.
+It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now
+see the expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive was
+stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown
+
+
+
+
+something out— what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The
+playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities
+of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized
+the air — it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I reflected
+for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of
+another composer.
+
+Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of
+that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and
+twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his
+frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and
+whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning.
+And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a
+calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.
+
+At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had
+sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann's screaming
+viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The
+shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the
+window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the
+chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper
+on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at
+Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were
+bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind,
+mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
+
+A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it
+toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were
+gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to
+gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d'Auseil from which one
+might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very
+dark, but the city's lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst
+the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows,
+looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-
+wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from
+remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined
+space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on
+earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles
+in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness
+with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-
+baying viol behind me.
+
+
+
+
+I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a hght, crashing
+against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place
+where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich
+Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought
+some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard
+above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow
+struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of
+Zann's chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to
+his senses.
+
+He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved
+my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted
+in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he
+neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all
+through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and
+babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why —
+knew not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face
+whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle,
+finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that
+glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed
+viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.
+
+Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house;
+racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and
+tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and
+the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the
+broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible
+impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that
+the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.
+
+Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able
+to find the Rue d'Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss
+in undreamable abysses of the closely-written sheets which alone could have
+explained the music of Erich Zann.
+
+
+
+
+The Nameless City
+
+Written in January of 1921
+
+Published in November of 1921 in The Wolverine
+
+When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a
+parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding
+uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made
+grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge,
+this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me
+and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see,
+and no man else had dared to see.
+
+Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate,
+its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been
+thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of
+Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to
+recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and
+muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it
+without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad
+poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet:
+
+That is not dead which can eternal lie.
+
+And with strange aeons death may die.
+
+I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless
+city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them
+and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that
+is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man
+shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon
+it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of
+a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my
+triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.
+
+For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey
+turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of
+sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast
+reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing
+edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and
+in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of
+musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
+
+
+
+
+My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the
+sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men had seen.
+
+In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered,
+finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who
+built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was
+unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the
+city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and
+dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug
+much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and
+nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill
+wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as
+I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered
+behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most
+of the desert still.
+
+I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as
+from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a
+little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of
+the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that
+swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for
+relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much
+time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished
+buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the
+sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the spendours of an age so
+distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed,
+that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of lb, that was
+carven of grey stone before mankind existed.
+
+All at once I came upon a place where the bedrock rose stark through the sand
+and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further
+traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the
+unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose
+interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though
+sandstorms had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
+
+Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but I cleared one
+with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever
+mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a
+temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before
+the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low,
+were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there were many
+singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of
+
+
+
+
+the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright; but the
+area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered
+oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten
+rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what
+manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen
+all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the temples
+might yield.
+
+Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity
+stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows that
+had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared
+another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague
+stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had
+contained. The room was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very
+narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines
+I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the
+stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
+
+The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud
+of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point
+along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had
+disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I
+chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This
+astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden
+local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it
+was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave,
+and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it
+came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of
+sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I
+neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged
+with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind
+almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing
+uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew
+fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again;
+but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city, and when I
+glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I
+was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for
+wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber
+from which it had come.
+
+This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I
+had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds
+from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the
+
+
+
+
+stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof
+I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race,
+curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on
+two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned
+curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of
+the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric
+cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been
+vast.
+
+Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I had been
+seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had
+blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door
+chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel
+with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and
+steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came
+to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps
+or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad
+thoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across
+the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not
+know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal
+and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as
+though on a ladder.
+
+It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can
+have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some
+hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the
+unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and
+forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the
+distance I must be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness;
+and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle my feet first
+along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place
+was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I
+was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not
+think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it above
+me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange
+and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of
+far, ancient, and forbidden places.
+
+In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished
+treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs
+from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the
+delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and
+muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus;
+
+
+
+
+later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales-
+"The unreveberate blackness of the abyss." Once when the descent grew
+amazingly steep I recited something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I
+feared to recite more:
+
+
+
+A reservoir of
+
+As witches' cauldrons
+
+With moon-drugs in
+
+Leaning to look
+
+Down thro' that
+
+As far as
+
+The jetty sides
+
+Looking as if
+
+With that dark
+Throws out upon its slimy shore.
+
+
+
+darkness, black
+
+are, when fill'd
+
+th' eclipse distill' d
+
+if foot might pass
+
+chasm, I saw, beneath,
+
+vision could explore,
+
+as smooth as glass,
+
+just varnish'd o'er
+
+pitch the Seat of Death
+
+
+
+Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found
+myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now
+so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, but could kneel
+upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon
+knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood
+having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things
+as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases
+were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and
+were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I
+tried to move two or three for further examination, I found that they were firmly
+fastened.
+
+I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping
+run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness;
+crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure
+the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually
+that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and
+glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of
+indescribable emotion I did see it.
+
+Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual
+glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and
+the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a little
+while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I
+mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my
+fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the
+city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid.
+
+
+
+
+and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of
+mural paintings whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases
+were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the
+mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic
+dreams of man.
+
+To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile
+kind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal,
+but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever
+heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their fore-legs bore delicate
+and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all
+were their heads, which presented a contour violating all know biological
+principles. To nothing can such things be well compared - in one flash I thought
+of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the
+human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead,
+yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things
+outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the
+mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were
+indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was
+alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in
+the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and
+unknown shining metals.
+
+The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held
+first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With
+matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they
+had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not help
+but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps shewing the
+progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself,
+were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-
+beast is to a tribe of Indians.
+
+Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city;
+the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose
+out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept
+into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and
+defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its
+people - here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles - were driven to
+chisel their way down though the rocks in some marvellous manner to another
+world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and
+realistic, and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was
+unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.
+
+
+
+
+As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter Hght I saw later stages of the
+painted epic - the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and
+the valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from
+quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as
+nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at
+which they had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied
+the pictures more closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must
+represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city.
+Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included a
+written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably
+later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I
+could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save
+such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the
+reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of
+immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
+
+Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost
+picturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city in its
+desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of paradise to which
+the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the
+desert valley were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over
+the fallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times,
+shown spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost
+too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled
+with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I saw
+signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, and much more
+bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow
+decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the
+outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people -
+always represented by the sacred reptiles - appeared to be gradually wasting
+away, though their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight
+gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes,
+cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed
+a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars,
+torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remembered how the Arabs fear
+the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling
+were bare.
+
+As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the
+end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which came all of the
+illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent
+amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there
+was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when
+
+
+
+
+gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind
+me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was
+an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
+
+Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of
+steps - small numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed - but
+after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything. Swung back open
+against the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly
+thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the
+whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at
+the steps, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door,
+and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame
+with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.
+
+As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in
+the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance - scenes
+representing the nameless city in its heyday - the vegetations of the valley
+around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of
+the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered
+that it would be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In
+the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the
+reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and
+reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought
+curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor,
+which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there
+honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the
+very rites here involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious
+theory, however, could easily explain why the level passages in that awesome
+descent should be as low as the temples - or lower, since one could not even
+kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified
+forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are
+curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to
+pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics
+and symbols of the primordial life.
+
+But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear;
+for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of
+the greatest explorer. That a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of
+peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human
+memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had
+pictured unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt
+on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
+
+
+
+
+My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the
+physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and
+antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world
+of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity
+of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble
+seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the
+nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes
+shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there
+some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the geological
+ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed
+to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the
+luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to
+think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent deserted
+vigil.
+
+Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently
+seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a
+cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a
+sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that
+rose to the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun
+the nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In
+another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a
+definite sound - the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like
+depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits,
+and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till
+it soon reverberated frightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I
+became conscious of an increasing draught of cold air, likewise flowing from the
+tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance,
+for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the
+abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden
+tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so braced
+myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had
+swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon
+tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
+
+More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulf of
+the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of
+being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such
+fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form
+toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and
+imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more
+I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful
+corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish
+
+
+
+
+clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the
+stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the
+last - I was almost mad - but if I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel
+of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible
+torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and
+inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly
+snapped; for I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the
+mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
+
+That is not dead which can eternal lie.
+
+And with strange aeons even death may die.
+
+Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place-what
+indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon
+guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night
+wind till oblivion - or worse - claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the
+thing - too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent
+damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.
+
+I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal - cacodaemoniacal - and
+that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities.
+Presently these voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain
+to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered
+aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the
+ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined
+against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk
+of the corridor - a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate distorted, grotesquely
+panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no man might mistake - the crawling
+reptiles of the nameless city.
+
+And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of
+earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged
+shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to
+the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the
+Nile.
+
+
+
+
+The Other Gods
+
+Written on August 14, 1921
+
+Published in November of 1933 in The Fantasy Fan
+
+Atop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer not man to
+tell that he hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever
+the men from the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the
+gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remains. When they
+left their old peaks they took with them all signs of themselves, save once, it is
+said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountain which they called
+Ngranek.
+
+But now they have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the cold waste
+where no man treads, and are grown stern, having no higher peak whereto to
+flee at the coming of men. They are grown stern, and where once they suffered
+men to displace them, they now forbid men to come; or coming, to depart. It is
+well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste; else they would
+seek injudiciously to scale it.
+
+Sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the
+peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden
+way on remembered slopes. Men have felt the tears of the gods on white-capped
+Thurai, though they have thought it rain; and have heard the sighs of the gods in
+the plaintive dawn-winds of Lerion. In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel,
+and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night
+when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.
+
+In Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, once dwelt an old man avid to behold
+the gods of earth; a man deeply learned in the seven cryptical books of earth, and
+familiar with the Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar. His name
+was Barzai the Wise, and the villagers tell of how he went up a mountain on the
+night of the strange eclipse.
+
+Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings,
+and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself. It
+was he who wisely advised the burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their
+remarkable law against the slaying of cats, and who first told the young priest
+Atal where it is that black cats go at midnight on St. John's Eve. Barzai was
+learned in the lore of the earth's gods, and had gained a desire to look upon their
+faces. He believed that his great secret knowledge of gods could shield him from
+
+
+
+
+their wrath, so resolved to go up to the summit of high and rocky Hatheg-Kla on
+a night when he knew the gods would be there.
+
+Hatheg-Kla is far in the stony desert beyond Hatheg, for which it is named, and
+rises like a rock statue in a silent temple. Around its peak the mists play always
+mournfully, for mists are the memories of the gods, and the gods loved Hatheg-
+Kla when they dwelt upon it in the old days. Often the gods of earth visit
+Hatheg-Kla in their ships of clouds, casting pale vapors over the slopes as they
+dance reminiscently on the summit under a clear moon. The villagers of Hatheg
+say it is ill to climb the Hatheg-Kla at any time, and deadly to climb it by night
+when pale vapors hide the summit and the moon; but Barzai heeded them not
+when he came from neighboring Ulthar with the young priest Atal, who was his
+disciple. Atal was only the son of an innkeeper, and was sometimes afraid; but
+Barzai's father had been a landgrave who dwelt in an ancient castle, so he had no
+common superstition in his blood, and only laughed at the fearful cotters.
+
+Banzai and Atal went out of Hatheg into the stony desert despite the prayers of
+peasants, and talked of earth's gods by their campfires at night. Many days they
+traveled, and from afar saw lofty Hatheg-Kla with his aureole of mournful mist.
+On the thirteenth day they reached the mountain's lonely base, and Atal spoke of
+his fears. But Barzai was old and learned and had no fears, so led the way up the
+slope that no man had scaled since the time of Sansu, who is written of with
+fright in the moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts.
+
+The way was rocky, and made perilous by chasms, cliffs, and falling stones. Later
+it grew cold and snowy; and Barzai and Atal often slipped and fell as they hewed
+and plodded upward with staves and axes. Finally the air grew thin, and the sky
+changed color, and the climbers found it hard to breathe; but still they toiled up
+and up, marveling at the strangeness of the scene and thrilling at the thought of
+what would happen on the summit when the moon was out and the pale
+vapours spread around. For three days they climbed higher and higher toward
+the roof of the world; then they camped to wait for the clouding of the moon.
+
+For four nights no clouds came, and the moon shone down cold through the thin
+mournful mist around the silent pinnacle. Then on the fifth night, which was the
+night of the full moon, Barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed
+up with Atal to watch them draw near. Thick and majestic they sailed, slowly
+and deliberately onward; ranging themselves round the peak high above the
+watchers, and hiding the moon and the summit from view. For a long hour the
+watchers gazed, whilst the vapours swirled and the screen of clouds grew thicker
+and more restless. Barzai was wise in the lore of earth's gods, and listened hard
+for certain sounds, but Atal felt the chill of the vapours and the awe of the night.
+
+
+
+
+and feared much. And when Barzai began to cHmb higher and beckon eagerly, it
+was long before Atal would follow.
+
+So thick were the vapours that the way was hard, and though Atal followed at
+last, he could scarce see the gray shape of Barzai on the dim slope above in the
+clouded moonlight. Barzai forged very far ahead, and seemed despite his age to
+climb more easily than Atal; fearing not the steepness that began to grow too
+great for any save a strong and dauntless man, nor pausing at wide black chasms
+that Atal could scarce leap. And so they went up wildly over rocks and gulfs,
+slipping and stumbling, and sometimes awed at the vastness and horrible silence
+of bleak ice pinnacles and mute granite steeps.
+
+Very suddenly Barzai went out of Atal's sight, scaling a hideous cliff that seemed
+to bulge outward and block the path for any climber not inspired of earth's gods.
+Atal was far below, and planning what he should do when he reached the place,
+when curiously he noticed that the light had grown strong, as if the cloudless
+peak and moonlit meetingplace of the gods were very near. And as he scrambled
+on toward the bulging cliff and litten sky he felt fears more shocking than any he
+had known before. Then through the high mists he heard the voice of Barzai
+shouting wildly in delight:
+
+"I have heard the gods. I have heard earth's gods singing in revelry on Hatheg-
+Kla! The voices of earth's gods are known to Barzai the Prophet! The mists are
+thin and the moon is bright, and I shall see the gods dancing wildly on Hatheg-
+Kla that they loved in youth. The wisdom of Barzai hath made him greater than
+earth's gods, and against his will their spells and barriers are as naught; Barzai
+will behold the gods, the proud gods, the secret gods, the gods of earth who
+spurn the sight of man!"
+
+Atal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was now close to the bulging
+cliff and scanning it for footholds. Then he heard Barzai's voice grow shriller and
+louder:
+
+"The mist is very thin, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; the voices of
+earth's gods are high and wild, and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who
+is greater than they... The moon's light flickers, as earth's gods dance against it; I
+shall see the dancing forms of the gods that leap and howl in the moonlight. . .
+The light is dimmer and the gods are afraid. . ."
+
+Whilst Barzai was shouting these things Atal felt a spectral change in all the air,
+as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws; for though the way was
+steeper than ever, the upward path was now grown fearsomely easy, and the
+bulging cliff proved scarce an obstacle when he reached it and slid perilously up
+
+
+
+
+its convex face. The light of the moon had strangely failed, and as Atal plunged
+upward through the mists he heard Barzai the Wise shrieking in the shadows:
+
+"The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for
+upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's
+gods. . . There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened
+gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the
+black heavens whither I am plunging... Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I
+behold the gods of earth!"
+
+And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a
+loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the
+Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and
+anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:
+
+"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble
+gods of earth!... Look away... Go back... Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance
+of the infinite abysses... That cursed, that damnable pit... Merciful gods of earth,
+I am falling into the sky!"
+
+And as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to hump downward
+against the frightful pull from unknown heights, there resounded on Hatheg-Kla
+that terrible peal of thunder which awaked the good cotters of the plains and the
+honest burgesses of Hatheg, Nir and Ulthar, and caused them to behold through
+the clouds that strange eclipse of the moon that no book ever predicted. And
+when the moon came out at last Atal was safe on the lower snows of the
+mountain without sight of earth's gods, or of the other gods.
+
+Now it is told in the moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught but
+wordless ice and rock when he did climb Hatheg-Kla in the youth of the world.
+Yet when the men of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled
+that haunted steep by day in search of Barzai the Wise, they found graven in the
+naked stone of the summit a curious and cyclopean symbol fifty cubits wide, as if
+the rock had been riven by some titanic chisel. And the symbol was like to one
+that learned men have discerned in those frightful parts of the Pnakotic
+Manuscripts which were too ancient to be read. This they found.
+
+Barzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest Atal ever be
+persuaded to pray for his soul's repose. Moreover, to this day the people of
+Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg fear eclipses, and pray by night when pale vapors
+hide the mountain-top and the moon. And above the mists on Hatheg-Kla,
+earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are safe, and
+love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of clouds and play in the olden
+
+
+
+
+way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the chmbing of
+inaccessible places.
+
+
+
+
+The Outsider
+
+Written in 1921
+
+Published in April of 1926 in Weird Tales
+
+Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
+Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers
+with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed
+watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees
+that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me - to
+me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely
+content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind
+momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.
+
+I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely
+horrible, full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find
+only cobwebs and shadows. The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed
+always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the
+piled-up corpses of dead generations. It was never light, so that I used sometimes
+to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief, nor was there any sun
+outdoors, since the terrible trees grew high above the topmost accessible tower.
+There was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown
+outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-
+nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone.
+
+I must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time. Beings must
+have cared for my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself, or
+anything alive but the noiseless rats and bats and spiders. I think that whoever
+nursed me must have been shockingly aged, since my first conception of a living
+person was that of somebody mockingly like myself, yet distorted, shrivelled,
+and decaying like the castle. To me there was nothing grotesque in the bones and
+skeletons that strewed some of the stone crypts deep down among the
+foundations. I fantastically associated these things with everyday events, and
+thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living beings which I
+found in many of the mouldy books. From such books I learned all that I know.
+No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in
+all those years - not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never
+thought to try to speak aloud. My aspect was a matter equally unthought of, for
+there were no mirrors in the castle, and I merely regarded myself by instinct as
+akin to the youthful figures I saw drawn and painted in the books. I felt
+conscious of youth because I remembered so little.
+
+
+
+
+Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often he
+and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly
+picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests.
+Once I tried to escape from the forest, but as I went farther from the castle the
+shade grew denser and the air more filled with brooding fear; so that I ran
+frantically back lest I lose my way in a labyrinth of nighted silence.
+
+So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I
+waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic
+that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined
+tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I
+resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse
+the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.
+
+In the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the
+level where they ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds
+leading upward. Ghastly and terrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock;
+black, ruined, and deserted, and sinister with startled bats whose wings made no
+noise. But more ghastly and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for
+climb as I might, the darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill as of
+haunted and venerable mould assailed me. I shivered as I wondered why I did
+not reach the light, and would have looked down had I dared. I fancied that
+night had come suddenly upon me, and vainly groped with one free hand for a
+window embrasure, that I might peer out and above, and try to judge the height I
+had once attained.
+
+All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless, crawling up that concave and
+desperate precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have
+gained the roof, or at least some kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free
+hand and tested the barrier, finding it stone and immovable. Then came a deadly
+circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holds the slimy wall could give; till
+finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turned upward again,
+pushing the slab or door with my head as I used both hands in my fearful ascent.
+There was no light revealed above, and as my hands went higher I knew that my
+climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the trapdoor of an aperture
+leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower tower, no
+doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber. I crawled
+through carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from falling back into
+place, but failed in the latter attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I
+heard the eerie echoes of its fall, hoped when necessary to pry it up again.
+
+Believing I was now at prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the
+wood, I dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I
+
+
+
+
+might look for the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had
+read. But on every hand I was disappointed; since all that I found were vast
+shelves of marble, bearing odious oblong boxes of disturbing size. More and
+more I reflected, and wondered what hoary secrets might abide in this high
+apartment so many aeons cut off from the castle below. Then unexpectedly my
+hands came upon a doorway, where hung a portal of stone, rough with strange
+chiselling. Trying it, I found it locked; but with a supreme burst of strength I
+overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward. As I did so there came to me
+the purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly through an ornate
+grating of iron, and down a short stone passageway of steps that ascended from
+the newly found doorway, was the radiant full moon, which I had never before
+seen save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories.
+
+Fancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to
+rush up the few steps beyond the door; but the sudden veiling of the moon by a
+cloud caused me to stumble, and I felt my way more slowly in the dark. It was
+still very dark when I reached the grating - which I tried carefully and found
+unlocked, but which I did not open for fear of falling from the amazing height to
+which I had climbed. Then the moon came out.
+
+Most demoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and
+grotesquely unbelievable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in
+terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied. The
+sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a
+dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around
+me on the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground, decked
+and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient
+stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight.
+
+Half unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white gravel
+path that stretched away in two directions. My mind, stunned and chaotic as it
+was, still held the frantic craving for light; and not even the fantastic wonder
+which had happened could stay my course. I neither knew nor cared whether my
+experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on
+brilliance and gaiety at any cost. I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my
+surroundings might be; though as I continued to stumble along I became
+conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not
+wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and
+columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the
+visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where
+only occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road. Once I
+swam across a swift river where crumbling, mossy masonry told of a bridge long
+vanished.
+
+
+
+
+Over two hours must have passed before I reached what seemed to be my goal, a
+venerable ivied castle in a thickly wooded park, maddeningly familiar, yet full of
+perplexing strangeness to me. I saw that the moat was filled in, and that some of
+the well-known towers were demolished, whilst new wings existed to confuse
+the beholder. But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the open
+windows - gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest
+revelry. Advancing to one of these I looked in and saw an oddly dressed
+company indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly to one another. I had
+never, seemingly, heard human speech before and could guess only vaguely
+what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold expressions that brought up
+incredibly remote recollections, others were utterly alien.
+
+I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room,
+stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest
+convulsion of despair and realization. The nightmare was quick to come, for as I
+entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I
+had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon
+the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity,
+distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every
+throat. Flight was universal, and in the clamour and panic several fell in a swoon
+and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions. Many covered their
+eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to
+escape, overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they
+managed to reach one of the many doors.
+
+The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and
+dazed, listening to their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what
+might be lurking near me unseen. At a casual inspection the room seemed
+deserted, but when I moved towards one of the alcoves I thought I detected a
+presence there - a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to
+another and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to
+perceive the presence more clearly; and then, with the first and last sound I ever
+uttered - a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious
+cause - I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and
+unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a
+merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives.
+
+I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean,
+uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of
+decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome
+revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.
+God knows it was not of this world - or no longer of this world - yet to my horror
+I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty
+
+
+
+
+on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable
+quality that chilled me even more.
+
+I was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort towards
+flight; a backward stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless,
+voiceless monster held me. My eyes bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared
+loathsomely into them, refused to close; though they were mercifully blurred,
+and showed the terrible object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to raise
+my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could
+not fully obey my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my
+balance; so that I had to stagger forward several steps to avoid falling. As I did so
+I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing,
+whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found
+myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which
+pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and
+hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster
+beneath the golden arch.
+
+I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the nightwind shrieked for
+me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single fleeting
+avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. I knew in that second all that had been; I
+remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees, and recognized the altered
+edifice in which I now stood; I recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy
+abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from
+its own.
+
+But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe.
+In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the
+burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled
+from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the
+moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down
+the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had
+hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly
+ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-
+Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is
+not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save
+the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new
+wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.
+
+For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a
+stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known
+ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded
+
+
+
+
+frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of
+polished glass.
+
+
+
+
+The Picture in the House
+
+Written on December 12, 1919
+
+Published in July of 1920 in The National Amateur
+
+Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of
+Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to
+the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed
+steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood
+and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister
+monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a
+new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence,
+esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England;
+for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance
+combine to form the perfection of the hideous.
+
+Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from
+travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning
+against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they
+have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have
+swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green
+and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare
+shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by
+dulling the memory of unutterable things.
+
+In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world
+has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from
+their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of
+a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but
+cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds.
+Divorced from the enlightenment of civilization, the strength of these Puritans
+turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and
+struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits
+from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical
+and by philosophy stern, these folks were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all
+mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all
+else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the
+silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden
+since the early days, and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the
+drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be
+merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
+
+
+
+
+It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one
+afternoon in November, 1896, by a rain of such chilHng copiousness that any
+shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst
+the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and
+from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it
+convenient to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season. Now I found
+myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest
+cut to Arkham, overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and
+confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building
+which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms near
+the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it is from the remnant of a road, this house
+none the less impressed me unfavorably the very moment I espied it. Honest,
+wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in
+my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which
+biased me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to
+overcome my scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy
+rise to the closed door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.
+
+I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I
+approached it I was not so sure, for though the walks were indeed overgrown
+with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too well to argue complete
+desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a
+trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which
+served as a door-step, I glanced at the neighboring windows and the panes of the
+transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque
+with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited,
+despite its isolation and general neglect. However, my rapping evoked no
+response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the
+door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster
+was falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odor. I
+entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a
+narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to
+the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.
+
+Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into
+a small low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and
+furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind
+of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace
+above which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very
+few, and in the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What
+interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible
+detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but
+here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not
+
+
+
+
+discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the
+furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector's paradise.
+
+As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first
+excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or
+loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere
+seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets
+which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about
+examining the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my
+curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an
+antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library.
+It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of
+preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an
+abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater,
+for it proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta's account of the Congo region,
+written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopex and printed at Frankfurt in
+1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers
+De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages
+before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from
+imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes with white skins
+and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an
+exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation
+of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the
+volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome
+detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at
+my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me,
+especially in connection with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique
+gastronomy.
+
+I had turned to a neighboring shelf and was examining its meagre literary
+contents - an eighteenth century Bible, a "Pilgrim's Progress" of like period,
+illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker Isaiah
+Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana," and
+a few other books of evidently equal age - when my attention was aroused by the
+unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and
+startled, considering the lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I
+immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a
+sound sleep, and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the
+creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of
+cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy.
+When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a
+moment of silence during which the walker may have been inspecting my
+
+
+
+
+bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the paneled portal
+swing open again.
+
+In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have
+exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and
+ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique which inspired equal
+wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and
+despite a general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in
+proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the
+cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect;
+while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years.
+His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and burning.
+But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-
+looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive
+despite his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for
+it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy
+boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.
+
+The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for
+something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense
+of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a
+thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech
+was very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct;
+and I studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation.
+
+"Ketched in the rain, be ye?" he greeted. "Glad ye was nigh the haouse en' hed
+the sense ta come right in. I calc'late I was alseep, else I'd a heerd ye-I ain't as
+young as I uster be, an' I need a paowerful sight o' naps naowadays. Trav'lin fur?
+I hain't seed many folks 'long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage."
+
+I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologized for my rude entry into his
+domicile, whereupon he continued.
+
+"Glad ta see ye, young Sir - new faces is scurce arount here, an' I hain't got much
+ta cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don't ye? I never ben
+thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see 'im - we hed one fer deestrick
+schoolmaster in 'eighty-four, but he quit suddent an' no one never heerd on 'im
+sence - " here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no
+explanation when I questioned him. He seemed to be in an aboundingly good
+humor, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his
+grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when
+it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta's "Regnum
+Congo." The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in
+
+
+
+
+speaking of it, but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily
+accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did
+not seem an awkward one, for the old man answered freely and volubly.
+
+"Oh, that Afriky book? Cap'n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in 'sixty-eight - him
+as was kilt in the war." Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me
+to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any
+record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task at
+which I was laboring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.
+
+"Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an' picked up a sight o' queer
+stuff in every port. He got this in London, I guess - he uster like ter buy things at
+the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin' bosses, when I see this
+book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. 'Tis a queer book - here,
+leave me git on my spectacles-" The old man fumbled among his rags, producing
+a pair of dirty and amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and
+steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the
+pages lovingly.
+
+"Ebenezer cud read a leetle o' this-'tis Latin - but I can't. I had two er three
+schoolmasters read me a bit, and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in
+the pond - kin yew make anything outen it?" I told him that I could, and
+translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not
+scholar enough to correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English
+version. His proximity was becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to
+escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this
+ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered
+how much better he could read the few books in English which adorned the
+room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined
+apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:
+
+"Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin'. Take this un here near the front.
+Hey yew ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a floppin' over an' daown?
+And them men - them can't be niggers - they dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I
+guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o' these here critters looks like monkeys,
+or half monkeys an' half men, but I never heerd o' nothin' like this un." Here he
+pointed to a fabulous creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of
+dragon with the head of an alligator.
+
+"But naow I'll show ye the best un - over here nigh the middle - "The old man's
+speech grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his
+fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were entirely adequate
+to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from
+
+
+
+
+frequent consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate showing a
+butcher's shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness
+returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the
+artist had made his Africans look like white men - the limbs and quarters
+hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe
+was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I
+disliked it.
+
+"What d'ye think o' this - ain't never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this
+I felled Eb Holt, 'That's suthin' ta stir ye up an' make yer blood tickle.' When I
+read in Scripter about slayin' - like them Midianites was slew - I kinder think
+things, but I ain't got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it - I s'pose
+'tis sinful, but ain't we all born an' livin' in sin? - Thet feller bein' chopped up
+gives me a tickle every time I look at 'im - I hey ta keep lookin' at 'im - see whar
+the butcher cut off his feet? Thar's his head on thet bench, with one arm side of it,
+an' t'other arm's on the other side o' the meat block."
+
+As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy,
+spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted.
+My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt
+before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the
+ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His
+madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was
+almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I
+trembled as I listened.
+
+"As I says, 'tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin'. D'ye know, young Sir, I'm
+right sot on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot,
+especial when I'd heerd Passon Clark rant o' Sundays in his big wig. Onct I tried
+suthin' funny - here, young Sir, don't git skeert - all I done was ter look at the
+picter afore I kilt the sheep for market - killin' sheep was kinder more fun arter
+lookin' at it - " The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming
+so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the
+rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of
+approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal
+shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice
+it.
+
+"Killin' sheep was kinder more fun - but d'ye know, 'twan't quite satisfyin'.
+Queer haow a cravin' gits a holt on ye - As ye love the Almighty, young man,
+don't tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun to make me hungry fer
+victuals I couldn't raise nor buy - here, set still, what's ailin' ye? - I didn't do
+nothin', only I wondered haow 'twud be ef I did - They say meat makes blood
+
+
+
+
+an' flesh, an' gives ye new life, so I wondered ef 'twudn't make a man live longer
+an' longer ef 'twas more the same - " But the whisperer never continued. The
+interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm
+amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of
+blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though somewhat unusual
+happening.
+
+The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward.
+As the old man whispered the words "more the same" a tiny splattering impact
+was heard, and something showed on the yellowed paper of the upturned
+volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the
+butcher's shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened
+picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw
+it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it
+necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an
+hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster
+of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to
+spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A
+moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed
+house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my
+mind.
+
+
+
+
+The Quest of Iranon
+
+Written on Feb 28, 1921
+
+Published in July through August of 1935 in The Galleon
+
+Into the granite city of Teloth wandered the youth, vine-crowned, his yellow hair
+glistening with myrrh and his purple robe torn with briers of the mountain
+Sidrak that lies across the antique bridge of stone. The men of Teloth are dark
+and stern, and dwell in square houses, and with frowns they asked the stranger
+whence he had come and what were his name and fortune. So the youth
+answered:
+
+"I am Iranon, and come from Air a, a far city that I recall only dimly but seek to
+find again. I am a singer of songs that I learned in the far city, and my calling is
+to make beauty with the things remembered of childhood. My wealth is in little
+memories and dreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens when the moon is
+tender and the west wind stirs the lotus-buds."
+
+When the men of Teloth heard these things they whispered to one another; for
+though in the granite city there is no laughter or song, the stern men sometimes
+look to the Karthian hills in the spring and think of the lutes of distant Oonai
+whereof travellers have told. And thinking thus, they bade the stranger stay and
+sing in the square before the Tower of Mlin, though they liked not the colour of
+his tattered robe, nor the myrrh in his hair, nor his chaplet of vine-leaves, nor the
+youth in his golden voice. At evening Iranon sang, and while he sang an old man
+prayed and a blind man said he saw a nimbus over the singer's head. But most of
+the men of Teloth yawned, and some laughed and some went to sleep; for Iranon
+told nothing useful, singing only his memories, his dreams, and his hopes.
+
+"I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window where I was
+rocked to sleep. And through the window was the street where the golden lights
+came, and where the shadows danced on houses of marble. I remember the
+square of moonlight on the floor, that was not like any other light, and the
+visions that danced on the moonbeams when my mother sang to me. And too, I
+remember the sun of morning bright above the many-coloured hills in summer,
+and the sweetness of flowers borne on the south wind that made the trees sing.
+
+"Oh Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are thy beauties! How I loved the
+warm and fragrant groves across the hyline Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra
+that flowed though the verdant valley! In those groves and in the vale the
+children wove wreathes for one another, and at dusk I dreamed strange dreams
+
+
+
+
+under the yath-trees on the mountain as I saw below me the Hghts of the city,
+and the curving Nithra reflecting a ribbon of stars.
+
+"And in the city were the palaces of veined and tinted marble, with golden
+domes and painted walls, and green gardens with cerulean pools and crystal
+fountains. Often I played in the gardens and waded in the pools, and lay and
+dreamed among the pale flowers under the trees. And sometimes at sunset i
+would climb the long hilly street to the citadel and the open place, and look
+down upon Aira, the magic city of marble and beryl, splendid in a robe of golden
+flame.
+
+"Long have I missed thee, Aira, for i was but young when we went into exile; but
+my father was thy King and I shall come again to thee, for it is so decreed of Fate.
+All through seven lands have I sought thee, and some day shall I reign over thy
+groves and gardens, thy streets and palaces, and sing to men who shall know
+whereof I sing, and laugh not nor turn away. For I am Iranon, who was a Prince
+in Aira."
+
+That night the men of Teloth lodged the stranger in a stable, and in the morning
+an archon came to him and told him to go to the shop of Athok the cobbler, and
+be apprenticed to him.
+
+"But I am Iranon, a singer of songs, " he said, "and have no heart for the
+cobbler's trade."
+
+"All in Teloth must toil," replied the archon, "for that is the law." Then said
+Iranon:
+
+"Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only
+that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not
+life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers among you, where
+shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without
+an end. Were not death more pleasing?" But the archon was sullen and did not
+understand, and rebuked the stranger.
+
+"Thou art a strange youth, and I like not thy face or thy voice. The words thou
+speakest are blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that toil is good. Our
+gods have promised us a haven of light beyond death, where shall be rest
+without end, and crystal coldness amidst which none shall vex his mind with
+thought or his eyes with beauty. Go thou then to Athok the cobbler or be gone
+out of the city by sunset. All here must serve, and song is folly."
+
+
+
+
+So Iranon went out of the stable and walked over the narrow stone streets
+between the gloomy square house of granite, seeking something green, for all
+was of stone. On the faces of men were frowns, but by the stone embankment
+along the sluggish river Zuro sat a young boy with sad eyes gazing into the
+waters to spy green budding branches washed down from the hills by the
+freshets. And the boy said to him:
+
+"Art thou not indeed he of whom the archons tell, who seekest a far city in a fair
+land? I am Romnod, and borne of the blood of Teloth, but am not olf in the ways
+of the granite city, and yearn daily for the warm groves and the distant lands of
+beauty and song. Beyond the Karthian hills lieth Oonai, the city of lutes and
+dancing, which men whisper of and say is both lovely and terrible.Thither would
+I go were I old enough to find the way, and thither shouldst thou go and thou
+wouldst sing and have men listen to thee. Let us leave the city of Teloth and fare
+together among the hills of spring. Thou shalt shew me the ways of travel and I
+will attend thy songs at evening when the stars one by one bring dreams to the
+minds of dreamers. And per adventure it may be that Oonai the city of lutes and
+dancing is even the fair Aira thou seekest, for it is told that thou hast not known
+Aira since the old days, and a name often changeth. Let us go to Oonai, O Iranon
+of the golden head, where men shall know our longings and welcome us as
+brothers, nor even laugh or frown at what we say." And Iranon answered:
+
+"Be it so, small one; if any in this stone place yearn for beauty he must seek the
+mountains and beyond, and I would not leave thee to pine by the sluggish Zuro.
+But think not that delight and understanding dwell just across the Karthian hills,
+or in any spot thou canst find in a day's, or a year's, or a lustrum's journey.
+Behold, when I was small like thee I dwelt in the valley of Narthos by the frigid
+Xari, where none would listen to my dreams; and I told myself that when older i
+would go to Sinara on the southern slope, and sing to smiling dromedary-men in
+the marketplace. But when I went to Sinara i found the dromedary-men all
+drunken and ribald, and saw that their songs were not as mine, so I travelled in a
+barge down the Xari to onyx-walled Jaren. And the soldiers at Jaren laughed at
+me and drave me out, so that I wandered to many cities. I have seen Stethelos
+that is below the great cataract, and have gazed on the marsh where Sarnath once
+stood. I have been to thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai, and
+have dwelt long in Olathoe in the land of Lomar. But though i have had listeners
+sometimes, they have ever been few. and I know that welcome shall wait me
+only in Aira, the city of marble and beryl where my father once ruled as King. So
+for Aira shall we seek, though it were well to visit distant and lute-blessed oonai
+across the Karthianhills, which may indeed be Aira, though i think not. Aira's
+beauty is past imagining, and none can tell of it without rapture, whilist of Oonai
+the camel-drivers whisper leeringly."
+
+
+
+
+At the sunset Iranon and small Romnod went forth from Teloth, and for long
+wandered amidst the green hills and cool forests. The way was rough and
+obscure, and never did they seem nearer to oonai the city of lutes and dancing;
+but in the dusk as the stars came out Iranon would sing of Aira and its beauties
+and Romnod would listen, so that they were both happy after a fashion. They ate
+plentifully of fruit and red berries, and marked not the passing of time, but many
+years must have slipped away. Small Romnod was now not so small, and spoke
+deeply instead of shrilly, though Iranon was always the same, and decked his
+golden hair with vines and fragrant resins found in the woods. So it came to pass
+that Romnod seemed older than Iranon, though he had been very small when
+Iranon had found him watching for green budding branches in Teloth beside the
+sluggish stone-banked Zuro.
+
+Then one night when the moon was full the travellers came to a mountain crest
+and looked down upon the myriad light of Oonai. Peasants had told them they
+were near, and Iranon knew that this was not his native city of Aira. The lights of
+Oonai were not like those of Aira; for they were harsh and glaring, while the
+lights of Aira shine as softly and magically as shone the moonlight on the floor
+by the window where Iranon's mother once rocked him to sleep with song. But
+Oonai was a city of lutes and dancing, so Iranon and Romnod went down the
+steep slope that they might find men to whom sings and dreams would bring
+pleasure. And when they were come into the town they found rose-wreathed
+revellers bound from house to house and leaning from windows and balconies,
+who listened to the songs of Iranon and tossed him flowers and applauded when
+he was done. Then for a moment did Iranon believe he had found those who
+thought and felt even as he, though the town was not a hundredth as fair as Aira.
+
+When dawn came Iranon looked about with dismay, for the domes of Oonai
+were not golden in the sun, but grey and dismal. And the men of Oonai were
+pale with revelling, and dull with wine, and unlike the radient men of Aira. But
+because the people had thrown him blossoms and acclaimed his sings Iranon
+stayed on, and with him Romnod, who liked the revelry of the town and wore in
+his dark hair roses and myrtle. Often at night Iranon sang to the revellers, but he
+was always as before, crowned only in the vine of the mountains and
+remembering the marble streets of Aira and the hyaline Nithra. In the frescoed
+halls of the Monarch did he sing, upon a crystal dais raised over a floor that was
+a mirror, and as he sang, he brought pictures to his hearers till the floor seemed
+to reflect old, beautiful, and half-remembered things instead of the wine-
+reddened feasters who pelted him with roses. And the King bade him put away
+his tattered purple, and clothed him in satin and cloth-of-gold, with rings of
+green jade and bracelets of tinted ivory, and lodged him in a gilded and
+tapestried chamber on a bed of sweet carven wood with canopies and coverlets
+
+
+
+
+of flower-embroidered silk. Thus dwelt Iranon in Oonai, the city of lutes and
+dancing.
+
+It is not known how long Iranon tarried in Oonai, but one day the King brought
+to the palace some wild whirling dancers from the Liranian desert, and dusky
+flute-players from Drinen in the East, and after that the revellers threw their
+roses not so much at Iranon as at the dancers and flute-players. And day by day
+that Romnod who had been a small boy in granite Teloth grew coarser and
+redder with wine, till he dreamed less and less, amd listened with less delight to
+the songs of Iranon. But though Iranon was sad he ceased not to sing, and at
+evening told again of his dreams of Aira, the city of marble and beryl. Then one
+night the reddened and fattened Romnod snorted heavily amidst the poppied
+silks of his banquet-couch and died writhing, whilst Iranon, pale and slender,
+sang to himself in a far corner. And when Iranon had wept over the grave of
+Romnod and strewn it with green branches, such as Romnod used to love, he put
+aside his silks and gauds and went forgotten out of Oonai the city of lutes and
+dancing clad only in the ragged purple in which he had come, and garlanded
+with fresh vines from the mountains.
+
+Into the sunset wandered Iranon, seeking still for his native land and for men
+who would understand his songs and dreams. In all the cities of Cydathria and
+in the lands beyond the Bnazie desert gay-faced children laughed at his olden
+songs and tattered robe of purple; but Iranon stayed ever young, and wore
+wreathes upon his golden head whilst he sang of Aira, delight of the past and
+hope of the future.
+
+So came he one night to the squallid cot of an antique shepherd, bent and dirty,
+who kept flocks on a stony slope above a quicksand marsh. To this man Iranon
+spoke, as to so many others:
+
+"Canst thou tell me where I may find Aira, the city of marble and beryl, where
+flows the hyaline nithra and where the falls of the tiny Kra sing to the verdant
+valleys and hills forested with yath trees?" and the shepherd, hearing, looked
+long and strangely at Iranon, as if recalling something very far away in time, and
+noted each line of the stranger's face, and his golden hair, and his crown of vine-
+leaves. But he was old, and shook his head as he replied:
+
+"O stranger, i have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other names thou
+hast spoken, but they come to me from afar down the waste of long years. I heard
+them in my youth from the lips of a playmate, a beggar's boy given to strange
+dreams, who would weave long tales about the moon and the flowers and the
+west wind. We used to laugh at him, for we knew him from his birth though he
+thought himself a King's son. He was comely, even as thou, but full of folly and
+
+
+
+
+strangeness; and he ranaway when small to find those who would listen gladly
+to his songs and dreams. How often hath he sung to me of lands that never were,
+and things that never can be! Of Air a did he speak much; of Aira and the river
+Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra. There would he ever say he once dwelt as a
+Prince, though here we knew him from his birth.Nor was there ever a marble city
+of Aira, or those who could delight in strange songs, save in the dreams of mine
+old playmate Iranon who is gone."
+
+And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon cast on the
+marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is
+rocked to sleep at evening, there walked into the lethal quicksands a very old
+man in tattered purple, crowned with whithered vine-leaves and gazing ahead
+as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That
+night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.
+
+
+
+
+The Rats in the Walls
+
+Written August through September of 1923
+
+Pubhshed in March of 1924 in Weird Tales
+
+On 16 July 1923, 1 moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished
+his labours. The restoration had been a stupendous task, for little had remained
+of the deserted pile but a shell-like ruin; yet because it had been the seat of my
+ancestors, I let no expense deter me. The place had not been inhabited since the
+reign of James the First, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely
+unexplained, nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several
+servants; and driven forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son,
+my lineal progenitor and the only survivor of the abhorred line.
+
+With this sole heir denounced as a murderer, the estate had reverted to the
+crown, nor had the accused man made any attempt to exculpate himself or
+regain his property. Shaken by some horror greater than that of conscience or the
+law, and expressing only a frantic wish to exclude the ancient edifice from his
+sight and memory, Walter de la Poer, eleventh Baron Exham, fled to Virginia and
+there founded the family which by the next century had become known as
+Delapore.
+
+Exham Priory had remained untenanted, though later allotted to the estates of
+the Norrys family and much studied because of its peculiarly composite
+architecture; an architecture involving Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or
+Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order
+or blend of orders — Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends
+speak truly. This foundation was a very singular thing, being merged on one side
+with the solid limestone of the precipice from whose brink the priory overlooked
+a desolate valley three miles west of the village of Anchester.
+
+Architects and antiquarians loved to examine this strange relic of forgotten
+centuries, but the country folk hated it. They had hated it hundreds of years
+before, when my ancestors lived there, and they hated it now, with the moss and
+mould of abandonment on it. I had not been a day in Anchester before I knew I
+came of an accursed house. And this week workmen have blown up Exham
+Priory, and are busy obliterating the traces of its foundations. The bare statistics
+of my ancestry I had always known, together with the fact that my first
+American forebear had come to the colonies under a strange cloud. Of details,
+however, I had been kept wholly ignorant through the policy of reticence always
+maintained by the Delapores. Unlike our planter neighbours, we seldom boasted
+
+
+
+
+of crusading ancestors or other mediaeval and Renaissance heroes; nor was any
+kind of tradition handed down except what may have been recorded in the
+sealed envelope left before the Civil War by every squire to his eldest son for
+posthumous opening. The glories we cherished were those achieved since the
+migration; the glories of a proud and honourable, if somewhat reserved and
+unsocial Virginia line.
+
+During the war our fortunes were extinguished and our whole existence changed
+by the burning of Carfax, our home on the banks of the James. My grandfather,
+advanced in years, had perished in that incendiary outrage, and with him the
+envelope that had bound us all to the past. I can recall that fire today as I saw it
+then at the age of seven, with the federal soldiers shouting, the women
+screaming, and the negroes howling and praying. My father was in the army,
+defending Richmond, and after many formalities my mother and I were passed
+through the lines to join him.
+
+When the war ended we all moved north, whence my mother had come; and I
+grew to manhood, middle age, and ultimate wealth as a stolid Yankee. Neither
+my father nor I ever knew what our hereditary envelope had contained, and as I
+merged into the greyness of Massachusetts business life I lost all interest in the
+mysteries which evidently lurked far back in my family tree. Had I suspected
+their nature, how gladly I would have left Exham Priory to its moss, bats and
+cobwebs!
+
+My father died in 1904, but without any message to leave to me, or to my only
+child, Alfred, a motherless boy of ten. It was this boy who reversed the order of
+family information, for although I could give him only jesting conjectures about
+the past, he wrote me of some very interesting ancestral legends when the late
+war took him to England in 1917 as an aviation officer. Apparently the Delapores
+had a colourful and perhaps sinister history, for a friend of my son's, Capt.
+Edward Norrys of the Royal Flying Corps, dwelt near the family seat at
+Anchester and related some peasant superstitions which few novelists could
+equal for wildness and incredibility. Norrys himself, of course, did not take them
+so seriously; but they amused my son and made good material for his letters to
+me. It was this legendry which definitely turned my attention to my transatlantic
+heritage, and made me resolve to purchase and restore the family seat which
+Norrys showed to Alfred in its picturesque desertion, and offered to get for him
+at a surprisingly reasonable figure, since his own uncle was the present owner.
+
+I bought Exham Priory in 1918, but was almost immediately distracted from my
+plans of restoration by the return of my son as a maimed invalid. During the two
+years that he lived I thought of nothing but his care, having even placed my
+business under the direction of partners.
+
+
+
+
+In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired manufacturer no
+longer young, I resolved to divert my remaining years with my new possession.
+Visiting Anchester in December, I was entertained by Capt. Norrys, a plump,
+amiable young man who had thought much of my son, and secured his
+assistance in gathering plans and anecdotes to guide in the coming restoration.
+Exham Priory itself I saw without emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins
+covered with lichens and honeycombed with rooks' nests, perched perilously
+upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other interior features save the stone
+walls of the separate towers.
+
+As I gradually recovered the image of the edifice as it had been when my
+ancestors left it over three centuries before, I began to hire workmen for the
+reconstruction. In every case I was forced to go outside the immediate locality,
+for the Anchester villagers had an almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the
+place. The sentiment was so great that it was sometimes communicated to the
+outside labourers, causing numerous desertions; whilst its scope appeared to
+include both the priory and its ancient family.
+
+My son had told me that he was somewhat avoided during his visits because he
+was a de la Poer, and I now found myself subtly ostracized for a like reason until
+I convinced the peasants how little I knew of my heritage. Even then they
+sullenly disliked me, so that I had to collect most of the village traditions through
+the mediation of Norrys. What the people could not forgive, perhaps, was that I
+had come to restore a symbol so abhorrent to them; for, rationally or not, they
+viewed Exham Priory as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves.
+
+Piecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and supplementing
+them with the accounts of several savants who had studied the ruins, I deduced
+that Exham Priory stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-
+Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge. That
+indescribable rites had been celebrated there, few doubted, and there were
+unpleasant tales of the transference of these rites into the Cybele worship which
+the Romans had introduced.
+
+Inscriptions still visible in the sub-cellar bore such unmistakable letters as 'DIV...
+OPS ... MAGNA. MAT...', sign of the Magna Mater whose dark worship was
+once vainly forbidden to Roman citizens. Anchester had been the camp of the
+third Augustan legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that the temple of
+Cybele was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless
+ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest. Tales added that the fall of the
+old religion did not end the orgies at the temple, but that the priests lived on in
+the new faith without real change. Likewise was it said that the rites did not
+vanish with the Roman power, and that certain among the Saxons added to what
+
+
+
+
+remained of the temple, and gave it the essential outline it subsequently
+preserved, making it the centre of a cult feared through half the heptarchy.
+About 1000 A.D. the place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial
+stone priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by
+extensive gardens which needed no walls to exclude a frightened populace. It
+was never destroyed by the Danes, though after the Norman Conquest it must
+have declined tremendously, since there was no impediment when Henry the
+Third granted the site to my ancestor, Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham, in
+1261.
+
+Of my family before this date there is no evil report, but something strange must
+have happened then. In one chronicle there is a reference to a de la Poer as
+"cursed of God in 1307", whilst village legendry had nothing but evil and frantic
+fear to tell of the castle that went up on the foundations of the old temple and
+priory. The fireside tales were of the most grisly description, all the ghastlier
+because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness. They represented
+my ancestors as a race of hereditary daemons beside whom Gilles de Retz and
+the Marquis de Sade would seem the veriest tyros, and hinted whisperingly at
+their responsibility for the occasional disappearances of villagers through several
+generations.
+
+The worst characters, apparently, were the barons and their direct heirs; at least,
+most was whispered about these. If of healthier inclinations, it was said, an heir
+would early and mysteriously die to make way for another more typical scion.
+There seemed to be an inner cult in the family, presided over by the head of the
+house, and sometimes closed except to a few members. Temperament rather than
+ancestry was evidently the basis of this cult, for it was entered by several who
+married into the family. Lady Margaret Trevor from Cornwall, wife of Godfrey,
+the second son of the fifth baron, became a favourite bane of children all over the
+countryside, and the daemon heroine of a particularly horrible old ballad not yet
+extinct near the Welsh border. Preserved in balladry, too, though not illustrating
+the same point, is the hideous tale of Lady Mary de la Poer, who shortly after her
+marriage to the Earl of Shrewsfield was killed by him and his mother, both of the
+slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to whom they confessed what
+they dared not repeat to the world.
+
+These myths and ballads, typical as they were of crude superstition, repelled me
+greatly. Their persistence, and their application to so long a line of my ancestors,
+were especially annoying; whilst the imputations of monstrous habits proved
+unpleasantly reminiscent of the one known scandal of my immediate forebears
+— the case of my cousin, young Randolph Delapore of Carfax who went among
+the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.
+
+
+
+
+I was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and bowlings in tbe
+barren, windswept valley beneath the limestone cliff; of the graveyard stenches
+after the spring rains; of the floundering, squealing white thing on which Sir John
+Clave's horse had trod one night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had
+gone mad at what he saw in the priory in the full light of day. These things were
+hackneyed spectral lore, and I was at that time a pronounced sceptic. The
+accounts of vanished peasants were less to be dismissed, though not especially
+significant in view of mediaeval custom. Prying curiosity meant death, and more
+than one severed head had been publicly shown on the bastions — now effaced
+— around Exham Priory.
+
+A few of the tales were exceedingly picturesque, and made me wish I had learnt
+more of the comparative mythology in my youth. There was, for instance, the
+belief that a legion of bat-winged devils kept witches' sabbath each night at the
+priory — a legion whose sustenance might explain the disproportionate
+abundance of coarse vegetables harvested in the vast gardens. And, most vivid
+of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats — the scampering army of obscene
+vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that
+doomed it to desertion — the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all
+before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless
+human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army
+a whole separate cycle of myths revolves, for it scattered among the village
+homes and brought curses and horrors in its train.
+
+Such was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion, with an elderly
+obstinacy, the work of restoring my ancestral home. It must not be imagined for
+a moment that these tales formed my principal psychological environinent. On
+the other hand, I was constantly praised and encouraged by Capt. Norrys and
+the antiquarians who surrounded and aided me. When the task was done, over
+two years after its commencement, I viewed the great rooms, wainscoted walls,
+vaulted ceilings, mullioned windows, and broad staircases with a pride which
+fully compensated for the prodigious expense of the restoration.
+
+Every attribute of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced and the new parts
+blended perfectly with the original walls and foundations. The seat of my fathers
+was complete, and I looked forward to redeeming at last the local fame of the
+line which ended in me. I could reside here permanently, and prove that a de la
+Poer (for I had adopted again the original spelling of the name) need not be a
+fiend. My comfort was perhaps augmented by the fact that, although Exham
+Priory was mediaevally fitted, its interior was in truth wholly new and free from
+old vermin and old ghosts alike.
+
+
+
+
+As I have said, I moved in on 16 July 1923. My household consisted of seven
+servants and nine cats, of which latter species I am particularly fond. My eldest
+cat, "Nigger-Man", was seven years old and had come with me from my home in
+Bolton, Massachusetts; the others I had accumulated whilst living with Capt.
+Norrys' family during the restoration of the priory.
+
+For five days our routine proceeded with the utmost placidity, my time being
+spent mostly in the codification of old family data. I had now obtained some very
+circumstantial accounts of the final tragedy and flight of Walter de la Poer, which
+I conceived to be the probable contents of the hereditary paper lost in the fire at
+Carfax. It appeared that my ancestor was accused with much reason of having
+killed all the other members of his household, except four servant confederates,
+in their sleep, about two weeks after a shocking discovery which changed his
+whole demeanour, but which, except by implication, he disclosed to no one save
+perhaps the servants who assisted him and afterwards fled beyond reach.
+
+This deliberate slaughter, which included a father, three brothers, and two
+sisters, was largely condoned by the villagers, and so slackly treated by the law
+that its perpetrator escaped honoured, unharmed, and undisguised to Virginia;
+the general whispered sentiment being that he had purged the land of an
+immemorial curse. What discovery had prompted an act so terrible, I could
+scarcely even conjecture. Walter de la Poer must have known for years the
+sinister tales about his family, so that this material could have given him no fresh
+impulse. Had he, then, witnessed some appalling ancient rite, or stumbled upon
+some frightful and revealing symbol in the priory or its vicinity? He was reputed
+to have been a shy, gentle youth in England. In Virginia he seemed not so much
+hard or bitter as harassed and apprehensive. He was spoken of in the diary of
+another gentleman adventurer, Francis Harley of Bellview, as a man of
+unexampled justice, honour, and delicacy.
+
+On 22 July occurred the first incident which, though lightly dismissed at the
+time, takes on a preternatural significance in relation to later events. It was so
+simple as to be almost negligible, and could not possibly have been noticed
+under the circumstances; for it must be recalled that since I was in a building
+practically fresh and new except for the walls, and surrounded by a well-
+balanced staff of servitors, apprehension would have been absurd despite the
+locality.
+
+What I afterward remembered is merely this — that my old black cat, whose
+moods I know so well, was undoubtedly alert and anxious to an extent wholly
+out of keeping with his natural character. He roved from room to room, restless
+and disturbed, and sniffed constantly about the walls which formed part of the
+Gothic structure. I realize how trite this sounds — like the inevitable dog in the
+
+
+
+
+ghost story, which always growls before his master sees the sheeted figure — yet
+I cannot consistently suppress it.
+
+The following day a servant complained of restlessness among all the cats in the
+house. He came to me in my study, a lofty west room on the second storey, with
+groined arches, black oak panelling, and a triple Gothic window overlooking the
+limestone cliff and desolate valley; and even as he spoke I saw the jetty form of
+Nigger-Man creeping along the west wall and scratching at the new panels
+which overlaid the ancient stone.
+
+I told the man that there must be a singular odour or emanation from the old
+stonework, imperceptible to human senses, but affecting the delicate organs of
+cats even through the new woodwork. This I truly believed, and when the fellow
+suggested the presence of mice or rats, I mentioned that there had been no rats
+there for three hundred years, and that even the field mice of the surrounding
+country could hardly be found in these high walls, where they had never been
+known to stray. That afternoon I called on Capt. Norrys, and he assured me that
+it would be quite incredible for field mice to infest the priory in such a sudden
+and unprecedented fashion.
+
+That night, dispensing as usual with a valet, I retired in the west tower chamber
+which I had chosen as my own, reached from the study by a stone staircase and
+short gallery — the former partly ancient, the latter entirely restored. This room
+was circular, very high, and without wainscoting, being hung with arras which I
+had myself chosen in London.
+
+Seeing that Nigger-Man was with me, I shut the heavy Gothic door and retired
+by the light of the electric bulbs which so cleverly counterfeited candles, finally
+switching off the light and sinking on the carved and canopied four-poster, with
+the venerable cat in his accustomed place across my feet. I did not draw the
+curtains, but gazed out at the narrow window which I faced. There was a
+suspicion of aurora in the sky, and the delicate traceries of the window were
+pleasantly silhouetted.
+
+At some time I must have fallen quietly asleep, for I recall a distinct sense of
+leaving strange dreams, when the cat started violently from his placid position. I
+saw him in the faint auroral glow, head strained forward, fore feet on my ankles,
+and hind feet stretched behind. He was looking intensely at a point on the wall
+somewhat west of the window, a point which to my eye had nothing to mark it,
+but toward which all my attention was now directed.
+
+And as I watched, I knew that Nigger-Man was not vainly excited. Whether the
+arras actually moved I cannot say. I think it did, very slightly. But what I can
+
+
+
+
+swear to is that behind it I heard a low, distinct scurrying as of rats or mice. In a
+moment the cat had jumped bodily on the screening tapestry, bringing the
+affected section to the floor with his weight, and exposing a damp, ancient wall
+of stone; patched here and there by the restorers, and devoid of any trace of
+rodent prowlers.
+
+Nigger-Man raced up and down the floor by this part of the wall, clawing the
+fallen arras and seemingly trying at times to insert a paw between the wall and
+the oaken floor. He found nothing, and after a time returned wearily to his place
+across my feet. I had not moved, but I did not sleep again that night.
+
+In the morning I questioned all the servants, and found that none of them had
+noticed anything unusual, save that the cook remembered the actions of a cat
+which had rested on her windowsill. This cat had howled at some unknown
+hour of the night, awaking the cook in time for her to see him dart purposefully
+out of the open door down the stairs. I drowsed away the noontime, and in the
+afternoon called again on Capt. Norrys, who became exceedingly interested in
+what I told him. The odd incidents — so slight yet so curious — appealed to his
+sense of the picturesque and elicited from him a number of reminiscenses of local
+ghostly lore. We were genuinely perplexed at the presence of rats, and Norrys
+lent me some traps and Paris green, which I had the servants place in strategic
+localities when I returned.
+
+I retired early, being very sleepy, but was harassed by dreams of the most
+horrible sort. I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit
+grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove
+about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me
+with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his
+task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to
+devouring beasts and man alike.
+
+From this terrific vision I was abruptly awakened by the motions of Nigger-Man,
+who had been sleeping as usual across my feet. This time I did not have to
+question the source of his snarls and hisses, and of the fear which made him sink
+his claws into my ankle, unconscious of their effect; for on every side of the
+chamber the walls were alive with nauseous sound — the veminous slithering of
+ravenous, gigantic rats. There was now no aurora to show the state of the arras
+— the fallen section of which had been replaced - but I was not too frightened to
+switch on the light.
+
+As the bulbs leapt into radiance I saw a hideous shaking all over the tapestry,
+causing the somewhat peculiar designs to execute a singular dance of death. This
+motion disappeared almost at once, and the sound with it. Springing out of bed, I
+
+
+
+
+poked at the arras with the long handle of a warming-pan that rested near, and
+lifted one section to see what lay beneath. There was nothing but the patched
+stone wall, and even the cat had lost his tense realization of abnormal presences.
+When I examined the circular trap that had been placed in the room, I found all
+of the openings sprung, though no trace remained of what had been caught and
+had escaped.
+
+Further sleep was out of the question, so lighting a candle, I opened the door and
+went out in the gallery towards the stairs to my study, Nigger-Man following at
+my heels. Before we had reached the stone steps, however, the cat darted ahead
+of me and vanished down the ancient flight. As I descended the stairs myself, I
+became suddenly aware of sounds in the great room below; sounds of a nature
+which could not be mistaken.
+
+The oak-panelled walls were alive with rats, scampering and milling whilst
+Nigger-Man was racing about with the fury of a baffled hunter. Reaching the
+bottom, I switched on the light, which did not this time cause the noise to
+subside. The rats continued their riot, stampeding with such force and
+distinctness that I could finally assign to their motions a definite direction. These
+creatures, in numbers apparently inexhaustible, were engaged in one stupendous
+migration from inconceivable heights to some depth conceivably or
+inconceivably below.
+
+I now heard steps in the corridor, and in another moment two servants pushed
+open the massive door. They were searching the house for some unknown source
+of disturbance which had thrown all the cats into a snarling panic and caused
+them to plunge precipitately down several flights of stairs and squat, yowling,
+before the closed door to the sub-cellar. I asked them if they had heard the rats,
+but they replied in the negative. And when I turned to call their attention to the
+sounds in the panels, I realized that the noise had ceased.
+
+With the two men, I went down to the door of the sub-cellar, but found the cats
+already dispersed. Later I resolved to explore the crypt below, but for the present
+I merely made a round of the traps. All were sprung, yet all were tenantless.
+Satisfying myself that no one had heard the rats save the felines and me, I sat in
+my study till morning, thinking profoundly and recalling every scrap of legend I
+had unearthed concerning the building I inhabited. I slept some in the forenoon,
+leaning back in the one comfortable library chair which my mediaeval plan of
+furnishing could not banish. Later I telephoned to Capt. Norrys, who came over
+and helped me explore the sub-cellar.
+
+Absolutely nothing untoward was found, although we could not repress a thrill
+at the knowledge that this vault was built by Roman hands. Every low arch and
+
+
+
+
+massive pillar was Roman — not the debased Romanesque of the bungling
+Saxons, but the severe and harmonious classicism of the age of the Caesars;
+indeed, the walls abounded with inscriptions familiar to the antiquarians who
+had repeatedly explored the place — things like "P. GETAE. PROP... TEMP...
+DONA. . ." and "L. PRAEG. . . VS. . . PONTIFI. . . ATYS. . ."
+
+The reference to Atys made me shiver, for I had read Catullus and knew
+something of the hideous rites of the Eastern god, whose worship was so mixed
+with that of Cybele. Norrys and I, by the light of lanterns, tried to interpret the
+odd and nearly effaced designs on certain irregularly rectangular blocks of stone
+generally held to be altars, but could make nothing of them. We remembered
+that one pattern, a sort of rayed sun, was held by students to imply a non-Roman
+origin suggesting that these altars had merely been adopted by the Roman
+priests from some older and perhaps aboriginal temple on the same site. On one
+of these blocks were some brown stains which made me wonder. The largest, in
+the centre of the room, had certain features on the upper surface which indicated
+its connection with fire — probably burnt offerings.
+
+Such were the sights in that crypt before whose door the cats howled, and where
+Norrys and I now determined to pass the night. Couches were brought down by
+the servants, who were told not to mind any nocturnal actions of the cats, and
+Nigger-Man was admitted as much for help as for companionship. We decided
+to keep the great oak door — a modern replica with slits for ventilation — tightly
+closed; and, with this attended to, we retired with lanterns still burning to await
+whatever might occur.
+
+The vault was very deep in the foundations of the priory, and undoubtedly far
+down on the face of the beetling limestone cliff overlooking the waste valley.
+That it had been the goal of the scuffling and unexplainable rats I could not
+doubt, though why, I could not tell. As we lay there expectantly, I found my vigil
+occasionally mixed with half-formed dreams from which the uneasy motions of
+the cat across my feet would rouse me.
+
+These dreams were not wholesome, but horribly like the one I had had the night
+before. I saw again the twilit grotto, and the swineherd with his unmentionable
+fungous beasts wallowing in filth, and as I looked at these things they seemed
+nearer and more distinct — so distinct that I could almost observe their features.
+Then I did observe the flabby features of one of them — and awakened with such
+a scream that Nigger-Man started up, whilst Capt. Norrys, who had not slept,
+laughed considerably. Norrys might have laughed more — or perhaps less —
+had he known what it was that made me scream. But I did not remember myself
+till later. Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
+
+
+
+
+Norrys waked me when the phenomena began. Out of the same frightful dream I
+was called by his gentle shaking and his urging to listen to the cats. Indeed, there
+was much to listen to, for beyond the closed door at the head of the stone steps
+was a veritable nightmare of feline yelling and clawing, whilst Nigger-Man,
+unmindful of his kindred outside, was running excitedly round the bare stone
+walls, in which I heard the same babel of scurrying rats that had troubled me the
+night before.
+
+An acute terror now rose within me, for here were anomalies which nothing
+normal could well explain. These rats, if not the creatures of a madness which I
+shared with the cats alone, must be burrowing and sliding in Roman walls I had
+thought to be solid limestone blocks ... unless perhaps the action of water
+through more than seventeen centuries had eaten winding tunnels which rodent
+bodies had worn clear and ample . . . But even so, the spectral horror was no less;
+for if these were living vermin why did not Norrys hear their disgusting
+commotion? Why did he urge me to watch Nigger-Man and listen to the cats
+outside, and why did he guess wildly and vaguely at what could have aroused
+them?
+
+By the time I had managed to tell him, as rationally as I could, what I thought I
+was hearing, my ears gave me the last fading impression of scurrying; which had
+retreated still downward, far underneath this deepest of sub-cellars till it seemed
+as if the whole cliff below were riddled with questing rats. Norrys was not as
+sceptical as I had anticipated, but instead seemed profoundly moved. He
+motioned to me to notice that the cats at the door had ceased their clamour, as if
+giving up the rats for lost; whilst Nigger-Man had a burst of renewed
+restlessness, and was clawing frantically around the bottom of the large stone
+altar in the centre of the room, which was nearer Norrys' couch than mine.
+
+My fear of the unknown was at this point very great. Something astounding had
+occurred, and I saw that Capt. Norrys, a younger, stouter, and presumably more
+naturally materialistic man, was affected fully as much as myself — perhaps
+because of his lifelong and intimate familiarity with local legend. We could for
+the moment do nothing but watch the old black cat as he pawed with decreasing
+fervour at the base of the altar, occasionally looking up and mewing to me in that
+persuasive manner which he used when he wished me to perform some favour
+for him.
+
+Norrys now took a lantern close to the altar and examined the place where
+Nigger-Man was pawing; silently kneeling and scraping away the lichens of the
+centuries which joined the massive pre-Roman block to the tessellated floor. He
+did not find anything, and was about to abandon his efforts when I noticed a
+
+
+
+
+trivial circumstance which made me shudder, even though it impHed nothing
+more than I had aheady imagined.
+
+I told him of it, and we both looked at its almost imperceptible manifestation
+with the fixedness of fascinated discovery and acknowledgment. It was only this
+— that the flame of the lantern set down near the altar was slightly but certainly
+flickering from a draught of air which it had not before received, and which
+came indubitably from the crevice between floor and altar where Norrys was
+scraping away the lichens.
+
+We spent the rest of the night in the brilliantly-lighted study, nervously
+discussing what we should do next. The discovery that some vault deeper than
+the deepest known masonry of the Romans underlay this accursed pile, some
+vault unsuspected by the curious antiquarians of three centuries, would have
+been sufficient to excite us without any background of the sinister. As it was, the
+fascination became two-fold; and we paused in doubt whether to abandon our
+search and quit the priory forever in superstitious caution, or to gratify our sense
+of adventure and brave whatever horrors might await us in the unknown depths.
+
+By morning we had compromised, and decided to go to London to gather a
+group of archaeologists and scientific men fit to cope with the mystery. It should
+be mentioned that before leaving the sub-cellar we had vainly tried to move the
+central altar which we now recognized as the gate to a new pit of nameless fear.
+What secret would open the gate, wiser men than we would have to find.
+
+During many days in London Capt. Norrys and I presented our facts,
+conjectures, and legendary anecdotes to five eminent authorities, all men who
+could be trusted to respect any family disclosures which future explorations
+might develop. We found most of them little disposed to scoff but, instead,
+intensely interested and sincerely sympathetic. It is hardly necessary to name
+them all, but I may say that they included Sir William Brinton, whose
+excavations in the Troad excited most of the world in their day. As we all took
+the train for Anchester I felt myself poised on the brink of frightful revelations, a
+sensation symbolized by the air of mourning among the many Americans at the
+unexpected death of the President on the other side of the world.
+
+On the evening of 7 August we reached Exham Priory, where the servants
+assured me that nothing unusual had occurred. The cats, even old Nigger-Man,
+had been perfectly placid, and not a trap in the house had been sprung. We were
+to begin exploring on the following dlay, awaiting which I assigned well-
+appointed rooms to all my guests.
+
+
+
+
+I myself retired in my own tower chamber, with Nigger-Man across my feet.
+Sleep came quickly, but hideous dreams assailed me. There was a vision of a
+Roman feast like that of Trimalchio, with a horror in a covered platter. Then
+came that damnable, recurrent thing about the swineherd and his filthy drove in
+the twilit grotto. Yet when I awoke it was full daylight, with normal sounds in
+the house below. The rats, living or spectral, had not troubled me; and Nigger-
+Man was still quietly asleep. On going down, I found that the same tranquillity
+had prevailed elsewhere; a condition which one of the assembled servants — a
+fellow named Thornton, devoted to the psychic — rather absurdly laid to the fact
+that I had now been shown the thing which certain forces had wished to show
+me.
+
+All was now ready, and at 11 A.M. our entire group of seven men, bearing
+powerful electric searchlights and implements of excavation, went down to the
+sub-cellar and bolted the door behind us. Nigger-Man was with us, for the
+investigators found no occasion to depise his excitability, and were indeed
+anxious that he be present in case of obscure rodent manifestations. We noted the
+Roman inscriptions and unknown altar designs only briefly, for three of the
+savants had already seen them, and all knew their characteristics. Prime
+attention was paid to the momentous central altar, and within an hour Sir
+William Brinton had caused it to tilt backward, balanced by some unknown
+species of counterweight.
+
+There now lay revealed such a horror as would have overwhelmed us had we
+not been prepared. Through a nearly square opening in the tiled floor, sprawling
+on a flight of stone steps so prodigiously worn that it was little more than an
+inclined plane at the centre, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones.
+Those which retained their collocation as skeletons showed attitudes of panic
+fear, and over all were the marks of rodent gnawing. The skulls denoted nothing
+short of utter idiocy, cretinism, or primitive semi-apedom.
+
+Above the hellishly littered steps arched a descending passage seemingly
+chiselled from the solid rock, and conducting a current of air. This current was
+not a sudden and noxious rush as from a closed vault, but a cool breeze with
+something of freshness in it. We did not pause long, but shiveringly began to
+clear a passage down the steps. It was then that Sir William, examining the hewn
+walls, made the odd observation that the passage, according to the direction of
+the strokes, must have been chiselled from beneath.
+
+I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words. After ploughing down a
+few steps amidst the gnawled bones we saw that there was light ahead; not any
+mystic phosphorescence, but a filtered daylight which could not come except
+from unknown fissures in the cliff that over-looked the waste valley. That such
+
+
+
+
+fissures had escaped notice from outside was hardly remarkable, for not only is
+the valley wholly uninhabited, but the cliff is so high and beetling that only an
+aeronaut could study its face in detail. A few steps more, and our breaths were
+literally snatched from us by what we saw; so literally that Thornton, the psychic
+investigator, actually fainted in the arms of the dazed mem who stood behind
+him. Norrys, his plump face utterly white and flabby, simply cried out
+inarticulately; whilst I think that what I did was to gasp or hiss, and cover my
+eyes.
+
+The man behind me — the only one of the party older than I — croaked the
+hackneyed "My God!" in the most cracked voice I ever heard. Of seven
+cultivated men, only Sir William Brinton retained his composure, a thing the
+more to his credit because he led the party and must have seen the sight first.
+
+It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye
+could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion.
+There were buildings and other architectural remains — in one terrified glance I
+saw a weird pattern of tumuli, a savage circle of monoliths, a low-domed Roman
+ruin, a sprawling Saxon pile, and an early English edifice of wood — but all these
+were dwarfed by the ghoulish spectacle presented by the general surface of the
+ground. For yards about the steps extended an insane tangle of human bones, or
+bones at least as human as those on the steps. Like a foamy sea they stretched,
+some fallen apart, but others wholly or partly articulated as skeletons; these latter
+invariably in postures of daemoniac frenzy, either fighting off some menace or
+clutching other forms with cannibal intent.
+
+When Dr Trask, the anthropologist, stopped to classify the skulls, he found a
+degraded mixture which utterly baffled him. They were mostly lower than the
+Piltdown man in the scale of evolution, but in every case definitely human. Many
+were of higher grade, and a very few were the skulls of supremely and
+sensitively developed types. All the bones were gnawed, mostly by rats, but
+somewhat by others of the half-human drove. Mixed with them were many tiny
+hones of rats — fallen members of the lethal army which closed the ancient epic.
+
+I wonder that any man among us lived and kept his sanity through that hideous
+day of discovery. Not Hoffman nor Huysmans could conceive a scene more
+wildly incredible, more frenetically repellent, or more Gothically grotesque than
+the twilit grotto through which we seven staggered; each stumbling on
+revelation after revelation, and trying to keep for the nonce from thinking of the
+events which must have taken place there three hundred, or a thousand, or two
+thousand or ten thousand years ago. It was the antechamber of hell, and poor
+Thornton fainted again when Trask told him that some of the skeleton things
+
+
+
+
+must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or more
+generations.
+
+Horror piled on horror as we began to interpret the architectural remains. The
+quadruped things — with their occasional recruits from the biped class — had
+been kept in stone pens, out of which they must have broken in their last
+delirium of hunger or rat-fear. There had been great herds of them, evidently
+fattened on the coarse vegetables whose remains could be found as a sort of
+poisonous ensilage at the bottom of the huge stone bins older than Rome. I knew
+now why my ancestors had had such excessive gardens — would to heaven I
+could forget! The purpose of the herds I did not have to ask.
+
+Sir William, standing with his searchlight in the Roman ruin, translated aloud
+the most shocking ritual I have ever known; and told of the diet of the
+antediluvian cult which the priests of Cybele found and mingled with their own.
+Norrys, used as he was to the trenches, could not walk straight when he came
+out of the English building. It was a butcher shop and kitchen — he had expected
+that — but it was too much to see familiar English implements in such a place,
+and to read familiar English graffiti there, some as recent as 1610. I could not go
+in that building — that building whose daemon activities were stopped only by
+the dagger of my ancestor Walter de la Poer.
+
+What I did venture to enter was the low Saxon building whose oaken door had
+fallen, and there I found a terrible row of ten stone cells with rusty bars. Three
+had tenants, all skeletons of high grade, and on the bony forefinger of one I
+found a seal ring with my own coat-of-arms. Sir William found a vault with far
+older cells below the Roman chapel, but these cells were empty. Below them was
+a low crypt with cases of formally arranged bones, some of them bearing terrible
+parallel inscriptions carved in Latin, Greek, and the tongue of Phyrgia.
+
+Meanwhile, Dr Trask had opened one of the prehistoric tumuli, and brought to
+light skulls which were slightly more human than a gorilla's, and which bore
+indescribably ideographic carvings. Through all this horror my cat stalked
+unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones,
+and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.
+
+Having grasped to some slight degree the frightful revelations of this twilit area
+— an area so hideously foreshadowed by my recurrent dream — we turned to
+that apparently boundless depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from
+the cliff could penetrate. We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds
+yawn beyond the little distance we went, for it was decided that such secrets are
+not good for mankind. But there was plenty to engross us close at hand, for we
+had not gone far before the searchlights showed that accursed infinity of pits in
+
+
+
+
+which the rats had feasted, and whose sudden lack of replenishment had driven
+the ravenous rodent army first to turn on the living herds of starving things, and
+then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy of devastation which the
+peasants will never forget.
+
+God! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls! Those
+nightmare chasms choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman, and English
+bones of countless unhallowed centuries! Some of them were full, and none can
+say how deep they had once been. Others were still bottomless to our
+searchlights, and peopled by unnamable fancies. What, I thought, of the hapless
+rats that stumbled into such traps amidst the blackness of their quests in this
+grisly Tartarus?
+
+Once my foot slipped near a horribly yawning brink, and I had a moment of
+ecstatic fear. I must have been musing a long time, for I could not see any of the
+party but plump Capt. Norrys. Then there came a sound from that inky,
+boundless, farther distance that I thought I knew; and I saw my old black cat dart
+past me like a winged Egyptian god, straight into the illimitable gulf of the
+unknown. But I was not far behind, for there was no doubt after another second.
+It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new
+horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of
+earth's centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the
+darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.
+
+My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but
+above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising,
+as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under the
+endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea.
+
+Something bumped into me — something soft and plump. It must have been the
+rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living
+. . . Why shouldn't rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things? . . .
+The war ate my boy, damn them all ... and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and
+burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret ... No, no, I tell you, I am not that
+daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys' fat face on
+that flabby fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy
+died! . . . Shall a Norrys hold the land of a de la Poer? . . . It's voodoo, I tell you . . .
+that spotted snake ... Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my
+family do! ... 'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust ... wolde ye
+swynke me thilke wys?... Magna Mater! Magna Mater!... Atys... Dia ad
+aghaidh's ad aodaun... agus bas dunarch ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-
+sa! . . . Ungl unl. . . rrlh . . . chchch. . .
+
+
+
+
+This is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three
+hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of
+Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat. Now they have
+blown up Exham Priory, taken my Nigger-Man away from me, and shut me into
+this barred room at Hanwell with fearful whispers about my heredity and
+experience. Thornton is in the next room, but they prevent me from talking to
+him. They are trying, too, to suppress most of the facts concerning the priory.
+When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of this hideous thing, but they must
+know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering
+scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that
+race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors
+than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the
+walls.
+
+
+
+
+The Shadow Out of Time
+
+Written in March of 1935
+
+Published in June of 1936 in Astounding Stories
+
+
+After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate
+conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch
+for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of 17-
+18 July 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an
+hallucination - for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism
+was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.
+
+If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the
+cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest
+mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific,
+lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose
+monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.
+
+It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final
+abandonment of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown,
+primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
+
+Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as
+has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had
+sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifull there is no proof, for in my
+fright I lost the awesome object which would - if real and brought out of that
+noxious abyss - have formed irrefutable evidence.
+
+When I came upon the horror I was alone - and I have up to now told no one
+about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and
+the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate
+some definite statement - not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to
+warn such others as may read it seriously.
+
+These pages - much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the
+general and scientific press - are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing
+me home. I shall give them to my son. Professor Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic
+University - the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer
+amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of
+
+
+
+
+all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful
+night.
+
+I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have
+the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with
+him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey.
+
+He can do anything that he thinks best with this account - showing it, with
+suitable comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is
+for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case
+that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its
+background.
+
+My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales
+of a generation back - or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or
+seven years ago - will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the
+details of my strange amnesia in 1908-13, and much was made of the traditions of
+horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurked behind the ancient Massachusetts
+town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known
+that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early
+life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly
+upon me from outside sources.
+
+It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-
+haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows - though even
+this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study.
+But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether
+normal. What came, came from somewhere else - where I even now hesitate to
+assert in plain words.
+
+I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old
+Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill - at the old homestead in
+Boardman Street near Golden Hill - and did not go to Arkham till I entered
+Miskatonic University as instructor of political economy in 1895.
+
+For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar
+of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and Hannah were
+born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate
+professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either
+occultism or abnormal psychology.
+
+It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was
+quite sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering visions of
+
+
+
+
+several, hours previous - chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because
+they were so unprecedented - must have formed premonitory symptoms. My
+head was aching, and I had a singular feeling - altogether new to me - that some
+one else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.
+
+The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in
+Political Economy VI - history and present tendencies of economics - for juniors
+and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel
+that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.
+
+My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that
+something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair,
+in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties
+again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four
+months, and thirteen days.
+
+It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no sign
+of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my home at 27
+Crane Street, and given the best of medical attention.
+
+At 3 A.M. May my eyes opened and began to speak and my family were
+thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear
+that I had no remembrance of my identity and my past, though for some reason
+seemed anxious to conceal his lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at
+the persons around me, and the flections of my facial muscles were altogether
+unfamiliar.
+
+Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily
+and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had
+laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was
+barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious
+archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast.
+
+Of the latter, one in particular was very potently - even terrifiedly - recalled by
+the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period
+such a phrase began to have an actual currency - first in England and then in the
+United States - and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it
+reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham
+patient of 1908.
+
+Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-
+education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because
+
+
+
+
+of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time
+kept under strict medical care.
+
+When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it
+openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the
+doctors that I lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of
+amnesia accepted as a natural thing.
+
+They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history,
+science, art, language, and folklore - some of them tremendously abstruse, and
+some childishly simple - which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my
+consciousness.
+
+At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many
+almost unknown sorts of knowledge - a command which I seemed to wish to
+hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to
+specific events in dim ages outside of the range of accepted history - passing off
+such references as a jest when I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of
+speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual fright.
+
+These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their
+vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of
+the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to
+absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a
+studious traveller from a far, foreign land.
+
+As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly
+began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and
+European Universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few
+years.
+
+I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a
+mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a
+typical example of secondary personality - even though I seemed to puzzle the
+lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptoms or some queer trace of
+carefully veiled mockery.
+
+Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and
+speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met, as if I were
+a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a
+black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance
+was oddly widespread and persistent.
+
+
+
+
+My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking
+my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was
+some utter alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal
+divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even after my return to normality
+in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter,
+neither of whom I have ever seen since.
+
+Only my second son, Wingate, seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion
+which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only
+eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did
+return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years
+he helped me with the studies to which I was driven, and today, at thirty-five, he
+is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic.
+
+But I do not wonder at the horror caused - for certainly, the mind, voice, and
+facial expression of the being that awakened on 15 May 1908, were not those of
+Nathaniel Wingate Peastee.
+
+I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may
+glean I the outward essentials - as I largely had to do - from files of old
+newspapers and scientific journals.
+
+I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely,
+in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were
+singular in the extreme, involving long visits to remote and desolate places.
+
+In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much attention
+through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on
+those journeys I have never been able to learn.
+
+During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic, north of
+Spitzbergen, afterward showing signs of disappointment.
+
+Later in that year I spent weeks - alone beyond the limits of previous or
+subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia
+- black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be
+considered.
+
+My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation,
+as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my
+own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was
+phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by glancing over it as
+
+
+
+
+fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in
+an instant was veritably awesome.
+
+At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the
+thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimize
+displays of this faculty.
+
+Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and
+scholars suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world
+hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless
+stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading - for the consuUtation of
+rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly.
+
+There is tangible proof - in the form of marginal notes - that I went minutely
+through such things as the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn's
+De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving
+fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the
+mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave
+of underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.
+
+In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest,
+and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I
+spoke of returning memories of my earlier life - though most auditors judged me
+insincere, since all the recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have
+been learned from my old private papers.
+
+About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and re-opened my long-
+closed house in Crane Street. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious
+aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in
+Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of any one intelligent
+enough to analyse it.
+
+Those who did see it - a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper - say that
+it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirros, though only about two feet
+tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and
+convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.
+
+On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper and the
+maid until noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean,
+dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile.
+
+
+
+
+It was about one A.M. that the hghts were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a poHceman
+observed the place in darkness, but the strager's motor still at the curb. By 4
+o'clock the motor was certainly gone.
+
+It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr Wilson
+to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call - a long-distance
+one - was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no
+sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.
+
+When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting room
+
+- in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished top were
+scratches showing where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was
+gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean
+foreigner had taken it away.
+
+In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning of the
+every remainmg scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the
+amnesia. Dr Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after a hypodermic
+injection it became more regular.
+
+At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto masklike face
+began to show signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that the expression was
+not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal
+self. About 11.30 I muttered some very curious syllables - syllables which seemed
+unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something.
+Then, just afternoon - the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned
+
+- I began to mutter in English.
+
+"- of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend
+toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of
+prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms
+perhaps the apex of -"
+
+Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back - a spirit in whose time scale it was
+still Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the
+battered desk on the platform.
+
+
+My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of
+over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case
+there were countless matters to be adjusted.
+
+
+
+
+What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to
+view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining custody of my
+second son, Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and
+endeavoured to resume my teaching - my old professorship having been kindly
+offered me by the college.
+
+I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that
+time I realized how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane -
+I hoped - and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous
+energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me,
+and when the outbreak of the World War turned my mind to history I found
+myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion.
+
+My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and
+simultaneousness - seemed subtly disordered so that I formed chimerical notions
+about living in one age and casting one's mind all over etenity for knowledge of
+past and future ages.
+
+The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off
+consequences - as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it
+in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with
+much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set a
+against them.
+
+When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied
+responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the
+mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of
+relativity - then discussed only in learned circles - which were later to become so
+famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of
+a mere dimension.
+
+But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my
+regular work in 1915. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying shape -
+giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of
+exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed had had suffered
+displacement, been an in-
+
+Thus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the whereabouts
+of my true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious
+knowledge and strange conduct of my body's late tenant troubled me more and
+more as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines.
+
+
+
+
+Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with some
+background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my
+subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing
+on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark years.
+
+Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams - and
+these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would
+regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted
+psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in
+order to see how typical or nontypical such visions might be among amnesia
+victims.
+
+My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental
+specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split
+personalities from the days of daemonic-possession legends to the medically
+realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled me.
+
+I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the overwhelming
+bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts
+which for years baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own
+experience. Some of them were bits of ancient folklore; others were case histories
+in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in
+standard histories.
+
+It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare,
+instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginnig of men's
+annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases, others none - or at
+least none whose record survived.
+
+The essence was always the same - a person of keen thoughtfulness seized a
+strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien
+existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, an later by a
+wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropologic
+knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly
+abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of rightful consciousness,
+intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting
+fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out.
+
+And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own - even in some of the
+smallest particulars - left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical
+nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous
+familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too
+morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific
+
+
+
+
+mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house before the
+second change.
+
+Another thing that worried me during my investigation was the somewhat
+greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive gHmpse of the typical
+nightmares was afforded to persons not visited well-defined amnesia.
+
+These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less - some so primitive that
+they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles forabnormal scholarship and
+preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien
+force - then a backward lapse, and a thin, swift-fading memory of unhuman
+horrors.
+
+There had been at least three such cases during the past half century - one only
+fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from
+some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister
+experiments of a kind and authorship uttely beyond same belief?
+
+Such were a few of the forless speculations of my weaker hours - fancies abetted
+by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain
+persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims
+and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and
+awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as mine.
+
+Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I
+still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savor of madness, and at times I
+believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting
+those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the
+subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might
+give rise to strange imaginative vagaries.
+
+This indeed - though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more
+plausible - was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for
+parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances
+sometimes discovered.
+
+They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic
+disorders. My course in trying to track down and analyze it, instead of vaintly
+seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the
+best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as
+had studied me during my possession by the other personality.
+
+
+
+
+My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract
+matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and
+inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my
+own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably
+abhorrent.
+
+When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or
+blue clothing, I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I
+had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was
+always shaved at the barber's.
+
+It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the
+fleeting, visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation
+had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my
+memory.
+
+I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible
+meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful
+influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came
+that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place
+the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.
+
+The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I
+would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone aroinings
+were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene
+might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as
+by the Romans.
+
+There were colossal, round windows and high, arched doors, and pedestals or
+tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood
+lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with
+strange hieroglyphs on their backs.
+
+The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear
+mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same
+characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a
+monstrous megathic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-
+bottomed courses which rested upon them.
+
+There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books,
+papers, and what seemed to be writing materials - oddly figured jars of a
+purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at
+times able to view them from above. On some of them were great globes of
+
+
+
+
+luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous
+tubes and metal rods.
+
+The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared
+not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was he waving tops of
+singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while
+rugs and hangings were entirely lacking.
+
+Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up
+and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were
+no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of
+the structures through which I floated must have towered in the sky for
+thousands of feet.
+
+There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trapdoors,
+sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special
+peril.
+
+I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I
+felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul
+with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.
+
+Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from
+the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high,
+scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led.
+
+There were, almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and
+ranged along paved roads fully 200 feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but
+few were less than 500 feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so
+limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some
+shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens.
+
+They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the
+oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs
+were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes
+there were terraces and higher levels, and wide, cleared spaces amidst the
+gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could
+not resolve this impression into details.
+
+In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far
+above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature
+and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a
+bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their
+
+
+
+
+rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or
+other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildinigs -
+all crumbling with the weathering of aeons - which resembled these dark,
+cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-
+cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear,
+like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.
+
+The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with
+bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with
+curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated -
+some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor.
+
+Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like
+trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous
+cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect.
+
+Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognizable, blooming in geometrical
+beds and at large among the greenery.
+
+In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more blossoms of
+most offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of
+inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns
+bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the
+larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the
+irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more
+evidences of the topiary art.
+
+The sides were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to
+witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of
+the sun - which looked abnormally large - and of the moon, whose markings
+held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When
+- very rarely - the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which
+were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated,
+but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could
+recognize, I felt I must be in the earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of
+Capricorn.
+
+The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great
+jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside
+the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now
+and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early
+visions never resolved.
+
+
+
+
+By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings
+over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads
+through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks,
+and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me.
+
+I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and clearings
+where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so
+dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation.
+
+Once I saw an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic ruins
+whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped
+towers in the haunting city.
+
+And once I saw the sea - a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone
+piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless sugggestions of
+shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was vexed ith anomalous
+spoutings.
+
+
+As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their
+terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger
+things - things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures,and
+reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of
+sleep.
+
+For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before
+been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have
+come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to
+reflect a common text book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the
+primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago - the world of the
+Permian or Triassic age.
+
+In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with
+accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the
+aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing
+abstract disturbances - the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions
+regarding time, and sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary
+personality of 1908-13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my
+own person.
+
+As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a
+thousandfold - until by October, 1915, 1 felt I must do something. It was then that
+
+
+
+
+I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I
+might thereby obectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip.
+
+However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It
+disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated;
+especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit of any geological
+knowledge - and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes - on the subjects'
+part.
+
+What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and
+explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens
+- and other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough,
+but what was hinted or asserted by some of the other dreamers savored of
+madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused to
+milder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed
+my course, on he whole, an advisable one.
+
+I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son
+Wingate did the same - his studies leading eventually to his present
+professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile,
+my examination of medical, historical, and anthropological records became
+indefatigable, involving travels to distant libraries, and finally including even a
+reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary
+personality had been so disturbingly interested.
+
+Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, and
+I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections
+of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly
+unhuman.
+
+These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all
+of which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic,
+facility. One note appended to von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however,
+was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the
+same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no recognized human
+pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably aldn to the
+characters constantly met with in my dreams - characters whose meaning I
+would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew, or was just on the brink of
+recalling.
+
+To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of
+previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all
+of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This
+
+
+
+
+despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages
+involved.
+
+Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and
+medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose
+scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me, the fact
+that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have
+brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive
+fables, I could not even guess; but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis
+existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion.
+
+Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth pattern - but afterward the
+fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and
+coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales
+during my memory lapse - my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural,
+then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured
+and moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state?
+
+A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the
+pre-human world, especially those Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs of
+time and forming part of the lore of modern theosopists.
+
+Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is
+only one - perhaps the least - of the highly evolved and dominant races of this
+planet's long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they
+implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature
+before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea 300
+million years ago.
+
+Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself,
+others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our
+life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of
+years, and linkages to other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of.
+Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.
+
+But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer
+and intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived
+till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was
+the greatest race of all because it alone had conquered the secret of time.
+
+It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the
+earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past
+and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every
+
+
+
+
+age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets,
+including those in human mythology.
+
+In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of
+earth's annals-histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or
+that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their
+languages, and their psychologies.
+
+With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and
+life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and
+situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside
+the recognized senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.
+
+In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable
+mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-
+sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials,
+it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of that
+period's life-forms. It would enter the organism's brain and set up therein its
+own vibrations, while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the
+displacer, remaining in the latter's body till a reverse process was set up.
+
+The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose
+as a member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as
+possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information
+and techniques.
+
+Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body,
+would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it
+occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners.
+Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the
+future had brought back records of that language.
+
+If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not
+physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech
+could be played as on a musical instrument.
+
+The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with
+head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from
+the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws
+attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and
+contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-foot bases.
+
+
+
+
+When the captive mind's amazement and resentment had worn off, and when -
+assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race's - it had
+lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new
+environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approyimating that of its
+displacer.
+
+With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed
+to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boatlike
+atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into
+the libraries containing the records of the planet's past and future.
+
+This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen,
+and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth-closed chapters of
+inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years
+ahead of their own natural ages-forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often
+unveiled, the supreme experience of life.
+
+Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds
+seized from the future - to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a
+hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And all
+were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and their
+respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives.
+
+It may be added that there was one special type of captive whose privileges were
+far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles,
+whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the
+Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction.
+
+Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the
+longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life - especially among those
+superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of
+elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later
+history - including mankind's.
+
+As for the ordinary cases of exploration - when the displacing mind had learned
+what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had
+started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in
+its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would return to that
+body of the future to which it properly belonged.
+
+Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this
+restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had - like
+those of the death-escapers - to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else
+
+
+
+
+the captive mind-like the dying permanent exiles - had to end its days in the
+form and past age of the Great Race.
+
+This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race - a
+not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely
+concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the
+Great Race was very slight - largely because of the tremendous penalties attached
+to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund.
+
+Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the
+offending minds in their new future bodies - and sometimes forced reexchanges
+were effected.
+
+Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by
+minds in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In
+every age since the discovery of mind projection, a minute but well-recognised
+element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages,
+sojourning for a longer or shorter while.
+
+When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future,
+it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the
+Great Race's age - this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in
+the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities.
+
+The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at
+known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two
+cases of this kind - said the old myths - that mankind had learned what it had
+concerning the Great Race.
+
+Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world,
+there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea,
+and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.
+
+Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most
+fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories
+that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-
+shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds
+recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare times
+brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages.
+
+There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish
+certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among
+
+
+
+
+human beings was suggested - a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging
+down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.
+
+And, meanwhile, the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned
+to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of
+exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and
+origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage
+had come - for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form.
+
+The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked
+ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had
+sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them - the
+cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago.
+
+Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left
+to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet
+would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies
+of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.
+
+Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When,
+around 1920, 1 had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the
+tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the
+fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily
+explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to dark studies during the
+amnesia - and then I read the forbidden legends and met the members of ancient
+and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the dreams and
+disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory.
+
+As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me,
+but laid at my door by librarians - I might easily have picked up a smattering of
+the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless
+coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into
+my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation with known cult
+leaders, but never succeeded in establishing the right connexions.
+
+At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to
+worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant
+folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present.
+
+Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and
+familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state.
+When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with
+the creatures of their household myths - the fabulous invaders supposed to
+
+
+
+
+displace men's minds - and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge
+which they thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past.
+
+Then, when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and
+thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers.
+Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth
+pattern.
+
+Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to
+supersede all others in my mind-largely because of the greater weakness of any
+rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and
+anthropologists gradually agreed with me.
+
+The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end
+I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still
+assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I
+had heard and read of. Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and
+pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of myths absorbed in my
+secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be
+of any actual significance.
+
+Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even
+though the visions - rather than the abstract impressions - steadily became more
+frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular
+work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting
+an instructorship in psychology at the university.
+
+My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled - besides
+which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday.
+My son was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his
+resent professorship, and we worked together a great deal.
+
+
+I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outre dreams which
+crowded upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine
+value as a psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like
+memories, though I fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success.
+
+In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I
+brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never
+mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them,
+filtering out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumors regarding my
+
+
+
+
+mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumors were confined wholly to
+laymen, without a single champion among physicians or psychologists.
+
+Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and
+records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the
+curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly
+increased. They have never, though, become other than disjointed fragments
+seemingly without clear motivation.
+
+Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom
+of wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one
+to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the
+common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-
+doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness
+clung.
+
+I saw tremendously tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable
+utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery
+whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound
+manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may here remark that sight
+and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary world.
+
+The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was
+before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories,
+to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in
+various parts of the building and in the streets below.
+
+These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their
+monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous,
+iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up
+of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four
+flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that
+of the cones themselves.
+
+These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes
+extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were
+enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpetlike
+appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet
+in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central
+circumference.
+
+Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like
+appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or
+
+
+
+
+tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey
+substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.
+
+Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance -
+for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one had known
+only human beings to do. These objects moved intelligently about the great
+rooms, getting books from the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice
+versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the
+greenish head tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in
+conversation-speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping.
+
+The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the
+top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting
+member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or
+lowered.
+
+The other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the cone,
+contracted to about five feet each when not in use. From their rate of reading,
+writing, and operating their machines - those on the tables seemed somehow
+connected with thought - I concluded that their intelligence was enormously
+greater than man's.
+
+Aftenvard I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and
+corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the
+vast roads in gigantic, boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they
+seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment.
+
+Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared
+to be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical
+variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only
+from the majority, but very largely from one another.
+
+They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of
+characters - never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I
+fancied, used our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more
+slowly than the general mass of the entities.
+
+All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied
+consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal, floating freely
+about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until
+August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say
+harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract, though infinitely terrible,
+association of my previously noted body loathing with the scenes of my visions.
+
+
+
+
+For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at
+myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the
+strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great
+tables - whose height could not be under ten feet - from a level not below that of
+their surfaces.
+
+And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and
+greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed
+nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay
+at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing
+down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet
+tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of Arkham with
+my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.
+
+Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions
+of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other
+unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing
+for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that
+hung down from my head.
+
+Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were
+horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless
+life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which
+had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-
+bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of
+the last human being.
+
+I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has
+ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs;
+which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was
+evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in
+human languages.
+
+Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way.
+A very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in
+the records and forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the
+time I seemed to be setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking,
+I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues
+which my dream-self had mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed
+with me.
+
+I learned - even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old
+myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang - that the entities around me
+
+
+
+
+were of the world's greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent
+exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my
+age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange
+forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language
+of claw clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.
+
+There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live
+incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million
+years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged,
+starheaded, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile
+people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean
+worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two
+from the arachnid denizens of earth's last age; five from the hardy coleopterous
+species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day
+to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several
+from different branches of humanity.
+
+I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-
+Chan, which is to come in 5,000 A.D.; with that of a general of the greatheaded
+brown people who held South Africa in 50,000 B.C.; with that of a twelfth-
+century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar
+who had ruled that terrible polar land one hundred thousand years before the
+squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it.
+
+I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of 16,000
+A.D.; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a
+quaestor in Sulla's time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty,
+who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep, with that of a priest of Atlantis'
+middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day, James
+Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the
+Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in 2,518 A.D.; with that
+of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a
+Greco-Bactrian official Of 200 B.C.; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis
+XIII's time named Pierre-Louis Montagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian
+chieftain of 15,000 B.C.; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the
+shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.
+
+I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or
+discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge.
+Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the
+dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science.
+
+
+
+
+I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the
+future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of
+the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down
+here.
+
+After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose
+members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom
+overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds
+would again migrate through time and space - to another stopping-place in the
+bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races
+after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-
+filled core, before the utter end.
+
+Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which
+I was preparing - half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library
+and travel opportunities - for the Great Race's central archives. The archives were
+in a colossal subterranean structure near the city's center, which I came to know
+well through frequent labors and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race,
+and to withstand the fiercest of earth's convulsions, this titan repository
+surpassed all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its
+construction.
+
+The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose
+fabric were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in
+individual cases of a strange, extremely light, restless metal of greyish hue,
+decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great Race's
+curvilinear hieroglyphs.
+
+These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults-like closed, locked shelves -
+wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate
+turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest
+or vertebrate level - the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the
+furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.
+
+But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the
+merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were
+not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea
+of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem to have
+possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually
+disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels over the mighty
+jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast,
+dark, windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear. There
+were also long sea voyages in enormous, many-decked boats of incredible
+
+
+
+
+swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed projectile-like airships lifted and
+moved by electrical repulsion.
+
+Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far
+continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who
+would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost
+minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green
+life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually
+displayed signs of volcanic forces.
+
+Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's
+mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food
+was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in
+steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes;
+and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of
+many forms - dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts,
+plesiosaurs, and the like-made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or
+mammals there were none that I could discover.
+
+The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and
+crocodiles while insects buzzed incessantly among the lush vegetation. And far
+out at sea, unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of
+foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic
+submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of
+awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the
+wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere
+abounded.
+
+Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race
+my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I
+here set down were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather
+than from my own dreaming.
+
+For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the
+dreams in many phases, so that certain dream-fragments were explained in
+advance and formed verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly
+established my belief that similar reading and research, accomplished by my
+secondary self, had formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of
+pseudomemories.
+
+The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000
+years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies
+occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving - or even scientifically
+
+
+
+
+known-line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous,
+and highly specialised organic type inclining as much as to the vegetable as to
+the animal state.
+
+Cell action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly
+eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red
+trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semifluid
+and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals.
+
+The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise - sight and hearing, the
+latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above
+their heads. Of other and incomprehensible senses - not, however, well utilizable
+by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies - they possessed many. Their three
+eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal.
+Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness.
+
+They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on
+their bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were
+used for the growth of their young - which were, however, reared only in small
+numbers on account of the longevity of individuals - four or five thousand years
+being the common life span.
+
+Markedly defective individuals were quickly disposed of as soon as their defects
+were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense
+of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms.
+
+The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before
+mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but
+such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the
+future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar
+tenement.
+
+The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with major
+institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political
+and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major
+resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board
+elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests.
+Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of
+common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their
+parents.
+
+Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked
+in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned.
+
+
+
+
+or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspeciahsed
+urges common to all organic life. A few added likenesses came through
+conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked.
+
+Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the
+abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various
+sorts.
+
+The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was
+a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and
+meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle
+to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by
+the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal days.
+
+Crime was surprisingly scant, and was dealt with through highly efficient
+policing. Punishments ranged from privilege deprivation and imprisonment to
+death or major emotion wrenching, and were never administered without a
+careful study of the criminal's inotivations.
+
+Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against
+reptilian or octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones
+who centered in the antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An
+enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous
+electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but
+obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins
+and of the great sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterranean levels.
+
+This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken
+suggestion - or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which
+bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common
+shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great
+Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with
+that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener minds
+ahead en masse in time.
+
+Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and
+legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths
+avoided it - or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the
+dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the
+Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned
+came only from some of the more sharply observant captive minds.
+
+
+
+
+According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible
+elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space
+from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three
+other solar planets about 600 million years ago. They were only partly material -
+as we understand matter - and their type of consciousness and media of
+perception differed widely from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their
+senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-
+visual pattern of impressions.
+
+They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter
+when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing - albeit of a
+peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their
+substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy
+them. They had the power of aerial motion, despite the absence of wings or any
+other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no
+exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race.
+
+When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of
+windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it
+was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure,
+trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as
+Yith.
+
+The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue
+the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which
+they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit.
+
+Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward
+occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings
+for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or
+scientific and historical zeal.
+
+But as the aeons passed there came vague, evil signs that the elder things were
+growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic
+irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote cities of
+the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had
+not peopled - places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly
+sealed or guarded.
+
+After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed
+forever - though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in
+fighting the elder things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places.
+
+
+
+
+The irruptions of the elder things must have been shocking beyond all
+description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great
+Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was
+left unmentioned. At no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked
+like.
+
+There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses
+of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and
+military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints
+made up of five circular toe marks, seemed also to be associated with them.
+
+It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race -
+the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of
+time to strange bodies in the safer future - had to do with a final successful
+irruption of the elder beings.
+
+Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the
+Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the
+foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the
+outer world, they knew from the planet's later history - for their projections
+shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous
+entities.
+
+Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable,
+storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they
+were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be
+quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds
+would tenant.
+
+Meanwhile, the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent
+weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from
+common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear
+hung bout the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.
+
+
+That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every
+night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in
+such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality - the sharp sense of
+pseudo-memory - that such feelings mainly depended.
+
+As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings in
+the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was
+
+
+
+
+augmented by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage
+of time. Yet in spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return
+momentarily now and then. It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and
+after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation.
+
+In the course of years I began to feel that my experience - together with the
+kindred cases and the related folklore - ought to be definitely summarised and
+published for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles
+briefly covering the whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of
+the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the
+dreams.
+
+These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the
+American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I
+continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing
+stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions. On July 10, 1934, there
+was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society the letter which opened the
+culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was
+postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I
+found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence.
+Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its
+entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and
+the photographs had upon me.
+
+I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often
+thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which
+had coloured my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a
+tangible survival from a lost world remote beyond all imagination. Most
+devastating of all were the photographs - for here, in cold, incontrovertible
+realism, there stood out against a background of sand certain worn-down, water-
+ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightly
+concave bottoms told their own story.
+
+And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly,
+amidst the batterrings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs
+and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me.
+But here is the letter, which speaks for itself.
+
+49, Dampier St.,
+
+Pilbarra, W. Australia,
+
+May 18, 1934.
+
+
+
+
+Prof. N. W Peaslee,
+
+c/o Am. Psychological Society,
+
+30 E. 41st St.,
+New York City, U.S.A.
+
+My Dear Sir:
+
+A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your
+articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about
+certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It
+would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old cities with huge
+stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have
+come upon something very important.
+
+The blackfellows have always been full of talk about "great stones with marks on
+them," and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in
+some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man
+who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will
+some day awake and eat up the world.
+
+There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts
+of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things
+have happened. The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle,
+went down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds began to blow
+from the place soon after they went down. However, there usually isn't much in
+what these natives say.
+
+But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting
+about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone
+perhaps 3X2X2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit.
+
+At first I couldn't find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I
+looked close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the
+weathering. There were peculiar curves, just like what the blackfellows had tried
+to describe. I imagine there must have been thirty or forty blocks, some nearly
+buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter.
+
+When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful
+reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of ten or twelve
+of the most typical blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see.
+
+I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they
+have done nothing about them.
+
+
+
+
+Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American
+Psychological Society, and, in time, happened to mention the stones. He was
+enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my
+snapshots, saying that the stones and the markings were just like those of the
+masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends.
+
+He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile, he sent me most of the
+magazines with your articles, and I saw at once, from your drawings and
+descriptions, that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate
+this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.
+
+Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question
+we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilization older than any
+dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends.
+
+As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that
+these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and
+granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or
+concrete.
+
+They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been
+submerged and come up again after long ages - all since those blocks were made
+and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years - or heaven knows
+how much more. I don't like to think about it.
+
+In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and
+everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead
+an expedition to the desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr.
+Boyle and I are prepared to cooperate in such work if you - or organizations
+known to you - can furnish the funds.
+
+I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging - the blackfellows would
+be of no use, for I've found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this
+particular spot. Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very obviously
+ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.
+
+The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about four days by motor tractor -
+which we'd need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of
+Warburton's path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could
+float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra - but all that
+can be talked over later.
+
+
+
+
+Roughly the stones He at a point about 22° 3' 14" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39" East
+Longitude. The chmate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying.
+
+I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager
+to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply
+impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will
+write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed
+by wireless.
+
+Hoping profoundly for an early message.
+
+Believe me.
+
+Most faithfully yours,
+
+Robert B.F. Mackenzie
+
+Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press.
+My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and
+both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the
+Australian end. We were not too specific with the public about our objects, since
+the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose
+treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing;
+but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to
+chronicle our various preparatory steps.
+
+Professor William Dyer of the college's geology department - leader of the
+Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition Of 1930-31 - Ferdinand C. Ashley of the
+department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of
+anthropology - together with my son Wingate - accompanied me.
+
+My correspondent, Mackenzie, came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our
+final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man
+of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of
+Australian travel.
+
+He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer
+sufficiently small to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate
+in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and
+disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original situation.
+
+Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a
+leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal,
+down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how
+the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I
+
+
+
+
+detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were
+given their last loads.
+
+Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent - and his
+knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and
+me.
+
+Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our
+party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday,
+May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter
+desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual
+site of the elder world behind the legends - a terror, of course, abetted by the fact
+that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated
+force.
+
+It was on Monday, June 3rd, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I
+cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched - in objective reality -
+a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of
+my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of carving - and my hands
+trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to
+me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.
+
+A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear
+and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and
+bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or
+octagonally cut-like those of the floors and pavements in my dreams - while a
+few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to
+suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window
+casings.
+
+The deeper - and the farther north and east - we dug, the more blocks we found;
+though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them.
+Professor Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and
+Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and
+Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering of the
+blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of
+cosmic savagery.
+
+We had an aeroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to
+different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale
+outlines - either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were
+virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some
+
+
+
+
+significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced by
+another equally insubstantial - a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand.
+
+One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and
+disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something I
+had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a
+terrible familiarity about them - which somehow made me look furtively and
+apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and
+northeast.
+
+Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed
+emotions about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there
+was curiosity - but more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion
+of memory.
+
+I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head,
+but met with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost
+welcomed this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I
+acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night-usually to
+the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed
+subtly to pull me.
+
+Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the
+ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we
+had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface.
+The ground was less level than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now
+and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary hillocks - exposing low traces of
+the elder stones while it covered other traces.
+
+I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the
+same time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a
+rather bad state - all the worse because I could not account for it.
+
+An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an
+odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the
+evening of July Uth, when the moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a
+curious pallor.
+
+Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which
+seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost
+wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later
+studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric
+torch.
+
+
+
+
+Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no
+convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance,
+wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the
+now familiar fragments.
+
+Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly
+unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I
+fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was
+something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with the
+uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry.
+
+It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great
+Race held in such fear - the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-
+material, alien things that festered in earth's nether abysses and against whose
+wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels
+posted.
+
+I remained awake all night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the
+shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a
+discoverer's enthusiasm.
+
+The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my
+son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I
+had formed no clear idea of the stone's location, and a late ind had wholly
+altered the hillocks of shifting sand.
+
+
+I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative - all the more
+difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel
+uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feelingin
+view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my experience
+would raise - which impels me to make this record.
+
+My son - a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic
+knowledge of my whole case - shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.
+
+First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know them.
+On the night of July 17-18, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep.
+Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling
+regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal
+walks; seeing and greeting only one person - an Australian miner named Tupper
+- as I left our precincts.
+
+
+
+
+The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky, and drenched the ancient
+sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely
+evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as
+amply attested by Tupper and others who saw me walking rapidly across the
+pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast.
+
+About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling
+three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that
+leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in
+view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet, as
+many as three men - all Australians - seemed to feel something sinister in the air.
+
+Mackenzie explained to Professor Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from
+blackfellow folklore - the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant
+myth about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under
+a clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under
+the ground, where terrible things have happened - and are never felt except near
+places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided
+as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.
+
+It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I
+staggered into camp - hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and
+without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Professor
+Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost
+frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot and
+made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all
+tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep.
+
+But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary -
+different from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon
+talking - nervously and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had
+become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said,
+been dreams even more frightful than usual - and when I was awaked by the
+sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic,
+frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and
+bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long - hence the hours of my absence.
+
+Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing -
+exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of
+mind regarding the whole work of the expedition, and urged a halt in all digging
+toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak - for I mentioned a
+dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible
+shortage of funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant.
+
+
+
+
+Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes - not even my son,
+whose concern for my health was obvious.
+
+The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations.
+Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as
+possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the
+plane to Perth - a thousand miles to the southwest - as soon as he had surveyed
+the region I wished let alone.
+
+If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a
+specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the
+miners who knew the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my son
+made the survey that very afternoon, flying over all the terrain my walk could
+possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in sight.
+
+It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again - the shifting sand
+had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain
+awesome object in my stark fright - but now I know that the loss was merciful. I
+can still believe my whole experience an illusion - especially if, as I devoutly
+hope, that hellish abyss is never found.
+
+Wingate took me to Perth on July 20th, though declining to abandon the
+expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer
+for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and
+frantically upon the entire matter, and have decided that my son at least must be
+informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse the matter more widely.
+
+In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my
+background - as already known in a scattered way to others - and will now tell as
+briefly as possible what seemed to happen during my absence from the camp
+that hideous night.
+
+Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that
+inexplicable, dread-mingled, mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on
+beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half shrouded by sand,
+those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons.
+
+The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to
+oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my
+maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the
+present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven stones.
+
+
+
+
+And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous - more and more assailed
+by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some
+of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and
+wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was
+fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown
+force sought to keep the portal barred.
+
+The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like
+frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with
+fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each
+sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-
+human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well
+from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race.
+
+At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient, conical horrors moving about at
+their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with
+them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the
+rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous
+crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns beyond the windows. I was
+awake and dreaming at the same time.
+
+I do not know how long or how far - or indeed, in just what direction -I had
+walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day's wind. It was the
+largest group in one place that I had seen so far, and so sharply did it impress me
+that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away.
+
+Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an
+unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric
+torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly
+round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across and from
+two to eight feet high.
+
+From the very outset I realized that there was some utterly unprecedented
+quality about those stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without
+parallel, but something in the sandworn traces of design arrested me as I scanned
+them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch.
+
+Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It
+was something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at
+one block alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously.
+
+Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of
+those blocks were closely related - parts of one vast decorative conception. For
+
+
+
+
+the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in its
+old position - tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the less existing in a
+very definite sense.
+
+Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there
+clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret
+varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design.
+
+After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at
+the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal
+masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses
+appalled and unnerved me.
+
+This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks
+and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the
+right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have
+wound down to still lower depths.
+
+I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in
+them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level
+should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading
+upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the long subterrene
+passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me?
+
+How did I know that the room of machines and the rightward-leading tunnel to
+the central archives ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there
+would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom four
+levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself
+shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.
+
+Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air
+trickling upward from a depressed place near the center of the huge heap.
+Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil
+moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean
+masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of
+nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but one
+thing - a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface.
+
+My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground
+huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then
+thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging
+at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable
+
+
+
+
+source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink
+of uncovering?
+
+It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific
+zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.
+
+I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling
+fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I
+possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another,
+till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the
+deserts dry air. A black rift began to yawn, and at length - when I had pushed
+away every fragment small enough to budge - the leprous moonlight blazed on
+an aperture of ample width to admit me.
+
+I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a
+chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle
+of about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse
+from above.
+
+Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at
+whose upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it
+appeared, the deserts sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of
+earth's youth - how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not
+then and cannot now even attempt to guess.
+
+In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss
+- and at a time when one's whereabouts were unknown to any living soul -
+seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was - yet that night I embarked
+without hesitancy upon such a descent.
+
+Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along
+seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the
+battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline
+below the opening - sometimes facing forward as I found good hand - and foot-
+holds, and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I clung and
+fumbled more precariously.
+
+In two directions beside me distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed
+dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken
+darkness.
+
+I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling
+hints and images was my mind that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into
+
+
+
+
+incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a
+wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at me.
+
+Eventually, I reached a level floor strewn with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments
+of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side - perhaps thirty feet
+apart - rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved
+I could just discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception.
+
+What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch
+could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out
+distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless
+dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first time.
+
+Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world
+outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of
+my sight, lest I have no guide for my return.
+
+I now advanced toward the wall at my left, where the traces of carving were
+plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap
+had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way.
+
+At one place I heaved aside some blocks and locked away the detritus to see
+what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the
+great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.
+
+Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the searchlight slowly and
+carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed
+to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations
+which I could not explain.
+
+In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many
+aeons more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form
+amidst earth's heavings.
+
+But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-
+crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the
+complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination.
+
+That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not
+beyond normal credibility.
+
+Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied
+in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow, coming to my notice during the
+amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind.
+
+
+
+
+But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and
+spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamed for more than a
+score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced
+each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly
+besieged my sleeping vision night after night?
+
+For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the
+millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of
+something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street,
+Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the
+identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented.
+
+The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in
+that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that
+structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of
+uncounted ages, I realized with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in
+heaven's name could all this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And
+what awful reality could lie behind those antique tales of the beings who had
+dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?
+
+Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which
+ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain
+overhead before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and
+the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of
+moonlight in view.
+
+I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity
+and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of old in
+the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes
+which had underlain the city and linked all the titan towers, how much had still
+survived the writhings of earth's crust?
+
+Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the
+house of the writing master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, the captive mind from
+the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures
+on the blank spaces of the walls?
+
+Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be
+still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible
+entity - a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-
+Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future - had kept a certain thing
+which it had modelled from clay.
+
+
+
+
+I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these
+insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I feh
+acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering,
+I realized that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning
+somewhere beyond and below me.
+
+I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them
+from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that
+driving fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome records
+that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless metal.
+
+There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and
+future, of the cosmic space-time continuum - written by captive minds from
+every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course - but had I not
+now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I?
+
+I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob twistings needed
+to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I
+gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial
+vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar.
+
+If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It
+was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and
+stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the
+depths below.
+
+
+From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on - indeed, I
+still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemonic
+dream or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything
+came to me through a kind of haze - sometimes only intermittently.
+
+The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing
+phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the
+decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I
+had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged,
+grotesquely stalactited roof.
+
+It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of
+pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in
+relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted
+smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was
+
+
+
+
+something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down
+at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.
+
+Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered -
+often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every
+stone and corner of that daemonic gulf was known to me, and at many points I
+stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling, yet familiar,
+archways.
+
+Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare, or debris-filled. In a few I
+saw masses of metal - some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or
+battered - which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams.
+What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.
+
+I found the downward incline and began its descent - though after a time halted
+by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than
+four feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable
+inky depths beneath.
+
+I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with
+fresh panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There
+could be no guards now - for what had lurked beneath had long since done its
+hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the posthuman beetle
+race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I
+trembled anew.
+
+It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor
+prevented a running start - but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the
+left-hand wall - where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably
+clear of dangerous debris - and after one frantic moment reached the other side
+in safety.
+
+At last, gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of
+machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal, half buried beneath fallen
+vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently
+over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I
+realised, would take me under the city to the central archives.
+
+Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that
+debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the ages-
+tained walls - some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my
+dreams. Since this was a subterrene house - connecting highway, there were no
+archways save when the route led through the lower levels of various buildings.
+
+
+
+
+At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down well-
+remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find
+any radical changes from what I had dreamed of - and in one of these cases I
+could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.
+
+I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a
+hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless,
+ruined towers whose alien, basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible
+origin.
+
+This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing
+carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything
+save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward and
+downward. There were no stairs or inclines - indeed, my dreams had pictured
+those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who
+had built them had not needed stairs or inclines.
+
+In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously
+guarded. Now it lay open-black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool,
+damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would
+not permit myself to think.
+
+Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a
+place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I
+climbed up over it, passing through a vast, empty space where my torchlight
+could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the
+house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the
+archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.
+
+I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stone, but after a
+short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting
+almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and
+tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly
+packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium might have brought down
+all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not
+know.
+
+It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me - if, indeed, my whole
+underground adventure was not - as I hope - a hellish delusion or phase of
+dreaming. But I did make - or dream that I made - a passage that I could squirm
+through. As I wiggled over the mound of debris - my torch, switched
+continuously on, thrust deeply in my mouth - I felt myself torn by the fantastic
+stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
+
+
+
+
+I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to
+form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and
+picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held,
+intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with arches -
+still in a marvelous state of preservation - opening off on every side.
+
+The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were
+densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols - some
+added since the period of my dreams.
+
+This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar
+archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to
+all the surviving levels, I had, oddly, little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile,
+housing the annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and
+strength to last as long as that system itself.
+
+Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with
+cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the
+planet's rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp,
+its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours, the vast, dust-drifted floors
+scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant.
+
+The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head.
+All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a
+kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously
+well-remembered aisles beyond the archway.
+
+I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the
+great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place,
+others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological
+stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry.
+
+Here and there a dust-covered heap beneath a gaping, empty shelf seemed to
+indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth tremors. On occasional
+pillars were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and subclasses of
+volumes.
+
+Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal
+cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I
+dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the
+floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs,
+though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly unusual.
+
+
+
+
+The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and
+I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within.
+The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches
+thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top.
+
+Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they
+had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of
+the text-symbols unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet
+known to human scholarship - with a haunting, half-aroused memory.
+
+It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known
+slightly in my dreams - a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived
+much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a
+fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was devoted
+to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.
+
+As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch
+was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with
+me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing
+through unending tangles of aisles and corridors - recognising now and then
+some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made
+my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs.
+
+The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made
+me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human
+feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements.
+
+Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint.
+There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and
+buried recollection, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
+
+I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors
+flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling
+brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand
+twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the
+intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe
+with a combination lock.
+
+Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream - or scrap of
+unconsciously absorbed legend - could have taught me a detail so minute, so
+intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all
+coherent thought. For was not this whole experience - this shocking familiarity
+with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything
+
+
+
+
+before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested - a
+horror beyond all reason?
+
+Probably it was my basic conviction then - as it is now during my saner moments
+
+- that I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of
+febrile hallucination.
+
+Eventually, I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline.
+For some shadowy reason I tiled to soften my steps, even though I lost speed
+thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor.
+
+As I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of
+the metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards
+now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing
+through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned.
+
+I felt a current of cool, damp air as I had felt there, and wished that my course led
+in another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did
+not know.
+
+When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead,
+the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap
+very thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At
+the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I
+could not discover why.
+
+Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless
+labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals
+of the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across
+the space that I realized why I shook so violently.
+
+Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me.
+In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be
+
+- there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many
+months before. I could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were
+dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was
+highly disquieting.
+
+When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what
+I saw - for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were
+regular lines of composite impressions - impressions that went in threes, each
+slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints,
+one in advance of the other four.
+
+
+
+
+These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two
+directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were, of
+course, very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there was an
+element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end
+of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long before,
+while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind,
+yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.
+
+
+That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by
+its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that
+hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my
+right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its
+eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of
+lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust
+toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well.
+
+My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only
+beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my
+human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the
+lock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do - what dare I do with
+what - as I now commenced to realise - 1 both hoped and feared to find? Would it
+prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of something past normal conception,
+or shew only that I was dreaming?
+
+The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoed racing and was standing still, staring at
+a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of
+almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had
+sprung open.
+
+My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described - so utter and insistent was
+the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up at a row near the top and
+wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An
+open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed
+doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between
+my teeth, as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all I
+must make no noise.
+
+How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could
+probably hook its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack.
+Again I wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat
+
+
+
+
+each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not
+scrape or creak - and that my hand could work it properly.
+
+Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to
+climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but, as I had expected, the
+opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the swinging door and the edge of the
+aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking.
+
+Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just
+reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half numb from climbing, were very clumsy
+at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-
+rhythm was strong in them.
+
+Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate, secret motions had somehow reached
+my brain correctly in every detail - for after less than five minutes of trying there
+came a click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not
+consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging
+open with only the faintest grating sound.
+
+Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case ends thus exposed, and felt a
+tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my
+right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang
+infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to
+dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward myself
+without any violent noise.
+
+Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen
+inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just
+exceeded three inches.
+
+Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled
+with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the
+heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now
+free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect
+my prize.
+
+Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me.
+My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I
+longed - and felt compelled - to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me
+what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties.
+
+If the thing were there - and if I were not dreaining - the implications would be
+quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most
+
+
+
+
+was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The
+sense of reality was hideous - and again becomes so as I recall the scene.
+
+At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared
+fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in
+prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as
+hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not
+actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal memory.
+
+I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I
+temporized and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and
+shut it off to save the battery. Then, in the dark, I collected my courage finally
+lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all, I did indeed flash the
+torch upon the exposed page - steeling myself in advance to suppress any sound
+no matter what I should find.
+
+I looked for an instant, then collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept
+silent. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the
+engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was
+dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery.
+
+I must be dreaming - but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and
+shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even
+though there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl about me.
+Ideas and images of the starkest terror - excited by vistas which my glimpse had
+opened up - began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.
+
+I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my
+own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the
+page as a serpent's victim may look at his destroyer's eyes and fangs.
+
+Then, with clumsy fingers, in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container,
+and snapped the lid and the curious, hooked fastener. This was what I must
+carry back to the outer world if it truly existed - if the whole abyss truly existed -
+if I, and the world itself, truly existed.
+
+Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It
+comes to me oddly - as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal
+world - that I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours
+nderground.
+
+Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found
+myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught - giving abyss and
+
+
+
+
+those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the
+endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had
+not felt on the downward journey.
+
+I dreaded having to repass through the black basalt crypt that was older than the
+city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of
+that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking - be it
+ever so weak and dying - down there. I thought of those five-circle prints and of
+what my dreams had told me of such prints - and of strange winds and whistling
+noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern
+blackfellows, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins
+was dwelt upon.
+
+I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last after
+passing that other book I had examined - to the great circular space with the
+branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch
+through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my
+course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the
+archive building. My new metal-eased burden weighed upon me, and I found it
+harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of
+every sort.
+
+Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched
+a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite, for my first
+passage had made some noise, and I now - after seeing those possible prints -
+dreaded sound above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing
+the narrow crevice.
+
+But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the
+aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself - my
+back torn as before by stalactites.
+
+As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the
+slope of the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent
+me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without
+further noise - but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet
+raised a sudden and unprecedented din.
+
+The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a
+terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling
+sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. If
+so, what followed has a grim irony - since, save for the panic of this thing, the
+second thing might never have happened.
+
+
+
+
+As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand
+and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea
+in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the
+waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above.
+
+I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the
+vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly
+in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments.
+
+Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared
+for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in
+a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the
+black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.
+
+I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of
+consciousness shows me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the
+corridor amidst the clangour - case and torch still with me.
+
+Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter
+madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became
+audible a repetition of that frightful alien whistling I thought I had heard before.
+This time there was no doubt about it - and what was worse, it came from a point
+not behind but ahead of me.
+
+Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through
+the hellish basalt vault of the elder things, and hearing that damnable alien
+sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses.
+There was a wind, too - not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent,
+purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf
+whence the obscene whistling came.
+
+There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with
+that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and
+seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from
+the spaces behind and beneath.
+
+Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding
+my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of
+the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the
+structure that led to the surface.
+
+I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as
+I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors
+
+
+
+
+must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and
+over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I
+was in camp - perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up
+my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.
+
+I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by
+other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent,
+the leap across had been easy - but could I clear the gap as readily when going
+uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the
+anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the
+last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in
+the black abysses below the chasm.
+
+My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory
+when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling
+shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my
+imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware
+of the added blasts and whistling in front of me - tides of abomination surging
+up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
+
+Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed -
+and, ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled
+and plunged upward over the incline's debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I
+saw the chasm's edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I
+possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome
+sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.
+
+This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions
+belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoria delirium. Dream, madness, and
+memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions
+which can have no relation to anything real.
+
+There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient
+darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and
+its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within
+me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless
+crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless, basalt towers upon which no
+light ever shone.
+
+Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain
+without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not
+even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while
+cold fingers of damp vapor clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch.
+
+
+
+
+damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and
+silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.
+
+Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams - not in ruins,
+but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and
+mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books
+up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines.
+
+Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful, momentary flashes of a
+non-vistial consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from
+clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid
+air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild
+stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.
+
+Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half sight - a faint, diffuse suspicion
+of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind - pursued
+climbing and crawling - of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through
+a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane.
+It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last
+told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
+
+I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me
+shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet's
+surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and
+scratches.
+
+Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where
+delirious dream left off and true memory began. There had seemed to be a
+mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past,
+and a nightmare horror at the end - but how much of this was real?
+
+My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had
+there been such a case - or any abyss- or any mound? Raising my head, I looked
+behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the desert.
+
+The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly
+in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the
+camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert
+and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not,
+how could I bear to live any longer?
+
+For, in this new doubt, all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions
+dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then
+
+
+
+
+the Great Race was real - and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the
+cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-
+shattering actuality.
+
+Had I, in full, hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred
+and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my
+present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean
+gulfs of time?
+
+Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that
+accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those
+familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting
+dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories?
+
+Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space,
+learned the universe's secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my
+own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others -
+those shocking elder things of the mad winds and daemon pipings - in truth a
+lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while
+varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet's age-
+racked surface?
+
+I do not know. If that abyss and what I held were real, there is no hope. Then, all
+too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out
+of time. But, mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh
+phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would
+have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.
+
+If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my
+son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist
+in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to
+others.
+
+I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges
+absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean, buried
+ruins. It has been hard for me, literally, to set down that crucial revelation,
+though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book within
+the metal case - the case which I pried out of its lair amidst the dust of a million
+centuries.
+
+No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this
+planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw
+that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages
+
+
+
+
+were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth. They were, instead,
+the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English
+language in my own handwriting.
+
+
+
+
+The Shadow Over Innsmouth
+
+Written in 1931
+
+Published in 1936 in The Shadow over Innsmouth
+
+
+
+During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange
+and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts
+seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast
+series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and
+dynamiting - under suitable precautions - of an enormous number of crumbling,
+worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.
+Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a
+spasmodic war on liquor.
+
+Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests,
+the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy
+surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges
+were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of
+the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps,
+and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing
+positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is
+even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.
+
+Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential
+discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and
+prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent.
+Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with
+the government in the end. Only one paper - a tabloid always discounted
+because of its wild policy - mentioned the deep diving submarine that
+discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef.
+That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-
+fetched; since the low, black reef lay a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth
+Harbour.
+
+People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among
+themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying
+and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be
+wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted at years
+before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was no need to
+
+
+
+
+exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew little; for wide salt marshes,
+desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbors off from Innsmouth on the landward
+side.
+
+But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am
+certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever
+accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified men at Innsmouth.
+Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do
+not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have
+many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair
+has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away
+impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.
+
+It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July
+16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action
+brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while
+the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public
+interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few
+frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and
+blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my
+own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a
+contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind
+regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.
+
+I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and - so far -
+last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England -
+sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical - and had planned to go directly from
+ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother's family was derived. I had
+no car, but was travelling by train, trolley and motor-coach, always seeking the
+cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was
+the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I
+demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-
+faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic
+toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other
+informants had offered.
+
+"You could take that old bus, I suppose," he said with a certain hesitation, "but it
+ain't thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth - you may have
+heard about that - and so the people don't like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow -
+Joe Sargent - but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess.
+Wonder it keeps running at all. I s'pose it's cheap enough, but I never see mor'n
+two or three people in it - nobody but those Innsmouth folk. Leaves the square -
+
+
+
+
+front of Hammond's Drug Store - at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've changed
+lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap - I've never been on it."
+
+That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town
+not shown on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have
+interested me, and the agent's odd manner of allusion roused something like real
+curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I thought, must
+be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist's attention. If it came before
+Arkham I would stop off there and so I asked the agent to tell me something
+about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly
+superior to what he said.
+
+"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the
+Manuxet. Used to be almost a city - quite a port before the War of 1812 - but all
+gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now - B. and M. never
+went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.
+
+"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of
+except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham
+or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one
+gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.
+
+"That refinery, though, used to he a big thing, and old man Marsh, who owns it,
+must be richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his
+home. He's supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in
+life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who
+founded the business. His mother seems to've been some kind of foreigner - they
+say a South Sea islander - so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich
+girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here
+and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in 'em.
+But Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like anyone else far's I can see.
+I've had 'em pointed out to me here - though, come to think of it, the elder
+children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.
+
+"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you
+mustn't take too much stock in what people here say. They're hard to get started,
+but once they do get started they never let up. They've been telling things about
+Innsmouth - whispering 'em, mostly - for the last hundred years, I guess, and I
+gather they're more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make
+you laugh - about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and
+bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-
+worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people
+
+
+
+
+stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts - but I come from Panton, Vermont, and
+that kind of story don't go down with me.
+
+"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef
+off the coast - Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a good part of the
+time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The
+story is that there's a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef -
+sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It's a
+rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping
+days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.
+
+"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had
+against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at
+night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation
+was interesting, and it's just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and
+maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I
+guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the
+reef.
+
+"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in
+Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was,
+but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or
+somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough - there was riots over it,
+and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don't believe ever got outside of town - and
+it left the place in awful shape. Never came back - there can't be more'n 300 or
+400 people living there now.
+
+"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I don't
+say I'm blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I
+wouldn't care to go to their town. I s'pose you know - though I can see you're a
+Westerner by your talk - what a lot our New England ships - used to have to do
+with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what
+queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably
+heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you
+know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.
+
+"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The
+place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and
+creeks and we can't be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it's pretty
+clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens
+when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and
+thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today -
+I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl. You'll notice a little
+
+
+
+
+in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat
+noses and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite
+right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or creased
+up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst - fact is, I don't
+believe I've ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of
+looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em - they used to have lots of horse trouble
+before the autos came in.
+
+"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with
+'em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when
+anyone tries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off
+Innsmouth Harbour when there ain't any anywhere else around - but just try to
+fish there yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used to
+come here on the railroad - walking and taking the train at Rowley after the
+branch was dropped - but now they use that bus.
+
+"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth - called the Gilman House - but I don't believe
+it can amount to much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better stay over here and
+take the ten o'clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus
+there for Arkham at eight o'clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at
+the Gilman a couple of years ago and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the
+place. Seems they get a queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other
+rooms - though most of 'em was empty - that gave him the shivers. It was foreign
+talk he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was the kind of voice that
+sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural - slopping like, he said - that he didn't
+dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the
+morning. The talk went on most all night.
+
+"This fellow - Casey, his name was - had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth
+folk, watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a
+queer place - it's in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said
+tallied up with what I'd heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any
+kind of dealings. You know it's always been a kind of mystery where the
+Marshes get the gold they refine. They've never seemed to do much buying in
+that line, but years ago they shipped out an enormous lot of ingots.
+
+"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and refinery
+men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the
+Marsh women-folks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in
+some heathen port, especially since he always ordered stacks of glass beads and
+trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for native trade. Others thought and
+still think he'd found an old pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny
+thing. The old Captain's been dead these sixty years, and there's ain't been a
+
+
+
+
+good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same the
+Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things - mostly glass and
+rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to look at
+themselves - Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea
+cannibals and Guinea savages.
+
+"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway,
+they're a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and other rich folks are as bad as
+any. As I told you, there probably ain't more'n 400 people in the whole town in
+spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess they're what they call 'white
+trash' down South - lawless and sly, and full of secret things. They get a lot of
+fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right
+there and nowhere else.
+
+"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and
+census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain't
+welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard personally of more'n one business or
+government man that's disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who
+went crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful
+scare for that fellow.
+
+"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there and have
+no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you - even though the
+people hereabouts will advise you not to make it. If you're just sightseeing, and
+looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you."
+
+And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking
+up data about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops,
+the lunchroom, the garages, and the fire station, I had found them even harder to
+get started than the ticket agent had predicted; and realized that I could not
+spare the time to overcome their first instinctive reticence. They had a kind of
+obscure suspiciousness, as if there were something amiss with anyone too much
+interested in Innsmouth. At the Y. M. C. A., where I was stopping, the clerk
+merely discouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent place; and the people at
+the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in the eyes of the educated,
+Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.
+
+The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except
+that the town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution,
+a seat of great marine prosperity in the early 19th century, and later a minor
+factory center using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were
+very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to the county.
+
+
+
+
+References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was
+unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh
+Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining
+bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and
+less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered
+competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour.
+Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence
+that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a
+peculiarly drastic fashion.
+
+Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely
+associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside
+more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of
+Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport
+Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and
+prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness.
+Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them
+out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the
+local sample - said to be a large, queerly-proportioned thing evidently meant for
+a tiara - if it could possibly be arranged.
+
+The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a Miss
+Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient
+gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me into the closed building, since the
+hour was not outrageously late. The collection was a notable one indeed, but in
+my present mood I had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in
+a corner cupboard under the electric lights.
+
+It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the
+strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a
+purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was
+clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and
+with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of
+almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly
+gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an
+equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost
+perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly
+untraditional designs - some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine -
+chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible
+skill and grace.
+
+The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination
+there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for.
+
+
+
+
+At first I decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which
+made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever seen either belonged to some
+known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic defiances
+of every recognized stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some
+settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was
+utterly remote from any - Eastern or Western, ancient or modern - which I had
+ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of
+another planet.
+
+However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally
+potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the
+strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable
+abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs
+became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent
+grotesqueness and malignity - half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion -
+which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense
+of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues
+whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I
+fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing
+with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.
+
+In odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy history as related by
+Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a shop in State Street in
+1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a brawl. The
+Society had acquired it directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a display
+worthy of its quality. It was labeled as of probable East-Indian or Indochinese
+provenance, though the attribution was frankly tentative.
+
+Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and its
+presence in New England, was inclined to believe that it formed part of some
+exotic pirate hoard discovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely
+not weakened by the insistent offers of purchase at a high price which the
+Marshes began to make as soon as they knew of its presence, and which they
+repeated to this day despite the Society's unvarying determination not to sell.
+
+As the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear that the pirate
+theory of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent people of
+the region. Her own attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth - which she never
+seen - was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the cultural scale,
+and she assured me that the rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a
+peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox
+churches.
+
+
+
+
+It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon", and was undoubtedly a
+debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time
+when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a
+simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of
+abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the town,
+replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic
+Hall on New Church Green.
+
+All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for shunning the
+ancient town of decay and desolation; but to me it was merely a fresh incentive.
+To my architectural and historical anticipations was now added an acute
+anthropological zeal, and I could scarcely sleep in my small room at the "\" as
+the night wore away.
+
+
+Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of
+Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As
+the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other
+places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-
+agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth
+and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude
+and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the
+curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the
+half-illegible sign on the windshield - Arkham-Innsmouth-Newburyport - soon
+verified.
+
+There were only three passengers - dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and
+somewhat youthful cast - and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled
+out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The
+driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make
+some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-
+agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of
+spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly
+struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus
+owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of
+such a man and his kinsfolk.
+
+When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to
+determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered
+man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and
+wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep
+creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his
+
+
+
+
+dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that
+seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly
+undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed
+almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in
+irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if
+peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined,
+and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in
+proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl
+closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his
+peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The
+more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit
+them.
+
+A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently
+given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much
+of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even
+guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or
+negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have
+thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
+
+I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow
+I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time
+obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard,
+extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word "Innsmouth." He
+looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without
+speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I
+wished to watch the shore during the journey.
+
+At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old
+brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust.
+Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious
+wish to avoid looking at the bus - or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it.
+Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother;
+flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial
+farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging
+into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.
+
+The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and
+stunted shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window
+I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently
+drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway
+to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state
+of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone
+
+
+
+
+poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges
+over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the
+region.
+
+Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above
+the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I
+had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change,
+it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of 1846, and was
+thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil.
+Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore,
+which robbed the soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of
+wind-blown sand.
+
+At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic
+on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense
+of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met
+the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane
+earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and
+cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent
+driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I
+looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face,
+having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.
+
+Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the
+Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in
+Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could
+just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of
+which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was
+captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to
+face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.
+
+It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous
+dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke
+came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward
+horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another
+there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast
+huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive
+clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now
+descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were
+some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed
+"widow's walks." These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two
+seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among
+them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning
+
+
+
+
+telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old
+carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
+
+The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy
+the white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a
+small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient
+stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few
+seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a
+bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I
+saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only
+deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure
+and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.
+
+Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in
+indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And
+far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising
+above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew,
+must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed
+superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more
+disturbing than the primary impression.
+
+We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in
+varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in
+the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once
+or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging
+clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged
+children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed
+more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain
+peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able
+to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique
+suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of
+particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very
+quickly.
+
+As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall
+through the unnatural stillness. The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker,
+lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those
+we were leaving behind. The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene,
+and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick
+sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and
+there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of
+buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy
+odour imaginable.
+
+
+
+
+Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to
+shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right
+shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but
+there now came signs of a sparse habitation - curtained windows here and there,
+and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were
+increasingly well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old - wood
+and brick structures of the early 19th century - they were obviously kept fit for
+habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my
+feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the
+past.
+
+But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of
+poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or
+radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular
+green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand
+junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and peeling and
+the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with
+difficulty make out the words "Esoteric Order of Dagon". This, then was the
+former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to
+decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a
+cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my
+side of the coach.
+
+The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of
+the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately
+high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were
+missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the
+hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an
+onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized
+me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open,
+revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed
+or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary
+conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis
+could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
+
+It was a living object - the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the
+compact part of the town - and had I been in a steadier mood I would have
+found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it
+was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the
+Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which
+had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of
+bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one
+Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination.
+
+
+
+
+had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed,
+shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I
+should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not
+natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique
+type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way -
+perhaps as treasure-trove?
+
+A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible
+on the sidewalks - lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower
+floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy
+signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of
+waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep
+river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which
+a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both
+sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part
+way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two
+vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my
+left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large
+semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front
+of a tall, cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-
+effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
+
+I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the
+shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight - an elderly man without
+what I had come to call the "Innsmouth look" - and I decided not to ask him any
+of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been
+noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had
+already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
+
+One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the
+other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period,
+from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest.
+Lamps were depressingly few and small - all low-powered incandescents - and I
+was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the
+moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included
+perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the
+First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale
+fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastward extremity of the square near
+the river an office of the town's only industry - the Marsh Refining Company.
+There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor
+trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic
+centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour,
+against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian
+
+
+
+
+steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white
+belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
+
+For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery,
+whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy
+of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and
+affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager
+to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its
+furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from
+Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back
+whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in
+Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give
+up his job.
+
+There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but
+I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal.
+West of that were the fine old residence streets - Broad, Washington, Lafayette,
+and Adams - and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums -
+along Main Street - that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were
+all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such
+neighbourhoods - especially north of the river since the people were sullen and
+hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.
+
+Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable
+cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or
+around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon
+Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd - all violently
+disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using
+the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were
+heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvelous transformations
+leading to bodily immorality - of a sort - on this earth. The youth's own pastor -
+Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham - had gravely urged him not to
+join any church in Innsmouth.
+
+As for the Innsmouth people - the youth hardly knew what to make of them.
+They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one
+could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory
+fishing. Perhaps - judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed -
+they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed
+sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding -
+despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of
+entity. Their appearance - especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one
+never saw shut - was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were
+
+
+
+
+disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and
+especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April
+30th and October 31st.
+
+They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and
+harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in
+sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of
+it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and
+of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did
+occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at
+the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether
+the "Innsmouth look" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon
+which increased its hold as years advanced.
+
+Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical
+anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity - changes invoking
+osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull - but then, even this aspect was
+no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a
+whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions
+regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no
+matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.
+
+The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible
+ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the
+queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were
+reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen
+abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood - if any - these beings had, it was
+impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters
+out of sight when government and others from the outside world came to town.
+
+It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the
+place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man
+who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time
+walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok
+Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the
+town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over
+his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to
+talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his
+favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments
+of whispered reminiscence.
+
+After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories
+were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could
+
+
+
+
+have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever beheved him, but
+the natives did not hke him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not
+always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of
+the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.
+
+Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time,
+but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder
+such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night,
+there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the
+streets were loathsomely dark.
+
+As for business - the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the
+natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling
+and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the
+refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of
+where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the
+works in a closed, curtained car.
+
+There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once
+been a great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the
+Edwardian age curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly
+conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight
+a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons
+and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it
+was said that their health was failing.
+
+One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore
+an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which
+the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had
+heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of
+demons. The clergymen - or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays -
+also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses
+of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured
+to exist around Innsmouth.
+
+The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town - the
+Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots - were all very retiring. They lived in
+immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour
+in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public
+view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
+
+Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my
+benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient
+
+
+
+
+features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and
+pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I
+had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as
+a lunch later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets,
+talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for
+Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of
+communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations
+to the field of architecture.
+
+Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow,
+shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the
+lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free
+from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a
+bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic
+center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
+
+Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter
+desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel
+roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish,
+decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were
+tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw
+the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous
+and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those
+windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the
+waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather
+than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark
+desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death,
+and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given
+over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears
+and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
+
+Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and
+stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate,
+save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living
+thing did I see except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and
+not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the
+falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I
+looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water
+Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
+
+North of the river there were traces of squalid life - active fish-packing houses in
+Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional
+sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the
+
+
+
+
+dismal streets and unpaved lanes - but I seemed to find this even more
+oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more
+hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was
+several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not
+quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger
+here than farther inland - unless, indeed, the "Innsmouth look" were a disease
+rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the
+more advanced cases.
+
+One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard.
+They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet
+in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There
+were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought
+uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly
+I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had
+heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do
+so.
+
+Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main
+and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical
+goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass
+the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form
+of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told
+me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable
+neighbourhoods for strangers.
+
+Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing
+Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician
+neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets.
+Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-
+shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my
+gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one
+or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was
+a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-tended lawns and
+gardens. The most sumptuous of these - with wide terraced parterres extending
+back the whole way to Lafayette Street - 1 took to be the home of Old Man Marsh,
+the afflicted refinery owner.
+
+In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete
+absence of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and
+disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly
+shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and
+secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I
+
+
+
+
+could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by
+sly, staring eyes that never shut.
+
+I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too
+well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following
+Washington street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry
+and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the
+traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge
+on my right.
+
+The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took
+the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared.
+Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal
+faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming
+intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of
+getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time
+of that sinister bus.
+
+It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red
+faced, bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a
+bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking
+firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish
+nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and
+incredible.
+
+
+It must have been some imp of the perverse - or some sardonic pull from dark,
+hidden sources - which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before
+resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then
+hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this
+festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new
+currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.
+
+I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed,
+and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to
+be seen talking with him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town's
+decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a
+lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and
+maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth - and
+old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the
+last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my
+youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from
+
+
+
+
+the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of
+raw whiskey.
+
+I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely
+notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg
+liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I
+would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old
+Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said
+that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour
+or two at a time.
+
+A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of
+a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty -looking fellow
+who waited on me had a touch of the staring "Innsmouth look", but was quite
+civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers -
+truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like - as were occasionally in town.
+
+Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for - shuffling out of Paine
+street around the corner of the Gilman House - I glimpsed nothing less than the
+tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I
+attracted his attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and soon
+realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite
+Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.
+
+I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was
+aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had
+previously visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the
+distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the
+range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free
+to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main
+Street I could hear a faint and wheezy "Hey, Mister!" behind me and I presently
+allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.
+
+I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and
+crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I
+had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between
+crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf
+projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised
+tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined
+warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal place for a long secret
+colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in
+among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the
+smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
+
+
+
+
+About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock
+coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler;
+meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to
+overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into
+a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but
+much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth
+and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a
+wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a
+sententious village fashion.
+
+Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be
+enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old
+Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening
+which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's
+rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back
+was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other
+had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef,
+then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight
+seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a
+confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my
+coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken,
+
+"Thar's whar it all begun - that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep
+water starts. Gate o' hell - sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin
+tech. or Cap'n Obed done it - him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in
+the Saouth Sea islands.
+
+"Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business -
+even the new ones - an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of
+1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow - both on 'em Gilman
+venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat - brigantine Columby, brig Hefty,
+an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an'
+Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as
+late as twenty-eight.
+
+"Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed - old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind
+him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to
+Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdns meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git
+better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies - gods as ud bring 'em good fishin'
+in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.
+
+"Matt Eliot his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin' any
+heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o'
+
+
+
+
+stone ruins older'n anybody knew anying abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape,
+in the Carohnes, but with carven's of faces that looked like the big statues on
+Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other
+ruins with diff'rent carvin' - ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea
+onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.
+
+"Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives anound thar had all the fish they cud ketch,
+an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold
+an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on
+the little island - sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all
+kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get aout o' them
+whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they
+managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's.
+Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides,
+that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good from year to
+year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks
+looked dinned queer even for Kanakys.
+
+"It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done
+it, but be begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they
+come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old
+chief — Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old
+yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody
+never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller -
+though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed
+had."
+
+The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the
+terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale
+could be nothing but drunken phantasy.
+
+"Wal, Sir, Obed he 'lart that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd
+about - an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was
+sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that
+lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things
+on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish
+monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o'
+critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started.
+
+"They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up
+from thar. Seem they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the
+island come up sudden to the surface. That's how the Kanakys got wind they
+
+
+
+
+was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced
+up a bargain afore long.
+
+"Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o'
+the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say,
+an' I guess Obed was'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with
+the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout
+everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things twice
+every year - May-Eve an' Hallawe'en - reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a' the
+carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was
+plenty a' fish - they druv 'em in from all over the sea - an' a few gold like things
+naow an' then.
+
+"Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet - goin' thar in
+canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as
+was comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main island, but
+arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin' with the
+folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big days - May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye
+see, they was able to live both in ant aout o' water - what they call amphibians, I
+guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta
+wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein' thar, but they says they dun't keer
+much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin'
+to bother - that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost
+Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when
+anybody visited the island.
+
+"When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o'
+balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems
+that human folks has got a kind a' relation to sech water-beasts - that everything
+alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin.
+Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be children as
+ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things, till finally
+they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things daown har. An' this is the
+important part, young feller - them as turned into fish things an' went into the
+water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt violent.
+
+"Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o'
+fish blood from them deep water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it,
+they was kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place.
+Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough to
+take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way them things said. Them
+as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human
+sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually
+
+
+
+
+go daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water gen'rally
+come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a'talkin' to his own five-
+times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so
+afore.
+
+"Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin' - excep' in canoe wars with the other
+islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or
+plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the water -
+but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible artet a
+while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give up -
+an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think the same hisself when he'd chewed over
+old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't got
+none of the fish blood - bein' of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on
+other islands.
+
+"Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the sea
+things, an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a lot from
+human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the
+reg'lar things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o'
+thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish
+things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest o' 'em. The idee
+was to drop it daown with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as
+the things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that looked abaout cud
+find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.
+
+"Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from
+the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them gold-
+like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of them. Things went on
+that way for years an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start
+the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fuUin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces
+like they was, for folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the same his crews
+ud get a piece an' dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to
+keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some o' the pieces as was more
+human-like than most.
+
+"Well, come abaout thutty-eight - when I was seven year' old - Obed he faound
+the island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had
+got wind o' what was goin' on, and had took matters into their own hands.
+S'pose they must a had, after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was
+the only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will
+chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins
+older'n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was - they didn't leave nothin' standin' on
+either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of the ruins
+
+
+
+
+was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed
+abaout - like charms - with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika
+naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace
+o' no gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the
+matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.
+
+"That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very
+poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what profited
+the master of a ship gen'Uy profited the crew proportionate. Most of the folks
+araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but they
+was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wan't doin'
+none too well.
+
+"Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an'
+prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed
+o' folks as prayed to gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good
+bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud
+bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. 0' course them as sarved on the
+Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what he meant, an' wa'n't none too
+anxious to get clost to sea-things like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't
+know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, and
+begun to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring
+'em results."
+
+Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive
+silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare
+fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I
+knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing
+interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of
+crude allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an
+imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment
+did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less
+the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it brought in references
+to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport.
+Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and
+possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this
+antique toper.
+
+I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how
+he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into
+his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his
+pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch
+any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind
+
+
+
+
+the stained bushy whiskers. Yes - he was really forming words, and I could grasp
+a fair proportion of them.
+
+"Poor Matt - Matt he alius was agin it - tried to line up the folks on his side, an'
+had long talks with the preachers - no use - they run the Congregational parson
+aout o' taown, an' the Methodist feller quit - never did see Resolved Babcock, the
+Baptist parson, agin - Wrath 0' Jehovy - I was a mightly little critter, but I heerd
+what I heerd an, seen what I seen - Dagon an' Ashtoreth - Belial an' Beelzebub -
+Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines - Babylonish abominations
+- Mene, mene, tekel, upharisn - -."
+
+He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was
+close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me
+with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.
+
+"Dun't believe me, hey? Hey, heh, heh - then jest tell me, young feller, why
+Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the
+dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the
+wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was alius droppin'
+heavy things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom
+shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that
+funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did
+they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new
+church parsons - fellers as used to he sailors - wear them queer robes an' cover
+their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?"
+
+The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white
+beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began
+to cackle evilly.
+
+"Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginni'n to see hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them
+days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse.
+Oh, I kin tell ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what
+was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh!
+Haow abaout the night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the
+reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's the moon riz?
+
+"Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the
+deep water an' never come up . . .
+
+"Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin' shapes as
+wa'n't human shapes? . . .Heh? . . . Heh, heh, heh . . ."
+
+
+
+
+The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm.
+He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was
+not altogether that of mirth.
+
+"S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved often Obed's dory beyond the
+reef and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did
+anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce,
+an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison Hey? Heh, heh,
+heh, heh ... Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands ... them as had reel
+hands ...
+
+"Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three
+darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke
+stared comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too - fish
+begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill' an' heaven knows what sized cargoes
+we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. T'was then Obed
+got the ol' branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout
+the ketch an' come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em
+agin. An' jest then our folk organised the Esoteric Order 0' Dagon, an' bought
+Masoic Hall often Calvary Commandery for it . . . heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a
+Mason an' agin the sellin', but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.
+
+"Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on that
+Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no
+younguns to take to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted
+them gold things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was
+satisfied fer a while . . .
+
+"Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too many
+folks missin' - too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday - too much talk
+abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from
+the cupalo. They was a party one night as foUered Obed's craowd aout to the
+reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed and thutty-two others
+was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot and jest what
+charge agin 'em cud he got to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead ... a couple
+o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet long . . .
+
+Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for
+a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and
+was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was
+glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I
+strained to catch his whispers.
+
+
+
+
+"That awful night ... I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo ... hordes of 'em ...
+swarms of 'em ... all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet
+. . . God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night . . . they rattled our
+door, but pa wouldn't open . . . then he dumb aout the kitchen winder with his
+musket to find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do . . . Maounds o' the dead
+an' the dyin' . . . shots and screams . . . shaoutin' in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an'
+New Church Green - gaol throwed open ... - proclamation . . . treason . . . called it
+the plague when folks come in an' faoud haff our people missin' . . . nobody left
+but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet ... never
+heard o' my pa no more. . . "
+
+The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder
+tightened.
+
+"Everything cleaned up in the mornin' - but they was traces ... Obed he kinder
+takes charge an' says things is goin' to be changed . . . others'll worship with us at
+meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to entertin guests . . . they wanted to mix
+like they done with the Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop 'em.
+Far gone, was Obed . . . jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung
+us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered after ..."
+
+"Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutsid; only we was to keep shy o' strangers
+ef we knowed what was good fer us.
+
+"We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third
+oaths that some o' us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards - gold
+an' sech - No use balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther
+not start risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was gave away an' forced
+to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em
+off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys wudu't never give away
+their secrets.
+
+"Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown
+when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no
+strangers as might bear tales aoutside - that is, withaout they got pry in'. All in
+the band of the faithful - Order 0' Dagon - an' the children shud never die, but go
+back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct ... la! la!
+Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga - "
+
+Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul
+- to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the
+decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain?
+
+
+
+
+He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled checks
+into the depths of his beard.
+
+"God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old - Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin! -
+the folks as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves - them as told things in
+Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you're callin' me
+right naow - but God, what I seen - They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what I know,
+only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected
+unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an' delib'rit . . . but I wudn't
+take the third Oath - I'd a died ruther'n take that -
+
+"It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun
+to grow up - some 'em, that is. I was afeared - never did no pryin' arter that
+awful night, an' never see one o' - them - clost to in all my life. That is, never no
+full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a never
+come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad.
+That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter 'sixty-three.
+Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off - mills an' shops
+shet daown - shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up - railrud give up - but
+they ... they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river from that cursed
+reef o' Satan - an' more an' more attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an'
+more noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em. . .
+
+"Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us - s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em,
+seein' what questions ye ast - stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then,
+an' abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all
+melted up - but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'. They call
+them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren
+blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo off as
+many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very cur'ous,
+specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters - bosses wuss'n mules - but
+when they got autos that was all right.
+
+"In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see
+- some says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in - had
+three children by her - two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like
+anybody else an' was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a
+trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hav
+nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry
+now is Obed's grandson by his fust wife - son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but
+his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.
+
+
+
+
+"Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all
+aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon.
+Mebbe he's tried it already - they do sometimes go daown for little spells afore
+they go daown for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'.
+Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel - she come from Ipiwich, an' they nigh
+lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in
+'seventy-eight an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow - the fust wife's children
+dead, and the rest . . . God knows ..."
+
+The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it
+seemed to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear.
+He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder
+or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help
+beginning to share his apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to be
+trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
+
+"Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to he livin' in a taown
+like this, with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin'
+an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye
+turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the
+churches an' Order 0' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'?
+Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an'
+Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that
+ain't the wust!"
+
+Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me
+more than I care to own.
+
+"Curse ye, dun't set thar a'starin' at me with them eyes - 1 tell Obed Marsh he's
+in hell, an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh ... in hell, I says! Can't git me - I hain't
+done nothin' nor told nobody nothin' - -
+
+"Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm a'goin'
+to naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me, boy - this is what I ain't never told
+nobody... I says I didn't get to do pryin' arter that night - but I faound things
+about jest the same!"
+
+"Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this - it ain't what them
+fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up
+aout o' whar they come from into the taown - been doin' it fer years, an'
+slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an' Main
+Streets is full of 'em - them devils an' what they brung - an' when they git ready
+... I say, when they git. . . ever hear tell of a shoggoth?
+
+
+
+
+"Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be - I seen 'em one night
+when . . . eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh ..."
+
+The hideous suddenness and inhuman Rightfulness of the old man's shriek
+almost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea,
+were positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy
+of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he
+made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.
+
+There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set
+of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was
+shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a
+chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back -
+albeit as a trembling whisper.
+
+"Git aout o' here! Get aout o' here! They seen us - git aout fer your life! Dun't
+wait fer nothin' - they know naow - Run fer it - quick - aout o' this taown - -"
+
+Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf,
+and changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling
+scream. "E-yaahhhh! . . . Yheaaaaaa! ..."
+
+Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my
+shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around
+the ruined warehouse wall.
+
+I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water
+Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of
+Zadok Allen.
+
+
+I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode - an
+episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had
+prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed.
+Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had
+communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of
+loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.
+
+Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I
+wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late - my watch said
+7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight - so I tried to give my
+thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly
+
+
+
+
+through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel
+where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.
+
+Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit
+chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over
+my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous
+and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than
+the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too
+precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent
+corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-
+hour.
+
+Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before,
+I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the
+corner of Fall street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and
+when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were
+congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging,
+watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby,
+and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-
+passengers on the coach.
+
+The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight,
+and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable
+words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and
+entered the hotel; while the passengers - the same men whom I had seen arriving
+in Newburyport that morning - shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some
+faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not
+English. I boarded the empty coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was
+hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and began mumbling in a throaty
+voice of peculiar repulsiveness.
+
+I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the
+engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could
+not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that
+night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth
+either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over
+at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there
+was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently
+dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus
+and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night clerk told me
+I could have Room 428 on next the top floor - large, but without running water -
+for a dollar.
+
+
+
+
+Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid
+my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant
+up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly
+devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare,
+cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low,
+deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching
+roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a
+bathroom - a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric
+light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.
+
+It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner
+of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the
+unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the
+restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring,
+unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands
+being in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to
+find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of
+vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my
+cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-specked
+magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.
+
+As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap,
+iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I
+felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to
+brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was
+still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did
+not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild,
+watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.
+
+Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport
+ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants - not
+on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face
+for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have
+been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so
+gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the
+town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and
+decay.
+
+Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my
+room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of
+recent removal. No doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in
+this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt
+on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the
+
+
+
+
+marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general
+tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the
+aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver which I kept on my
+key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew
+that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of
+its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this
+kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms,
+and these I proceeded to fasten.
+
+I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with
+only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I
+placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the
+dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my
+thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for
+something - listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That
+inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had
+suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.
+
+After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with
+footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were
+no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive
+about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep
+at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been
+several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for
+their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns
+folk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with
+its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavorable notice. It occurred to me
+that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off
+speculating in this fashion - but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.
+
+At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the
+newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the
+hard, uneven bed - coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of
+the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept
+over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it
+on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of
+stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which
+seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my apprehensions. Without the least
+shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried - cautiously, furtively,
+tentatively - with a key.
+
+My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather
+than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit
+
+
+
+
+without definite reason, instinctively on my guard - and that was to my
+advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be.
+Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate
+reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow.
+It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign
+purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be
+intruder's next move.
+
+After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north
+entered with a pass key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was
+softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler
+left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that
+the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted
+connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went
+along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the
+bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or
+lesser time, as the future would shew.
+
+The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been
+subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape
+for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen tumbler meant a danger not to be
+met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one
+thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through
+some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.
+
+Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb
+over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless
+flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off.
+Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale - just what, I
+could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I
+heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely
+distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper
+sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled
+croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human speech. Then I thought
+with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this
+mouldering and pestilential building.
+
+Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to
+the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations
+there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows
+commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right
+and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their
+slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story
+
+
+
+
+level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two
+from my own - in one case on the north and in the other case on the south - and
+my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of making the transfer.
+
+I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps
+would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room
+would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be
+through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts
+of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram
+whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to
+the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it
+noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a
+window before any hostile forces became coordinated enough to open the right
+door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the
+bureau against it - little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.
+
+I perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully prepared for any
+calamity. Even getting to another roof would not solve the problem for there
+would then remain the task of reaching the ground and escaping from the town.
+One thing in my favour was the deserted and ruinous state of the abutting
+building and the number of skylights gaping blackly open in each row.
+
+Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was
+southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It
+was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw - after drawing the bolt and
+finding other fastening in place - it was not a favorable one for forcing.
+Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it
+to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The
+door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this - though a test
+proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side - I knew must be my route. If
+I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to
+the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or
+opposite building to Washington or Bates - or else emerge in Paine and edge
+around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike
+Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My
+preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all
+night.
+
+As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs
+below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the
+right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories
+and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted
+railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with
+
+
+
+
+islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded
+country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the
+moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward
+Arkham which I had determined to take.
+
+I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door,
+and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises
+underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A
+wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the
+corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal
+origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.
+
+For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse,
+and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly
+and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated - continuously, and with
+growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew
+the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of
+battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume
+would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged
+again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or
+pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all
+the while the clamour at the outer door increased.
+
+Finally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew those outside
+must have heard. Instantly the outside knocking became a violent battering,
+while keys sounded ominously in the hall doors of the rooms on both sides of
+me. Rushing through the newly opened connexion, I succeeded in bolting the
+northerly hall door before the lock could he turned; but even as I did so I heard
+the hall door of the third room - the one from whose window I had hoped to
+reach the roof below - being tried with a pass key.
+
+For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no
+window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over
+me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-
+glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from
+this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness,
+I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing
+at it in an effort to get through and - granting that fastenings might be as
+providentially intact as in this second room - bolt the hall door beyond before the
+lock could be turned from outside.
+
+Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve - for the connecting door before me
+was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my
+
+
+
+
+right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward.
+My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I
+could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I
+gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a
+confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the
+bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room
+and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass key sounded
+in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.
+
+The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think
+about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut
+and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side -
+pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a
+washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers
+to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street
+block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from
+the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was shuddering because not one of
+my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and subdued barkings at
+odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.
+
+As I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a frightful
+scurrying along the corridor toward the room north of me, and perceived that
+the southward battering had ceased. Plainly, most of my opponents were about
+to concentrate against the feeble connecting door which they knew must open
+directly on me. Outside, the moon played on the ridgepole of the block below,
+and I saw that the jump would be desperately hazardous because of the steep
+surface on which I must land.
+
+Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my
+avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for
+the nearest sky-light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would
+have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of
+yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to
+Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.
+
+The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the
+weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought
+some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still
+held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I
+opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies
+suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting
+catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the
+dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all;
+
+
+
+
+then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the
+drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw
+that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of
+the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the
+morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.
+
+I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the
+gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I
+observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north
+I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist
+church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There
+had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a
+chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket
+lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was
+slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty
+floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.
+
+The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and
+made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight - after a hasty glance at
+my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed
+tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second storey to the ground
+floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At
+length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous
+rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I
+found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the
+grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.
+
+The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about
+without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side
+were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking
+softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and
+chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I
+reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut.
+Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard,
+but stopped short when close to the doorway.
+
+For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes
+was pouring - lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices
+exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved
+uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not know where I had gone;
+but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features
+were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably
+repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and
+
+
+
+
+unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As
+the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I
+could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was
+detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping
+toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room
+with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my
+flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed
+outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.
+
+I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any
+light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I
+could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of
+pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose.
+The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street
+lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in
+prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained
+my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of
+deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked
+like pursuers.
+
+I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and
+dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and
+stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual
+wayfarer.
+
+At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures
+crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open
+space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of
+South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the
+grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was
+no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of
+possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to
+cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as
+best I could, and trusting that no one - or at least no pursuer of mine - would be
+there.
+
+Just how fully the pursuit was organised - and indeed, just what its purpose
+might be - I could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity in the town,
+but I judged that the news of my escape from the Gilman had not yet spread. I
+would, of course, soon have to shift from Washington to some other southward
+street; for that party from the hotel would doubtless be after me. I must have left
+dust prints in that last old building, revealing how I had gained the street.
+
+
+
+
+The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonht; and I saw the remains
+of a parkhke, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though
+a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town
+Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to
+the waterfront and commanding a long view out a sea; and I hoped that no one
+would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.
+
+My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been
+spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take
+in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far
+out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I
+glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the
+last twenty-four hours - legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable
+gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.
+
+Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef.
+They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror
+beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in
+only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to
+make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman
+House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous
+though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering
+signal.
+
+Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh - how plainly visible I was, I
+resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on
+that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a
+seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it
+involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had
+landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous
+green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer
+moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable
+beacons.
+
+It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me - the
+impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running
+frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring
+windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the
+moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were
+alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and
+even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that
+the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to
+be expressed or consciously formulated.
+
+
+
+
+My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to
+hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps
+and gutteral sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In
+a second all my plans were utterly changed - for if the southward highway were
+blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I
+paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left
+the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.
+
+A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another
+street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen
+me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This,
+however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly
+patrolled; for the people could not have known what route I intended to take. If
+this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any
+road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of
+all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled - both from sheer
+hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.
+
+Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of
+ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the
+crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the
+townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-
+impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen
+it clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier
+length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in
+the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the
+undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and
+there was nothing to do but try it.
+
+Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the
+grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was
+how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead
+to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette - there edging around but not crossing an
+open space homologous to the one I had traversed - and subsequently back
+northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam,
+and Bank streets - the latter skirting the river gorge - to the abandoned and
+dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to
+Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin
+my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.
+
+Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge
+around into Babeon as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in
+Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near
+
+
+
+
+the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I
+broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye.
+Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was
+still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights
+within, and I passed it without disaster.
+
+In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the
+searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice
+pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open
+space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not
+force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh
+distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover
+beheld a motor car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot
+Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.
+
+As I watched - choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement
+- I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same
+direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since
+that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed
+were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened
+whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill
+through me - for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.
+
+When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting
+around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest
+stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some
+croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished
+the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and
+moonlit South Street - with its seaward view - and I had to nerve myself for the
+ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers
+could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I
+decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the
+shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.
+
+When the view of the water again opened out - this time on my right - I was half-
+determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong
+glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows
+ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead,
+the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the
+abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its
+rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent
+aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I
+could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a
+
+
+
+
+curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead
+and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was
+completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful
+breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.
+
+I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing
+along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I
+had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them
+plainly only a block away - and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their
+faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in
+a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while
+another figure - robed and tiaraed - seemed to progress in an almost hopping
+fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard -
+the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look
+in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual,
+shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me
+or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on
+across the moonlit space without varying their course - meanwhile croaking and
+jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.
+
+Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and
+decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western
+sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the
+buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation,
+one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I
+tuned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a
+man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however,
+too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the
+Bank Street warehouses in safety.
+
+No one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and the roar of the
+waterfalls quite drowned my foot steps. It was a long dog-trot to the ruined
+station, and the great brick warehouse walls around me seemed somehow more
+terrifying than the fronts of private houses. At last I saw the ancient arcaded
+station - or what was left of it - and made directly for the tracks that started from
+its farther end.
+
+The rails were rusty but mainly intact, and not more than half the ties had rotted
+away. Walking or running on such a surface was very difficult; but I did my best,
+and on the whole made very fair time. For some distance the line kept on along
+the gorge's brink, but at length I reached the long covered bridge where it
+crossed the chasm at a dizzying height. The condition of this bridge would
+
+
+
+
+determine my next step. If humanly possible, I would use it; if not, 1 would have
+to risk more street wandering and take the nearest intact highway bridge.
+
+The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight,
+and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to
+use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that
+flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties
+which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate
+jump which fortunately succeeded.
+
+I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel.
+The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region
+increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour.
+Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my
+clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment
+in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley
+road.
+
+The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy
+embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort
+of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut
+choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at
+this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window
+view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer
+distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time
+thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.
+
+Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient
+spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic
+yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days
+before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town,
+something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.
+
+What I saw - or fancied I saw - was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion
+far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde
+must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was
+great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of
+that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the
+rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though
+the wind was blowing the other way - a suggestion of bestial scraping and
+bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.
+
+
+
+
+All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very
+extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near
+the waterfront; I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting
+the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the
+number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as
+Innsmouth.
+
+Whence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now beheld? Did
+those ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued, and
+unsuspected life? Or had some unseen ship indeed landed a legion of unknown
+outsiders on that hellish reef? Who were they? Why were they here? And if such
+a column of them was scouring the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the other
+roads be likewise augmented?
+
+I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace
+when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly
+changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must
+have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from
+that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too - a kind of wholesale,
+colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most
+detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating
+column on the far-off Ipswich road.
+
+And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and
+grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road
+drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging.
+Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and
+vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for
+tracking - though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the
+omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt
+reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track
+in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see
+them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.
+
+All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close
+moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the
+irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all
+Innsmouth types - something one would not care to remember.
+
+The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of
+croaking, baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech.
+Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So
+far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering
+
+
+
+
+was monstrous - 1 could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for
+it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde
+was very close now - air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost
+shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come,
+and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of holding my eyelids down.
+
+I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality
+or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my
+frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an
+hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient,
+haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the
+legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human
+imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting
+roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual
+contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who
+can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The
+government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to
+what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it
+possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?
+
+But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the mocking yellow
+moon - saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in plain sight in front of
+me as I crouched among the wild brambles of that desolate railway cut. Of
+course my resolution to keep my eyes shut had failed. It was foredoomed to
+failure - for who could crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities
+of unknown source flopped noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred yards
+away?
+
+I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared
+considering what I had seen before.
+
+My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal - so should I not have been
+ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in
+which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the
+raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I
+knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the
+cut flattened out and the road crossed the track - and I could no longer keep
+myself from sampling whatever honor that leering yellow moon might have to
+shew.
+
+It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of
+every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the
+human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined - nothing, even, that I could
+
+
+
+
+have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way -
+would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I
+saw - or believe I saw. I have tied to hint what it was in order to postpone the
+horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually
+spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what
+man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?
+
+And yet I saw them in a limitless stream - flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating -
+urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant
+saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that
+nameless whitish-gold metal . . . and some were strangely robed . . . and one, who
+led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers,
+and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a
+head.
+
+I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white
+bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were
+scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the
+heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of
+their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They
+hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was
+somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying
+voices, clearly wed tar articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression
+which their staring faces lacked.
+
+But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too
+well what they must be - for was not the memory of the evil tiara at
+Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless
+design - living and horrible - and as I saw them I knew also of what that
+humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded
+me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless
+swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only
+the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit
+of fainting; the first I had ever had.
+
+
+It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown
+railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of
+any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined
+roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a
+living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was
+still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.
+
+
+
+
+The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I
+felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-
+shadowed Innsmouth - and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied
+powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I
+found myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road
+to Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself
+with presentable cloths. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day
+talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later
+repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now
+familiar - and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell.
+Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me - yet perhaps a greater horror - or a
+greater marvel - is reaching out.
+
+As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest
+of my tour - the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had
+counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said to
+be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in
+Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very
+rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later no when I might
+have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there -
+Mr. B. Lapham Peabody - was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed
+unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who
+was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of
+seventeen.
+
+It seemed that a material uncle of mine had been there many years before on a
+quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some
+local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about
+the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the
+ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have
+been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire - a cousin of the Essex County
+Marshes - but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her
+family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and
+her French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham
+people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed the
+role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman - now long dead - was very
+taciturn, and there were those who said she would have told more than she did.
+
+But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded
+parents of the young woman - Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh - among the
+known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the
+natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence - she certainly had the true
+Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took
+
+
+
+
+place at the birth of my grandmother - her only child. Having formed some
+disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome
+the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr.
+Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was
+grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes
+and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.
+
+I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee
+recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year,
+and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome
+activities - reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from
+government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence
+had started. Around the middle of July - just a year after the Innsmouth
+experience - I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking
+some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of
+heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of a connected chart I
+could construct.
+
+I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had
+always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had
+never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always
+welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother
+had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved
+when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had
+wandered off in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He
+had shot himself after a trip to New England - the same trip, no doubt, which
+had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.
+
+This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about
+the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague,
+unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that.
+They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence - Walter's son -
+had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took
+him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in
+four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical,
+was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother's death
+two years before.
+
+My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland
+household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the
+place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson
+records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though
+for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal
+
+
+
+
+the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms,
+photographs, and miniatures.
+
+It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to
+acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and
+Uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed
+at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and
+alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible
+sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the
+steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was
+clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had
+not suggested before - something which would bring stark panic if too openly
+thought of.
+
+But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a
+downtown safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring
+enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my
+mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce.
+They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had
+never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to
+enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and
+my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in
+New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.
+
+As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not
+to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists
+and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship
+superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their
+exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two
+armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain
+figures of almost unbearable extravagance.
+
+During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must
+have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in
+his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which
+he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some
+demonstration when the first piece - the tiara - became visible, but I doubt if he
+expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I
+was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be.
+What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier choked
+railway cut a year before.
+
+
+
+
+From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension
+nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-
+grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband Hved in
+Arkham - and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a
+monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man trough trick? What was it the
+ancient toper had muttered about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In
+Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed
+Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who - or what - then, was my great-
+great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold
+ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the
+father of my great-grand-mother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-
+eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my
+part - sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly
+coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral
+quest in New England?
+
+For more than two years 1 fought off these reflections with partial success. My
+father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as
+deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They
+were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness
+as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed
+to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean
+walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to
+appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the
+dreams they did not horrify me at all - I was one with them; wearing their
+unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at
+their evil sea-bottom temples.
+
+There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember
+each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I
+dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to
+drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of
+blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and
+appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position
+and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had
+me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
+
+It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow
+ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something
+subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too,
+for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking
+place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and
+uncle Douglas?
+
+
+
+
+One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea.
+She hved in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange
+leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a
+warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed - as those who take to the
+water change - and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot
+her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders -
+destined for him as well - he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be
+my realm, too - I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with
+those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.
+
+I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years
+Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed
+Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot
+death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be
+destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might
+sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they
+remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It
+would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread,
+and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once
+more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that
+would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first
+time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the
+mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.
+
+So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and
+almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of
+horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps
+instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a
+kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full
+change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a
+sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of
+splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. la-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl
+id la! No, I shall not shoot myself - I cannot be made to shoot myself!
+
+I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we
+shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding
+reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-
+columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst
+wonder and glory for ever.
+
+
+
+
+The Shunned House
+
+Written October 1924
+
+
+
+From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Some times it enters
+directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to
+their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly
+exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties
+Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the
+gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in
+Benefit Street - the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered
+Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette - and his favourite walk led northward
+along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighbouring hillside
+churchyard of St. John's whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century
+gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.
+
+Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's greatest
+master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on
+the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the
+abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkept yard dating from a time when the
+region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of
+it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the
+two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror
+the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and
+stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.
+
+The house was - and for that matter still is - of a kind to attract the attention of
+the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average
+New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century - the prosperous
+peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian
+doorway and interior paneling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It
+faced south, with one gable and buried to the lower windows in the east ward
+rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its
+construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and
+straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street - at first called
+Back Street - was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first
+settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North
+Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots.
+
+
+
+
+At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn
+from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the
+Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space, exposing the foundations
+so that a brick basement wall had to be made, giving the deep cellar a street
+frontage with the door and two windows above ground, close to the new line of
+public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the
+intervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks must have seen only a
+sheer ascent of dull grey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a
+height of ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.
+
+The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, al most to
+Wheaton Street. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of
+course greatly above the existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a
+high bank wall of damp, mossy stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps
+which led inward be tween canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of mangy
+lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement
+urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and similar
+paraphernalia set off the weather beaten front door with its broken fanlight,
+rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.
+
+What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died
+there in alarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners
+had moved out some twenty years after building the place. It was plainly
+unhealthy, perhaps because of the dampness and fungous growth in the cellar,
+the general sickish smell, the draughts of the hallways, or the quality of the well
+and pump water. These things were bad enough, and these were all that gained
+belief among the person whom I knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian
+uncle. Dr. Elihu Whipple, revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer surmises
+which formed an undercurrent of folk-
+lore among old-time servants and humble folk, surmises which never travelled
+far, and which were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis
+with a shifting modern population.
+
+The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the
+community as in any real sense "haunted." There were no widespread tales of
+rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished lights, or faces at the window.
+Extremists sometimes said the house was "unlucky," but that is as far as even
+they went. What was really beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of
+persons died there; or more accurately, had died there, since after some peculiar
+happenings over sixty years ago the building had become deserted through the
+sheer impossibility of renting it. These persons were not all cut off suddenly by
+any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped, so
+
+
+
+
+that each one died the sooner from whatever tendency to weakness he may have
+naturally had. And those who did not die displayed in varying degree a type of
+anaemia or consumption, and sometimes a decline of the mental faculties, which
+spoke ill for the salubriousness of the building. Neighbouring houses, it must be
+added, seemed entirely free from the noxious quality.
+
+This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to show me the
+notes which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my
+childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and terrible old
+trees, long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high
+terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place,
+and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this
+sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated
+house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The
+small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation
+hung round the precarious panel ling, shaky interior shutters, peeling
+wallpaper,, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered
+furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the
+fearful; and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder
+to the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small blinking windows in the
+gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-
+wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into
+monstrous and hellish shapes.
+
+But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank,
+humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though
+it was wholly above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and
+window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the busy sidewalk. We scarcely
+knew whether to haunt it in spectral fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our
+souls and our sanity. For one thing, the bad odour of the house was strongest
+there; and for another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths which
+occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth floor.
+Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside, were truly
+horrible in their outlines; detest able parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes,
+whose like we had never seen in any other situation. They rotted quickly, and at
+one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnal passers-by
+sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind the broken panes of the foetor-
+spreading windows.
+
+We never - even in our wildest Hallowe'en moods - visited this cellar by night,
+but in some of our daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especially
+when the day was dark and wet. There was also a subtler thing we often thought
+we detected - a very strange thing which was, however, merely suggestive at
+
+
+
+
+most. I refer to a sort of cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor - a vague,
+shifting deposit of mould or nitre which we sometimes thought we could trace
+amidst the sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace of the basement
+kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblance
+to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed, and
+often there was no whitish deposit whatever. .On a certain rainy afternoon when
+this illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I
+glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the
+nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the
+matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged
+with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the
+wild ancient tales of the common folk - a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish,
+wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and queer contours
+assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust their way into the cellar
+through the loose foundation-stones.
+
+
+Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he
+had collected concerning the shunned house. Dr. Whipple was a sane,
+conservative physician of the old school, and for all his interest in the place was
+not eager to encourage young thoughts toward the abnormal. His own view,
+postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had
+nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesque ness
+which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all
+manner of gruesome imaginative associations.
+
+The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old- fashioned
+gentleman, and a local historian of note, who had often broken a lance with such
+controversial guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell.
+He lived with one man servant in a Georgian homestead with knocker and iron-
+railed steps, balanced eerily on the steep ascent of North Court Street beside the
+ancient brick court and colony house where his grandfather - a cousin of that
+celebrated privateersman, Capt. Whipple, who burnt His Majesty's armed
+schooner Gaspee in 1772 - had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the
+independence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp, low-ceiled
+library with the musty white paneling, heavy carved overmantel and small-
+paned, vine- shaded windows, were the relics and records of his ancient family,
+among which were many dubious allusions to the shunned house in Benefit
+Street. That pest spot lies not far. distant - for Benefit runs ledgewise just above
+the court house along the precipitous hill up which the first settlement climbed.
+
+
+
+
+When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my
+uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle.
+Long-winded, statistical, and drearily genealogical as some of the matter was,
+there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding, tenacious horror and
+preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more than it had impressed
+the good doctor. Separate events fitted together uncannily, and seemingly
+irrelevant details held mines of hideous possibilities. A new and burning
+curiosity grew in me, compared to which my boyish curiosity was feeble and
+inchoate. The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to that
+shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For at last my
+uncle insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and after a certain night in
+that house he did not come away with me. I am lonely without that gentle soul
+whose long years were filled only with honour, virtue, good taste, benevolence,
+and learning. I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John's churchyard -
+the place that Poe loved - the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where
+tombs and head stones huddle quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and
+the houses and bank walls of Benefit Street.
+
+The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace of
+the sinister either about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable
+family who built it. Yet from the first a taint of calamity, soon increased to
+boding significance, was apparent. My uncle's carefully compiled record began
+with the building of the structure in 1763, and followed the theme with an
+unusual amount of detail. The shunned house, it seems, was first inhabited by
+William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their children, Elkanah, born in
+1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born in 1761.
+Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India trade,
+connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After Brown's
+death in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Co. made him master of the
+brig Prudence, providence-built, of 120 tons, thus enabling him to erect the new
+homestead he had desired ever since his marriage.
+
+The site he had chosen - a recently straightened part of the new and fashionable
+Back Street, which ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside - was
+all that could be wished, and the building did justice to the location. It was the
+best that moderate means could afford, and Harris hastened to move in before
+the birth of a fifth child which the family expected. That child, a boy, came in
+December; but was still-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house
+for a century and a half.
+
+The next April sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and Ruth died
+before the month was over. Dr. Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile
+fever, though others declared it was more of a mere wasting-away or decline. It
+
+
+
+
+seemed, in any event, to be contagious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the two
+servants, died of it in the following June. Eli Lideason, the other servant,
+constantly complained of weakness; and would have returned to his father's
+farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was
+hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year - a sad year in deed, since it
+marked the death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate
+of Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods
+during the preceding decade.
+
+The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's
+death, and the passing of her firstborn Elkanah two years later was the final blow
+to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was
+thereafter confined to the upper part of the house, her elder maiden sister, Mercy
+Dexter, having moved in to take charge of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-
+boned woman of great strength, but her health visibly declined from the time of
+her advent. She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an
+especial affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy
+infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. In
+
+this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the other servant. Pre served Smith, left
+without coherent explanation - or at least, with only some wild tales and a
+complaint that he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure
+no more help, since the seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within
+five years' space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumour which
+later became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from
+out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown
+now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named Zenas
+Low.
+
+It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk. Mercy
+should have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country,
+for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as now, a seat of the most
+uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a
+dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged
+visitations injurious to the public health and peace, and one may imagine the
+point of view of the same section in 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active,
+and within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful
+and amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.
+
+Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and
+imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable,
+and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her
+son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian Lane
+
+
+
+
+near the new college building. The boy would seem to improve after these visits,
+and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning, she would have let him
+live permanently with Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of
+violence, tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant accounts
+that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it sounds absurd
+to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of French often shouted for
+hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that language, or that the same per son,
+alone and guarded, complained wildly of a staring thing which bit and chewed
+at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she
+laughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself
+died, and was laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.
+
+Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris, despite
+his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, man aged to enlist in the Army of
+Observation under General Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise
+in health and prestige.
+
+In 1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell,
+he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to
+Providence upon his honourable discharge in the following year.
+
+The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The house,
+it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been widened and
+changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter's once
+robust frame had undergone a sag and curious decay, so that she was now a
+stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and disconcerting pallor -
+qualities shared to a singular degree by the one remaining servant Maria. In the
+autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-born daughter, and on the
+fifteenth of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and
+virtuous life.
+
+William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically un healthful nature
+of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. Securing
+temporary quarters for himself and wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he
+arranged for the building of a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the
+growing part of the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee
+was born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove
+them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in the newer East
+Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris built his sumptuous but
+hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William and Phebe both succumbed to
+the yellow fever epidemic in 1797, but Dutee was brought up by his cousin
+Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.
+
+
+
+
+Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite
+WiUiam's wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obhgation to his ward to
+make the most of all the boy's property, nor did he concern himself with the
+deaths and illnesses which caused so many changes of tenants, or the steadily
+growing aversion with which the house was generally regarded. It is likely that
+he felt only vexation when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the
+place with sulphur, tar and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed
+deaths of four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever
+epidemic. They said the place had a febrile smell.
+
+Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a privateersman,
+and served with distinction on the Vigilant under Capt. Cahoone in the War of
+1812. He returned unharmed, married in 1814, and became a father on that
+memorable night of September 23, 1815, when a great gale drove the waters of
+the bay over half the town, and floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so
+that its masts almost tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the
+new boy. Welcome, was a seaman's son.
+
+Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at
+Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned
+house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to rent - perhaps on account of
+the mustiness and sickly odour of unkempt old age. Indeed, it never was rented
+after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitement of the war
+tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it
+only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque center of legend until I told him
+my experience. He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on
+the site, but after my account, decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent
+it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has gone.
+
+
+It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the
+Harrises. In this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil
+beyond anything in nature as I had known it; an evil clearly connected with the
+house and not with the family. This impression was confirmed by my uncle's less
+systematic array of miscellaneous data - legends transcribed from servant gossip,
+cuttings from the papers, copies of death certificates by fellow- physicians, and
+the like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless
+antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house; but I may refer to
+several dominant points which earn notice by their recurrence through many
+reports from diverse sources. For example, the servant gossip was practically
+unanimous in attributing to the fungous and malodorous cellar of the house a
+vast supremacy in evil influence. There had been servants - Ann White especially
+
+
+
+
+- who would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends
+bore upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and
+patches of mould in that region. These latter narratives interested me
+profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that most of
+the significance had in each case been largely obscured by additions from the
+common stock of local ghost lore.
+
+Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant
+and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried
+beneath the house one of those vampires - the dead who retain their bodily form
+and live on the blood or breath of the living - whose hideous legions send their
+preying shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the
+grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through
+that organ; and Ann's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been
+prominent in bringing about her discharge.
+
+Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily
+accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes.
+To me their interest depended less on this circumstance than on the peculiarly
+appropriate way in which they dove-tailed with certain other things - the
+complaint of the de parting servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann
+and never heard of her, that something "sucked his breath" at night; the death-
+certificates of fever victims of 1804, issued by Dr. Chad Hopkins, and showing
+the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure
+passages of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings, where she complained of the sharp
+teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.
+
+Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in me an
+odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper
+cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house - one from the Providence
+Gazette and Country-Journal of April 12, 1815, and the other from the Daily
+Transcript and Chronicle of October 27, 1845 - each of which detailed an
+appallingly grisly circumstance whose duplication was remarkable. It seems that
+in both instances the dying person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and
+in 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became
+transfigured in a horrible way; glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat
+of the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case which
+put an end to the renting of the house - a series of anaemia deaths preceded by
+progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily attempt the lives of his
+relatives by incisions in the neck or wrists.
+
+This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical practice;
+and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his elder professional
+
+
+
+
+colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the way in which the victims -
+ignorant people, for the ill- smelling and widely shunned house could now be
+rented to no others - would babble maledictions in French, a language they could
+not possibly have studied to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris
+nearly a century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting
+historical data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his return
+from the war, to the first-hand account of Drs. Chase and Whitmarsh. Indeed, I
+could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and that he was glad
+of my own interest - an open-minded and sympathetic interest which enabled
+him to discuss with me matters at which others would merely have laughed. His
+fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he felt that the place was rare in its
+imaginative potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the
+grotesque and macabre.
+
+For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with pro found
+seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to
+accumulate as much as I could. I talked with the elderly Archer Harris, then
+owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916; and obtained from him
+and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an authentic corroboration of all the
+family data my uncle had collected. When, however, I asked them what
+connection with France or its language the house could have, they confessed
+themselves as frankly baffled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all
+that Miss Harris could say was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee
+Harris, had heard of might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had
+survived his son Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not himself known
+the legend; but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins,
+seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird significance to
+the French ravings of Rhoby Harris, which she had so often heard during the last
+days of that hapless woman. Maria had been at the shunned house from 1769 till
+the removal of the family in 1783, and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she
+hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy's last
+moments, but he had soon for gotten all about it save that it was something
+peculiar. The grand daughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty.
+She and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer's
+son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after my experience.
+
+Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could furnish, I
+turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a zeal more
+penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shown in the same work.
+What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site from its very settlement
+in 1636 - or even before, if any Narragansett Indian legend could be unearthed to
+supply the data. I found, at the start, that the land had been part of a long strip of
+the lot granted originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips
+
+
+
+
+beginning at the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a
+line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton lot
+had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became very assiduous in
+tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Street was later run. It had, a
+rumour indeed said, been the Throckmorton graveyard; but as I examined the
+records more carefully, I found that the graves had all been transferred at an
+early date to the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.
+
+Then suddenly I came - by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the main
+body of records and might easily have been missed - upon something which
+aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of the queerest
+phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease in 1697, of a small tract of ground
+to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At last the French element had appeared - that,
+and another deeper element of horror which the name conjured up from the
+darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous reading - and I feverishly
+studied the platting of the locality as it had been before the cutting through and
+partial straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had
+half expected, that where the shunned house now stood, the Roulets had laid out
+their graveyard behind a one-story and attic cottage, and that no record of any
+transfer of. graves existed. The document, indeed, ended in much confusion; and
+I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley
+Library before I could find a local door which the name of Etienne Roulet would
+unlock. In the end I did find something; some thing of such vague but monstrous
+import that I set about at once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself
+with a new and ex cited minuteness.
+
+The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west
+shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had
+encountered much opposition before the Providence selectmen allowed them to
+settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in East Greenwich, whither
+they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rumour
+said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice,
+or the land disputes which involved other French settlers with the English in
+rivalries which not even Governor Andros could quell. But their ardent
+Protestantism - too ardent, some whispered - and their evident distress when
+virtually driven from the village had been granted a haven; and the swarthy
+Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing
+queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon
+Tillinghast's wharf, far south in Town Street. There had, however, been a riot of
+
+some sort later on - perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet's death - and no
+one seemed to hear of the family after that.
+
+
+
+
+For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well re membered and
+frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England
+seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably
+provoked the riot which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of
+speculation; and though Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of her
+Puritan neighbours, it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were
+neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this
+had undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins.
+What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants
+of the shunned house, imagination or future discovery alone could determine. I
+wondered how many of those who had known the legends realized that
+additional link with the terrible which my wider reading had given me; that
+ominous item in the annals of morbid horror which tells of the creature Jacques
+Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was condemned to death as a daemoniac but
+afterward saved from the stake by the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse.
+He had been found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly
+after the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to
+lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to
+name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not have
+generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would have
+brought some drastic and frightened action- indeed, might not its limited
+whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased the Roulets from the
+town?
+
+I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the
+unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the building,
+and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington
+Harris's permission, I fitted a key to the disused door opening from the cellar
+directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have a more immediate access to the
+outside world than the dark stairs, ground floor hall, and front door could give.
+There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long
+afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground
+door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside. Nothing
+new rewarded my efforts-only the same depressing mustiness and faint
+suggestions of noxious odours and nitrous outlines on the floor - and I fancy that
+many pedestrians must have watched me curiously through the broken panes.
+
+At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle's, I decided to try the spot nocturnally;
+and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the mouldy
+floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted, half-phosphorescent fungi. The
+place had dispirited me curiously that evening, and I was almost prepared when
+I saw - or thought I saw - amidst the whitish deposits a particularly sharp
+definition of the "huddled form" I had suspected from boyhood. Its clear ness
+
+
+
+
+was astonishing and unprecedented - and as I watched I seemed to see again the
+thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that rainy
+afternoon so many years before.
+
+Above the anthropomorphic patch of mould by the fireplace it rose; a subtle,
+sickish, almost luminous vapour which, as it hung trembling in the dampness,
+seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing
+off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney
+with a foetor in its wake. It was truly horrible, and the more so to me because of.
+what I knew of the spot. Refusing to flee, I watched it fade - and as I watched I
+felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than
+visible. When I told my uncle about it he was greatly aroused; and after a tense
+hour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighing in his
+mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of our relation to it, he
+insisted that we both test - and if possible destroy - the horror of the house by a
+joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in that musty and fungous-cursed cellar.
+
+
+On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carring ton Harris
+which did not include surmises as to what we expected to find, my uncle and I
+conveyed to the shunned house two camp chairs and a folding camp cot,
+together with some scientific mechanism of greater weight and intricacy. These
+we placed in the cellar during the day, screening the windows with paper and
+planning to return in the evening for our first vigil. We had locked the door from
+the cellar to the ground floor; and having a key to the outside cellar door, we
+were prepared to leave our expensive and delicate apparatus - which we had
+obtained secretly and at great cost - as many days as our vigil might need to be
+protracted. It was our design to sit up together till very late, and then watch
+singly till dawn in two- hour stretches, myself first and then my companion; the
+inactive member resting on the cot.
+
+The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments from the
+laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armory, and
+instinctively assumed direction of our venture, was a marvellous commentary on
+the potential vitality and resilience of a man of eighty-one. Elihu Whipple had
+lived according to the hygienic laws he had preached as a physician, and but for
+what happened later would be here in full vigour today. Only two persons
+suspect what did happen - Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris
+because he owned the house and deserved to know what had gone out of it.
+Then, too, we had spoken to him in advance of our quest; and I felt after my
+uncle's going that he would understand and assist me in some vitally necessary
+
+
+
+
+public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed to help me, and decided
+that it would now be safe to rent the house.
+
+To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching would be an
+exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I have said, in any sense
+childishly superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the
+known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole
+cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of
+evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of
+certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned,
+exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in vampires or
+werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that
+we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and
+unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very
+infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connection
+with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish
+us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may
+never hope to understand.
+
+In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of facts
+pointed to some lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or
+another of the ill-favoured French settlers of two centuries before, and still
+operative through rare and un known laws of atomic and electronic motion. That
+the family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity
+- dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror - their
+recorded history seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygone
+seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one
+or more of them - notably the sinister Paul Roulet - which obscurely survived the
+bodies murdered, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned
+space along the original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the
+encroaching community?
+
+Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of
+a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action.
+One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or
+otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-
+force or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably living things into
+which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself.
+It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of
+self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme
+of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty
+with every man not an enemy to the world's life, health, and sanity.
+
+
+
+
+What baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect in which we might
+encounter the thing. No sane person had even seen it, and few had ever feh it
+definitely. It might be pure energy - a form ethereal and outside the realm of
+substance-or it might be partly material; some unknown and equivocal mass of
+plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulous approximations of the solid,
+liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled states. The anthropomorphic patch of
+mould on the floor, the form of the yellowish vapour, and the curvature of the
+tree-roots in some of the old tales, all argued at least a remote and reminiscent
+connection with the human shape; but how representative or permanent that
+similarity might be, none could say with any kind of certainty.
+
+We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube
+operated by powerful storage batteries and pro vided with peculiar screens and
+reflectors, in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously
+destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort
+used in the World War, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of
+mechanical destruction - for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were
+prepared to burn the thing's heart out if heart existed to burn. All this aggressive
+mechanism we set in the cellar in positions care fully arranged with reference to
+the cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where the mould had
+taken strange shapes. That suggestive patch, by the way, was only faintly visible
+when we placed our furniture and instruments, and when we returned that
+evening for the actual vigil. For a moment I half-doubted that I had ever seen it
+in the more definitely limned form - but then I thought of the legends.
+
+Our cellar vigil began at 10 P.M., daylight saving time, and as it continued we
+found no promise of pertinent developments. A weak, filtered glow from the
+rain-harassed street lamps outside, and a feeble phosphorescence from the
+detestable fungi within, showed the drip ping stone of the walls, from which all
+traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, foetid and mildew-tainted hard
+earth floor with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains of what had been stools,
+chairs and tables, and other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and
+massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to
+bins and chambers beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone
+staircase with ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace of
+blackened brick where rusted iron fragments revealed the past presence of
+hooks, andirons, spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven - these things, and our
+austere cot and camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate destructive machinery
+we had brought.
+
+We had, as in my own former explorations, left the door to the street unlocked;
+so that a direct and practical path of escape might lie open in case of
+manifestations beyond our power to deal with. It was our idea that our
+
+
+
+
+continued nocturnal presence would call forth whatever malign entity lurked
+there; and that being prepared, we could dispose of the thing with one or the
+other of our provided means as soon as we had recognised and observed it
+sufficiently. How long it might require to evoke and extinguish the thing, we had
+no notion. It occurred to us, too, that our venture was far from safe, for in what
+strength the thing might appear no one could tell. But we deemed the game
+worth the hazard, and embarked on it alone and unhesitatingly; conscious that
+the seeking of outside aid would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeat
+our entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we talked - far into the night,
+till my uncle's growing drowsiness made me remind him to lie down for his two-
+hour sleep.
+
+Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone - 1 say alone,
+for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can
+realise. My uncle breathed heavily, his deep inhalations and exhalations
+accompanied by the rain outside, and punctuated by another nerve-racking
+sound of distant dripping water within - for the house was repulsively damp
+even in dry weather, and in this storm positively swamp-like. I studied the loose,
+antique-masonry of the walls in the fungous-light and the feeble rays which stole
+in from the street through the screened windows; and once, when the noisome
+atmosphere of the place seemed about to sicken me, I opened the door and
+looked up and down the street, feasting my eyes on familiar sights and my
+nostrils on whole some air. Still nothing occurred to reward my watching; and I
+yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better of apprehension.
+
+Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had turned
+restlessly on the cot several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now
+he was breathing with unusual irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which
+held more than a few of the qualities of a choking moan. I turned my electric
+flashlight on him and found his face averted, so rising and crossing to the other
+side of the cot, I again flashed the light to see if he seemed in any pain. What I
+saw unnerved me most surprisingly, considering its relative triviality. It must
+have been merely the association of an odd circumstance with the sinister nature
+of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in itself frightful
+or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle's facial expression, disturbed no doubt
+by the strange dreams which our situation prompted, betrayed consider able
+agitation, and seemed not at all characteristic of him. His habitual expression was
+one of kindly and well-bred calm, whereas now a variety of emotions seemed
+struggling within him. I think, on the whole, that it was this variety which chiefly
+disturbed me. My uncle, as he gasped and tossed in increasing perturbation and
+with eyes that had now started open, seemed not one man but many men, and
+suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself.
+
+
+
+
+All at once he commenced to mutter, and I did not like the look of his mouth and
+teeth as he spoke. The words were at first indistinguishable, and then - with a
+tremendous start - I recognised some thing about them which filled me with icy
+fear till I recalled the breadth of my uncle's education and the interminable
+translations he had made from anthropological and antiquarian articles in the
+Revue des Deux Mondes. For the venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering in
+French, and the few phrases I could distinguish seemed connected with the
+darkest myths he had ever adapted from the famous Paris magazine.
+
+Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper's forehead, and he leaped
+abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and
+the hoarse voice shouted excitedly, "My breath, my breath!" Then the awakening
+became complete, and with a subsidence of facial expression to the normal state
+my uncle seized my hand and began to relate a dream whose nucleus of
+significance I could only surmise with a kind of awe.
+
+He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream- pictures into a
+scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this
+world, and yet not of it - a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be
+seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations.
+There was a suggestion of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon
+an other; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space
+seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic
+vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snap-shots, if one might use the
+term, of singular clearness but un accountable heterogeneity.
+
+Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of angry
+faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down at him.
+Again he seemed to be in the interior of a house - an old house, apparently - but
+the details and inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could never be
+certain of the faces or the furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and
+windows seemed in just as great a state of flux as the more presumably mobile
+objects. It was queer - damnably queer - and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly,
+as if half expecting not to be believed, when he declared that of the strange faces
+many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And all the
+while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence
+had spread itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital
+processes. I shuddered at the thought of those vital processes, worn as they were
+by eighty-one years of continuous functioning, in conflict with unknown forces
+of which the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid; but in another
+moment reflected that dreams are only dreams, and that these uncomfortable
+visions could be, at most, no more than my uncle's reaction to the investigations
+and expectations which had lately filled our minds to the exclusion of all else.
+
+
+
+
+Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and in time I
+yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle seemed now very
+wakeful, and welcomed his period of watching even though the nightmare had
+aroused him far ahead of his al lotted two hours. Sleep seized me quickly, and I
+was at once haunted with dreams of the most disturbing kind. I felt, in my
+visions, a cosmic and abysmal loneness; with hostility surging from all sides
+upon some prison where I lay confined. I seemed bound and gagged, and
+taunted by the echoing yells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My
+uncle's face came to me with less pleasant associations than in waking hours, and
+I recall many futile struggles and at tempts to scream. It was not a pleasant sleep,
+and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek which clove through the
+barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness in which every
+actual object before my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and
+reality.
+
+
+I had been lying with my face away from my uncle's chair, so that in this sudden
+flash of awakening I saw only the door to the street, the more northerly window,
+and the wall and floor and ceiling toward the north of the room, all
+photographed with morbid vivid ness on my brain in a light brighter than the
+glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It was not a strong or even a
+fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong enough to read an average book
+by. But it cast a shadow of myself and the cot on the floor, and had a yellowish,
+penetrating force that hinted at things more portent than luminosity. This I
+perceived with unhealthy sharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses
+were violently assailed. For on my ears rang the reverberations of that shocking
+scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled the place. My mind,
+as alert as my senses, recognised the gravely unusual; and almost automatically I
+leaped up and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we had
+left trained on the mouldy spot before the fireplace. As I turned, I dreaded what I
+was to see; for the scream had been in my uncle's voice, and I knew not against
+what menace I should have to defend him and myself.
+
+Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond
+horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the
+cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few. Out of the fungous-ridden
+earth steamed up a va porous corpse-light, yellow and diseased, which bubbled
+and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half human and half
+monstrous, through which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was
+all eyes - wolfish and mocking - and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the
+top to a thin stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up
+the chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in conscious retrospection
+
+
+
+
+that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to form. At the time it was to
+me only a seething dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsomeness,
+enveloping and dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the one object to which all
+my attention was focused. That object was my uncle - the venerable Elihu
+Whipple - who with blackening and
+
+decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out drip ping claws to
+rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.
+
+It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myself in
+preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognising
+the bubbling evil as no substance reach able by matter or material chemistry, and
+therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which loomed on my left, I threw on the
+current of the Crookes tube apparatus, and focussed toward that scene of
+immortal blasphemousness the strongest ether radiations which men's art can
+arouse from the spaces and fluids of nature. There was a bluish haze and a
+frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my
+eyes. But I saw the dimness was only that of contrast, and that the waves from
+the machine had no effect whatever.
+
+Then, in the midst of that daemoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which
+brought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering towards that
+unlocked door to the quiet street, careless of what abnormal terrors I loosed upon
+the world, or what thoughts or judgments of men I brought down upon my
+head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the form of my uncle had commenced
+a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes all description, and in which there
+played across his vanishing face such changes of identity as only madness can
+conceive. He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant.
+Lit by the mixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a dozen - a
+score - a hundred- aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body that
+melted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions strange and yet not
+strange.
+
+I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and infantile,
+and other features old and young, coarse and re fined, familiar and unfamiliar.
+For a second there flashed a degraded counterfeit of a miniature of poor Rhoby
+Harris that I had seen in the School of Design Museum, and another time I
+thought I caught the rawboned image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a
+painting in Carrington Harris's house. It was frightful beyond conception;
+toward the last, when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickered close
+to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was spreading, it seemed as
+though the shifting features fought against themselves, and strove to form
+contours like those of my uncle's kindly face. I like to think that he existed at that
+
+
+
+
+moment, and that he tried to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccoughed a
+farewell from my own parched throat as I lurched out into the street; a thin
+stream of grease following me through the door to the rain- drenched sidewalk.
+
+The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking street, and
+in all the world there was no one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past
+College Hill and the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge to
+the business section where tall buildings seemed to guard me as modern material
+things guard the world from ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then the grey
+dawn unfolded wetly from the east, silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable
+steeples, and beckoning me to the place where my terrible work was still
+unfinished. And in the end I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light,
+and entered that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar, and which still
+swung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom I dared not
+speak.
+
+The grease was gone, for the mouldy floor was porous. And in front of the
+fireplace was no vestige of the giant doubled-up form in nitre. I looked at the cot,
+the chairs, the instruments, my neglected hat, and the yellowed straw hat of my
+uncle. Dazedness was upper most, and I could scarcely recall what was dream
+and what was reality. Then thought trickled back, and I knew that I had
+witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed. Sitting down, I tried to
+conjecture as nearly as sanity would let me just what had happened, and how I
+might end the horror, if indeed it had been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor
+ether, nor anything else conceivable by mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic
+emanation; some vampirish vapour such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over
+certain church yards? This I felt was the clue, and again I looked at the floor
+before the fireplace where the mould and nitre had taken strange forms. In ten
+minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out for home, where I
+bathed, ate, and gave by telephone an order for a pick- axe, a spade, a military
+gas-mask, and six carboys of sulphuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning
+at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to
+sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane
+verses to counteract my mood.
+
+At 11 A.M. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather, and I was
+glad of that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the unknown horror I
+sought, there was more fear in the thought of telling anybody. Later I told Harris
+only through sheer necessity, and because he had heard odd tales from old
+people which disposed him ever so little toward belief. As I turned up the
+stinking black earth in front of the fireplace, my spade causing a viscous yellow
+ichor to ooze from the white fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubious
+
+
+
+
+thoughts of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth are not good for
+mankind, and this seemed to me one of them.
+
+My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in the large
+hole I had made. With the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet
+square, the evil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of my imminent contact with
+the hellish thing whose emanations had cursed the house for over a century and
+a half. I wondered what it would look like - what its form and substance would
+be, and how big it might have waxed through long ages of life- sucking. At
+length I climbed out of the hole and dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arranging
+the great carboys of acid around and near two sides, so that when necessary I
+might empty them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that I
+dumped earth only along the other two sides; working more slowly and donning
+my gas- mask as the smell grew. I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a
+nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
+
+Suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered and made a
+motion as if to climb out of the hole, which was now as deep as my neck. Then
+courage returned, and I scraped away more dirt in the light of the electric torch I
+had provided. The surface I uncovered was fishy and glassy - a kind of semi-
+putrid congealed jelly with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further, and
+saw that it had form. There was a rift where a part of the substance was folded
+over. The exposed area was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth soft
+blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in diameter.
+Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out of the hole and away from
+the filthy thing; frantically unstopping and tilting the heavy carboys, and
+precipitating their corrosive contents one after another down that charnel gulf
+and upon this unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen.
+
+The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapour which surged tempestuously
+up from that hole as the floods of acid descended, will never leave my memory.
+All along the hill people tell of the yellow day, when virulent and horrible fumes
+arose from the factory waste dumped in the Providence River, but I know how
+mistaken they are as to the source. They tell, too, of the hideous roar which at the
+same time came from some disordered water-pipe or gas main underground -
+but again I could correct them if I dared. It was unspeakably shocking, and I do
+not see how I lived through it. I did faint after emptying the fourth carboy, which
+I had to handle after the fumes had begun to penetrate my mask; but when I
+recovered I saw that the hole was emitting no fresh vapours.
+
+The two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and after a
+time I felt it safe to shovel the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before I was
+done, but fear had gone out of the place. The dampness was less foetid, and all
+
+
+
+
+the strange fungi had withered to a kind of harmless greyish powder which blew
+ashlike along the floor. One of earth's nethermost terrors had perished forever;
+and if there be a hell, it had received at last the daemon soul of an unhallowed
+thing. And as I patted down the last spadeful of mould, I shed the first of many
+tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle's memory.
+
+The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned
+house's terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carring ton Harris rented the
+place. It it still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed
+with my relief a queer regret when it is torn down to make way for a tawdry
+shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in the yard have begun
+to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled
+boughs.
+
+
+
+
+The Silver Key
+
+Written in 1926
+
+Published January 1929 in Weird Tales
+
+When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to
+that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to
+strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands
+across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt those liberties
+slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could
+his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his
+elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten
+palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.
+
+He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-
+meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things,
+and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had
+gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain,
+among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those
+born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
+Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which
+tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in
+visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even
+more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and
+purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and
+from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes
+or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.
+
+They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the
+workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he
+complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all
+the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of
+breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead
+toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the
+atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he had failed to
+find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him
+he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions
+to the illusions of our physical creation.
+
+So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events
+and emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare
+
+
+
+
+and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of
+a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the
+peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of
+chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his dreams; and under their
+guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.
+
+Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and
+meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses
+contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have
+recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the
+extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our
+world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect
+because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of
+reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see
+that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of
+consistency or inconsistency.
+
+In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith
+endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic
+avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he
+mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish
+gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and
+overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the
+awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears
+and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see
+how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every
+step of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the
+attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to
+offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal
+fantasy.
+
+But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found
+them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty
+lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless
+cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone
+before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did
+not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of
+perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our
+fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and
+culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or transferred them to
+the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so
+that their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and
+disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from
+
+
+
+
+something no more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded
+the false gods of fear and blind piety for those of license and anarchy.
+
+Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and
+squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the
+flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a
+sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of
+them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the
+delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and
+could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of
+beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal
+unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with
+preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old
+lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore
+and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments,
+and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims
+or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew
+void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their
+ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display
+and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous
+through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the
+social order. Never could they realize that their brute foundations were as
+shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of
+one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in a dream,
+and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it
+threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.
+
+Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as befitted a man
+of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams fading under the ridicule of
+the age he could not believe in anything, but the love of harmony kept him close
+to the ways of his race and station. He walked impassive through the cities of
+men, and sighed because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of
+yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first
+lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and
+to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find. Travel
+was only a mockery; and even the Great War stirred him but little, though he
+served from the first in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he sought
+friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the
+sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his
+relatives were distant and out of touch with him, for they would not have
+understood his mental life. That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle
+Christopher could, and they were long dead.
+
+
+
+
+Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when
+dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfillment; for
+the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as
+he had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down all the twilight minarets he
+reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing
+flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness
+on his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant human
+events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and
+cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never
+been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he
+burned them and ceased his writing. They were very graceful novels, in which
+he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their
+sophistication had sapped all their life away.
+
+It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions
+of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of
+these, however, soon showed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the
+popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet
+without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity,
+falsehood, and muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to
+a mind trained above their own level. So Carter bought stranger books and
+sought out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into
+arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about the secret
+pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him ever
+afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his Boston home to
+suit his changing moods; one room for each, hung in appropriate colours,
+furnished with befitting books and objects, and provided with sources of the
+proper sensations of light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.
+
+Once he heard of a man in the south, who was shunned and feared for the
+blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled from
+India and Arabia. Him he visited, living with him and sharing his studies for
+seven years, till horror overtook them one midnight in an unknown and archaic
+graveyard, and only one emerged where two had entered. Then he went back to
+Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England,
+and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel
+roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded
+ancestor. But these horrors took him only to the edge of reality, and were not of
+the true dream country he had known in youth; so that at fifty he despaired of
+any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd
+for dreams.
+
+
+
+
+Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things. Carter spent
+his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of his dream-filled
+youth. He thought it rather silly that he bothered to keep on living at all, and got
+from a South American acquaintance a very curious liquid to take him to
+oblivion without suffering. Inertia and force of habit, however, caused him to
+defer action; and he lingered indecisively among thoughts of old times, taking
+down the strange hangings from his walls and refitting the house as it was in his
+early boyhood - purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.
+
+With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for his relics of
+youth and his cleavage from the world made life and sophistication seem very
+distant and unreal; so much so that a touch of magic and expectancy stole back
+into his nightly slumbers. For years those slumbers had known only such twisted
+reflections of every-day things as the commonest slumbers know, but now there
+returned a flicker of something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely
+awesome imminence which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his
+childhood days, and made him think of little inconsequential things he had long
+forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in
+their graves a quarter of a century.
+
+Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key. The grey old scholar, as
+vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line, and of the strange
+visions of the delicate and sensitive men who composed it. He spoke of the
+flame-eyed Crusader who learnt wild secrets of the Saracens that held him
+captive; and of the first Sir Randolph Carter who studied magic when Elizabeth
+was queen. He spoke, too, of that Edmund Carter who had just escaped hanging
+in the Salem witchcraft, and who had placed in an antique box a great silver key
+handed down from his ancestors. Before Carter awaked, the gentle visitant had
+told him where to find that box; that carved oak box of archaic wonder whose
+grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries.
+
+In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgotten at the
+back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot square, and its Gothic
+carvings were so fearful that he did not marvel no person since Edmund Carter
+had dared to open it. It gave forth no noise when shaken, but was mystic with
+the scent of unremembered spices. That it held a key was indeed only a dim
+legend, and Randolph Carter's father had never known such a box existed. It was
+bound in rusty iron, and no means was provided for working the formidable
+lock. Carter vaguely understood that he would find within it some key to the lost
+gate of dreams, but of where and how to use it his grandfather had told him
+nothing.
+
+
+
+
+An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the hideous faces
+leering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced familiarity. Inside,
+wrapped in a discoloured parchment, was a huge key of tarnished silver covered
+with cryptical arabesques; but of any legible explanation there was none. The
+parchment was voluminous, and held only the strange hieroglyphs of an
+unknown tongue written with an antique reed. Carter recognized the characters
+as those he had seen on a certain papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar
+of the South who had vanished one midmght in a nameless cemetery. The man
+had always shivered when he read this scroll, and Carter shivered now.
+
+But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box of ancient
+oak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though showing
+him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens of the old days, were
+assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be mistaken. They were
+calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of all his fathers
+were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source. Then he knew he
+must go into the past and merge himself with old things, and day after day he
+thought of the hills to the north where haunted Arkham and the rushing
+Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his people lay.
+
+In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past
+graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and hanging
+woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the crystal windings of the
+Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic bridges of wood or stone. At one
+bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an ancestor had oddly
+vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as the wind blew
+meaningly through them. Then there was the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody
+Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the
+ground on the north side. He speeded up his car as he passed it, and did not
+slacken till he had mounted the hill where his mother and her fathers before her
+were born, and where the old white house still looked proudly across the road at
+the breathlessly lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the
+distant spires of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints of the archaic, dream-laden
+sea in the farthest background.
+
+Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not seen in
+over forty years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the foot, and at the
+bend half way up he paused to scan the outspread countryside golden and
+glorified in the slanting floods of magic poured out by a western sun. All the
+strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemed present in this hushed
+and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the unknown solitudes of other
+planets as his eyes traced out the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant
+between their tumbled walls, and clumps of faery forest setting off far lines of
+
+
+
+
+purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down in
+shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled among
+swollen and distorted roots.
+
+Something made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he was
+seeking, so he left his car at the edge of the forest, and putting the great key in his
+coat pocket walked on up the hill. Woods now engulfed him utterly, though he
+knew the house was on a high knoll that cleared the trees except to the north. He
+wondered how it would look, for it had been left vacant and untended through
+his neglect since the death of his strange great-uncle Christopher thirty years
+before. In his boyhood he had revelled through long visits there, and had found
+weird marvels in the woods beyond the orchard.
+
+Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in the trees
+opened up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of twilight meadow and
+spied the old Congregational steeple on Central Hill in Kingsport; pink with the
+last flush of day, the panes of the little round windows blazing with reflected
+fire. Then, when he was in deep shadow again, he recalled with a start that the
+glimpse must have come from childish memory alone, since the old white church
+had long been torn down to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He had
+read of it with interest, for the paper had told about some strange burrows or
+passages found in the rocky hill beneath.
+
+Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its familiarity
+after long years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle Christopher's hired man,
+and was aged even in those far-off times of his boyhood visits. Now he must be
+well over a hundred, but that piping voice could come from no one else. He
+could distinguish no words, yet the tone was haunting and unmistakable. To
+think that "Old Benijy" should still be aHve!
+
+"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Wharbe ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt Marthy
+plumb to death? Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in the arternoon an' git
+back afur dark? Randy! Ran. . . dee!. . . He's the beatin'est boy fer runnin' off in the
+woods I ever see; haff the time a-settin' moonin' raound that snake-den in the
+upper timberlot! . . . Hey yew. Ran . . . dee!"
+
+Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand across his
+eyes. Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought not to be; had
+strayed very far away to places where he had not belonged, and was now
+inexcusably late. He had not noticed the time on the Kingsport steeple, though he
+could easily have made it out with his pocket telescope; but he knew his lateness
+was something very strange and unprecedented. He was not sure he had his
+little telescope with him, and put his hand in his blouse pocket to see. No, it was
+
+
+
+
+not there, but there was the big silver key he had found in a box somewhere.
+Uncle Chris had told him something odd once about an old unopened box with a
+key in it, but Aunt Martha had stopped the story abruptly, saying it was no kind
+of thing to tell a child whose head was already too full of queer fancies. He tried
+to recall just where he had found the key, but something seemed very confused.
+He guessed it was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly remembered bribing
+Parks with half his week's allowance to help him open the box and keep quiet
+about it; but when he remembered this, the face of Parks came up very strangely,
+as if the wrinkles of long years had fallen upon the brisk little Cockney.
+
+"Ran ... dee! Ran ... dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!"
+
+A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced on the
+silent and bewildered form of the pilgrim.
+
+"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that ye can't
+answer a body! I ben callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a heerd me long ago!
+Dun't ye know yer Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget over yer bein' off arter dark? Wait
+till I tell yer Uncle Chris when he gits hum! Ye'd orta know these here woods
+ain't no fitten place to be traipsin' this hour! They's things abroad what dun't do
+nobody no good, as my gran'-sir knowed afur me. Come, Mister Randy, or
+Hannah wunt keep supper no longer!"
+
+So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars glimmered
+through high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow light of small-
+paned windows shone out at the farther turn, and the Pleiades twinkled across
+the open knoll where a great gambrel roof stood black against the dim west.
+Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and did not scold too hard when Benijah
+shoved the truant in. She knew Uncle Chris well enough to expect such things of
+the Carter blood. Randolph did not show his key, but ate his supper in silence
+and protested only when bedtime came. He sometimes dreamed better when
+awake, and he wanted to use that key.
+
+In the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the upper
+timberlot if Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him into his chair by the
+breakfast table. He looked impatiently around the low-pitched room with the rag
+carpet and exposed beams and corner-posts, and smiled only when the orchard
+boughs scratched at the leaded panes of the rear window. The trees and the hills
+were close to him, and formed the gates of that timeless realm which was his true
+country.
+
+Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and being
+reassured, skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond, where the wooded
+
+
+
+
+hill climbed again to heights above even the treeless knoll. The floor of the forest
+was mossy and mysterious, and great lichened rocks rose vaguely here and there
+in the dim light like Druid monoliths among the swollen and twisted trunks of a
+sacred grove. Once in his ascent Randolph crossed a rushing stream whose falls a
+little way off sang runic incantations to the lurking fauns and aegipans and
+dryads.
+
+Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded "snake-den"
+which country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah had warned him
+again and again. It was deep; far deeper than anyone but Randolph suspected,
+for the boy had found a fissure in the farthermost black corner that led to a loftier
+grotto beyond - a haunting sepulchral place whose granite walls held a curious
+illusion of conscious artifice. On this occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his
+way with matches filched from the sitting-room matchsafe, and edging through
+the final crevice with an eagerness hard to explain even to himself. He could not
+tell why he approached the farther wall so confidently, or why he instinctively
+drew forth the great silver key as he did so. But on he went, and when he danced
+back to the house that night he offered no excuses for his lateness, nor heeded in
+the least the reproofs he gained for ignoring the noon-tide dinner-horn
+altogether.
+
+Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that something
+occurred to heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His cousin, Ernest B.
+Aspinwall, Esq., of Chicago, is fully ten years his senior; and distinctly recalls a
+change in the boy after the autumn of 1883. Randolph had looked on scenes of
+fantasy that few others can ever have beheld, and stranger still were some of the
+qualities which he showed in relation to very mundane things. He seemed, in
+fine, to have picked up an odd gift of prophecy; and reacted unusually to things
+which, though at the time without meaning, were later found to justify the
+singular impressions. In subsequent decades as new inventions, new names, and
+new events appeared one by one in the book of history, people would now and
+then recall wonderingly how Carter had years before let fall some careless word
+of undoubted connection with what was then far in the future. He did not
+himself understand these words, or know why certain things made him feel
+certain emotions; but fancied that some unremembered dream must be
+responsible. It was as early as 1897 that he turned pale when some traveller
+mentioned the French town of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends remembered it
+when he was almost mortally wounded there in 1916, while serving with the
+Foreign Legion in the Great War.
+
+Carter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately disappeared.
+His little old servant Parks, who for years bore patiently with his vagaries, last
+saw him on the morning he drove off alone in his car with a key he had recently
+
+
+
+
+found. Parks had helped him get the key from the old box containing it, and had
+felt strangely affected by the grotesque carvings on the box, and by some other
+odd quality he could not name. When Carter left, he had said he was going to
+visit his old ancestral country around Arkham.
+
+Half way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter place, they
+found his motor set carefully by the roadside; and in it was a box of fragrant
+wood with carvings that frightened the countrymen who stumbled on it. The box
+held only a queer parchment whose characters no linguist or palaeographer has
+been able to decipher or identify. Rain had long effaced any possible footprints,
+though Boston investigators had something to say about evidences of
+disturbances among the fallen timbers of the Carter place. It was, they averred,
+as though someone had groped about the ruins at no distant period. A common
+white handkerchief found among forest rocks on the hillside beyond cannot be
+identified as belonging to the missing man.
+
+There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs, but I shall
+stand firmly against this course because I do not believe he is dead. There are
+twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine;
+and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse
+these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted the
+lands of dream he had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he
+found a key, and I somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.
+
+I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain
+dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the River
+Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of
+turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the
+bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know
+how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of
+that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised
+all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.
+
+
+
+
+The Statement of Randolph Carter
+
+Written in 1919
+
+Published in May of 1920 in The Vagrant
+
+I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here
+forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate
+the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already.
+Everything that I can remember, I have told you with perfect candour. Nothing
+has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only
+because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind — that cloud and the
+nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.
+
+Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren, though I think —
+almost hope — that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a
+thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial
+sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my
+memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us
+together as he says, on the Gainsville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp,
+at half past 11 on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a
+curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things
+all played a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my
+shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone
+and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know
+nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there
+is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightful
+episode. I reply that I knew nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it
+may have been — vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was — yet it is all that
+my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the
+sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade — or some
+nameless thing I cannot describe — alone can tell.
+
+As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to
+me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books
+on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I
+am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot
+understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which
+brought on the end — the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world
+— was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would
+never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies — must I
+say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather
+
+
+
+
+merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more
+through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always
+dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his
+facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so
+incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat
+in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that
+he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.
+
+Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it
+had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him —
+that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from
+India a month before — but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected
+to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past 11 on the Gainsville pike,
+headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct
+memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour
+must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the
+vaporous heavens.
+
+The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold
+signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank
+grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which
+my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the
+signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that
+Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries.
+Over the valley's rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome
+vapors that seemed to emanate from unheard of catacombs, and by its feeble,
+wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns,
+cenotaphs, and mausoleum facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-
+stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy
+vegetation.
+
+My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns
+the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulcher and of
+throwing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now
+observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my
+companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit.
+No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without
+delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and
+drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface,
+which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance
+to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental
+calculations. Then he returned to the sepulcher, and using his spade as a lever,
+sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a
+
+
+
+
+monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his
+assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised
+and tipped to one side.
+
+The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an
+effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an
+interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less
+unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping
+with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls
+encrusted with niter. And now for the first time my memory records verbal
+discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice
+singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.
+
+"I'm sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface," he said, "but it would be a
+crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can't imagine,
+even from what you have read and from what I've told you, the things I shall
+have to see and do. It's fiendish work. Carter, and I doubt if any man without
+ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I
+don't wish to offend you, and Heaven knows I'd be glad enough to have you
+with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn't drag a
+bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you
+can't imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed
+over the telephone of every move — you see I've enough wire here to reach to
+the center of the earth and back!"
+
+I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember
+my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into
+those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he
+threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which
+proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still
+remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he
+had obtained my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel
+of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and
+seated myself upon an aged, discolored gravestone close by the newly uncovered
+aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared
+within that indescribable ossuary.
+
+For a minute I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the
+wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a
+turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away
+almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic
+strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that
+waning crescent moon.
+
+
+
+
+I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened
+with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter
+of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I
+called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was
+nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault
+in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley
+Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from
+below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:
+
+"God! If you could see what I am seeing!"
+
+I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones
+again:
+
+"Carter, it's terrible — monstrous — unbelievable!"
+
+This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of
+excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, "Warren, what is it? What is
+it?"
+
+Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now
+apparently tinged with despair:
+
+"I can't tell you. Carter! It's too utterly beyond thought — I dare not tell you —
+no man could know it and live — Great God! I never dreamed of this!"
+
+Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then
+the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:
+
+"Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can!
+Quick! — leave everything else and make for the outside — it's your only
+chance! Do as I say, and don't ask me to explain!"
+
+I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the
+tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the
+radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I,
+and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable
+of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a
+piteous cry from Warren:
+
+"Beat it! For God's sake, put back the slab and beat it. Carter!"
+
+Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed
+my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, "Warren, brace up! I'm coming
+
+
+
+
+down!" But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter
+despair:
+
+"Don't! You can't understand! It's too late — and my own fault. Put back the slab
+and run — there's nothing else you or anyone can do now!"
+
+The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless
+resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.
+
+"Quick - before it's too late!"
+
+I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and
+to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held
+inert in the chains of stark horror.
+
+"Carter — hurry! It's no use — you must go — better one than two — the slab —
+
+
+
+A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:
+
+"Nearly over now — don't make it harder — cover up those damned steps and
+run for your life — you're losing time — so long. Carter — won't see you again."
+
+Here Warren's whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek
+fraught with all the horror of the ages —
+
+"Curse these hellish things - legions - My God! Beat it! Beat it! BEAT IT!"
+
+After that was silence. I know not how many interminable eons I sat stupefied;
+whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over
+again through those eons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and
+screamed, "Warren! Warren! Answer me — are you there?"
+
+And then there came to me the crowning horror of all — the unbelievable,
+unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that eons seemed to elapse
+after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own
+cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking
+in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, "Warren,
+are you there?" and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over
+my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing — that voice — nor
+can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my
+consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my
+awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow;
+gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was
+
+
+
+
+the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no
+more — heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow,
+amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the
+miasmal vapors — heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable
+open sepulcher as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath
+an accursed waning moon.
+
+And this is what it said:
+
+"You fool, Warren is DEAD!"
+
+
+
+
+The Strange High House in the Mist
+
+Written November 9,1926
+
+Published October 1931 in Weird Tales
+
+In the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kingsport.
+White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of
+dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And later, in still summer rains
+on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of those dreams, that men shall
+not live without rumor of old strange secrets, and wonders that planets tell
+planets alone in the night. When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and
+conchs in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great
+eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on tile rocks see
+only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the
+solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
+
+Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on
+terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a gray frozen wind-cloud.
+Alone it is, a bleak point jutting in limitless space, for there the coast turns sharp
+where the great Miskatonic pours out of the plains past Arkham, bringing
+woodland legends and little quaint memories of New England's hills. The sea-
+folk of Kingsport look up at that cliff as other sea-folk look up at the pole-star,
+and time the night's watches by the way it hides or shows the Great Bear,
+Cassiopeia and the Dragon. Among them it is one with the firmament, and truly,
+it is hidden from them when the mist hides the stars or the sun.
+
+Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they call Father
+Neptune, or that whose pillared steps they term "The Causeway"; but this one
+they fear because it is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailors coming in from a
+voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the old Yankees believe it
+would be a much graver matter than death to climb it, if indeed that were
+possible. Nevertheless there is an ancient house on that cliff, and at evening men
+see lights in the small-paned windows.
+
+The ancient house has always been there, and people say One dwells within who
+talks with the morning mists that come up from the deep, and perhaps sees
+singular things oceanward at those times when the cliff's rim becomes the rim of
+all earth, and solemn buoys toll free in the white aether of faery. This they tell
+from hearsay, for that forbidding crag is always unvisited, and natives dislike to
+train telescopes on it. Summer boarders have indeed scanned it with jaunty
+binoculars, but have never seen more than the gray primeval roof, peaked and
+
+
+
+
+shingled, whose eaves come nearly to the gray foundations, and the dim yellow
+light of the little windows peeping out from under those eaves in the dusk. These
+summer people do not believe that the same One has lived in the ancient house
+for hundreds of years, but can not prove their heresy to any real Kingsporter.
+Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys
+groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his
+antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same
+when his grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages
+ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His
+Majesty's Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.
+
+Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was
+Thomas Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay.
+With stout wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were weary with
+seeing the same things for many years, and thinking the same well-disciplined
+thoughts. He looked at the mists from the diadem of Father Neptune, and tried
+to walk into their white world of mystery along the titan steps of The Causeway.
+Morning after morning he would lie on the cliffs and look over the world's rim at
+the cryptical aether beyond, listening to spectral bells and the wild cries of what
+might have been gulls. Then, when the mist would lift and the sea stand out
+prosy with the smoke of steamers, he would sigh and descend to the town,
+where he loved to thread the narrow olden lanes up and down hill, and study
+the crazy tottering gables and odd-pillared doorways which had sheltered so
+many generations of sturdy sea-folk. And he even talked with the Terrible Old
+Man, who was not fond of strangers, and was invited into his fearsomely archaic
+cottage where low ceilings and wormy panelling hear the echoes of disquieting
+soliloquies in the dark small hours.
+
+Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the gray unvisited cottage in
+the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the mists and the
+firmament. Always over Kingsport it hung, and always its mystery sounded in
+whispers through
+
+Kingsport's crooked alleys. The Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that his father
+had told him, of lightning that shot one night up from that peaked cottage to the
+clouds of higher heaven; and Granny Orne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode in
+Ship Street is all covered with moss and ivy, croaked over something her
+grandmother had heard at second-hand, about shapes that flapped out of the
+eastern mists straight into the narrow single door of that unreachable place - for
+the door is set close to the edge of the crag toward the ocean, and glimpsed only
+from ships at sea.
+
+
+
+
+At length, being avid for new strange things and held back by neither the
+Kingsporter's fear nor the summer boarder's usual indolence, Olney made a very
+terrible resolve. Despite a conservative training - or because of it, for humdrum
+lives breed wistful longings of the unknown - he swore a great oath to scale that
+avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally antique gray cottage in the sky.
+Very plausibly his saner self argued that the place must be tenanted by people
+who reached it from inland along the easier ridge beside the Miskatonic's
+estuary. Probably they traded in Arkham, knowing how little Kingsport liked
+their habitation or perhaps being unable to climb down the cliff on the Kingsport
+side. Olney walked out along the lesser cliffs to where the great crag leaped
+insolently up to consort with celestial things, and became very sure that no
+human feet could mount it or descend it on that beetling southern slope. East
+and north it rose thousands of feet perpendicular from the water so only the
+western side, inland and toward Arkham, remained.
+
+One early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the inaccessible
+pinnacle. He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past Hooper's Pond
+and the old brick powder-house to where the pastures slope up to the ridge
+above the Miskatonic and give a lovely vista of Arkham's white Georgian
+steeples across leagues of river and meadow. Here he found a shady road to
+Arkham, but no trail at all in the seaward direction he wished. Woods and fields
+crowded up to the high bank of the river's mouth, and bore not a sign of man's
+presence; not even a stone wall or a straying cow, but only the tall grass and
+giant trees and tangles of briars that the first Indian might have seen. As he
+climbed slowly east, higher and higher above the estuary on his left and nearer
+and nearer the sea, he found the way growing in difficulty till he wondered how
+ever the dwellers in that disliked place managed to reach the world outside, and
+whether they came often to market in Arkham.
+
+Then the trees thinned, and far below him on his right he saw the hills and
+antique roofs and spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was a dwarf from this
+height, and he could just make out the ancient graveyard by the Congregational
+Hospital beneath which rumor said some terrible caves or burrows lurked.
+Ahead lay sparse grass and scrub blueberry bushes, and beyond them the naked
+rock of the crag and the thin peak of the dreaded gray cottage. Now the ridge
+narrowed, and Olney grew dizzy at his loneness in the sky, south of him the
+frightful precipice above Kingsport, north of him the vertical drop of nearly a
+mile to the river's mouth. Suddenly a great chasm opened before him, ten feet
+deep, so that he had to let himself down by his hands and drop to a slanting
+floor, and then crawl perilously up a natural defile in the opposite wall. So this
+was the way the folk of the uncanny house journeyed betwixt earth and sky!
+
+
+
+
+When he chmbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly
+saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as gray as the rock, and high
+peak standing bold against the milky white of the seaward vapors. And he
+perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but only a couple of
+small lattice windows with dingy bull's-eye panes leaded in seventeenth century
+fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could see nothing below
+the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky with this queer and
+very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front and saw that the
+wall stood flush with the cliff's edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be
+reached save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could
+not wholly explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could
+survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.
+
+As the mist thickened, Olney crept around to the windows on the north and west
+and south sides, trying them but finding them all locked. He was vaguely glad
+they were locked, because the more he saw of that house the less he wished to
+get in. Then a sound halted him. He heard a lock rattle and a bolt shoot, and a
+long creaking follow as if a heavy door were slowly and cautiously opened. This
+was on the oceanward side that he could not see, where the narrow portal
+opened on blank space thousands of feet in the misty sky above the waves.
+
+Then there was heavy, deliberate tramping in the cottage, and Olney heard the
+windows opening, first on the north side opposite him, and then on the west just
+around the corner. Next would come the south windows, under the great low
+eaves on the side where he stood; and it must be said that he was more than
+uncomfortable as he thought of the detestable house on one side and the vacancy
+of upper air on the other. When a fumbling came in the nearer casements he
+crept around to the west again, flattening himself against the wall beside the now
+opened windows. It was plain that the owner had come home; but he had not
+come from the land, nor from any balloon or airship that could be imagined.
+Steps sounded again, and Olney edged round to the north; but before he could
+find a haven a voice called softly, and he knew he must confront his host.
+
+Stuck out of the west window was a great black-bearded face whose eyes were
+phosphorescent with the imprint of unheard-of sights. But the voice was gentle,
+and of a quaint olden kind, so that Olney did not shudder when a brown hand
+reached out to help him over the sill and into that low room of black oak
+wainscots and carved Tudor furnishings. The man was clad in very ancient
+garments, and had about him an unplaceable nimbus of sea-lore and dreams of
+tall galleons. Olney does not recall many of the wonders he told, or even who he
+was; but says that he was strange and kindly, and filled with the magic of
+unfathomed voids of time and space. The small room seemed green with a dim
+
+
+
+
+aqueous light, and Olney saw that the far windows to the east were not open, but
+shut against the misty aether with dull panes like the bottoms of old bottles.
+
+That bearded host seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder
+mysteries; and from the tales of marvelous ancient things he related, it must be
+guessed that the village folk were right in saying he had communed with the
+mists of the sea and the clouds of the sky ever since there was any village to
+watch his taciturn dwelling from the plain below. And the day wore on, and still
+Olney listened to rumors of old times and far places, and heard how the kings of
+Atlantis fought with the slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in
+ocean's floor, and how the pillared and weedy temple of Poseidon is still
+glimpsed at midnight by lost ships, who knew by its sight that they are lost.
+Years of the Titans were recalled, but the host grew timid when he spoke of the
+dim first age of chaos before the gods or even the Elder Ones were born, and
+when the other gods came to dance on the peak of Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert
+near Ulthar, beyond the River Skai.
+
+It was at this point that there came a knocking on the door; that ancient door of
+nail-studded oak beyond which lay only the abyss of white cloud. Olney started
+in fright, but the bearded man motioned him to be still, and tiptoed to the door to
+look out through a very small peephole. What he saw he did not like, so pressed
+his fingers to his lips and tiptoed around to shut and lock all the windows before
+returning to the ancient settle beside his guest. Then Olney saw lingering against
+the translucent squares of each of the little dim windows in succession a queer
+black outline as the caller moved inquisitively about before leaving; and he was
+glad his host had not answered the knocking. For there are strange objects in the
+great abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir up or meet the
+wrong ones.
+
+Then the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under the table, and
+then bolder ones in the dark panelled corners. And the bearded man made
+enigmatical gestures of prayer, and lit tall candles in curiously wrought brass
+candle-sticks. Frequently he would glance at the door as if he expected some one,
+and at length his glance seemed answered by a singular rapping which must
+have followed some very ancient and secret code. This time he did not even
+glance through the peep-hole, but swung the great oak bar and shot the bolt,
+unlatching the heavy door and flinging it wide to the stars and the mist.
+
+And then to the sound of obscure harmonies there floated into that room from
+the deep all the dreams and memories of earth's sunken Mighty Ones. And
+golden flames played about weedy locks, so that Olney was dazzled as he did
+them homage. Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive tritons and
+fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs was balanced a vast crenulate shell
+
+
+
+
+wherein rode the gay and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great
+Abyss. And the conchs of the tritons gave weird blasts, and the nereids made
+strange sounds by striking on the grotesque resonant shells of unknown lurkers
+in black seacaves. Then hoary Nodens reached forth a wizened hand and helped
+Olney and his host into the vast shell, whereat the conchs and the gongs set up a
+wild and awesome clamor. And out into the limitless aether reeled that fabulous
+train, the noise of whose shouting was lost in the echoes of thunder.
+
+All night in Kingsport they watched that lofty cliff when the storm and the mists
+gave them glimpses of it, and when toward the small hours the little dim
+windows went dark they whispered of dread and disaster. And Olney's children
+and stout wife prayed to the bland proper god of Baptists, and hoped that the
+traveller would borrow an umbrella and rubbers unless the rain stopped by
+morning. Then dawn swam dripping and mist-wreathed out of the sea, and the
+buoys tolled solemn in vortices of white aether. And at noon elfin horns rang
+over the ocean as Olney, dry and lightfooted, climbed down from the cliffs to
+antique Kingsport with the look of far places in his eyes. He could not recall
+what he had dreamed in the skyperched hut of that still nameless hermit, or say
+how he had crept down that crag untraversed by other feet. Nor could he talk of
+these matters at all save with the Terrible Old Man, who afterward mumbled
+queer things in his long white beard; vowing that the man who came down from
+that crag was not wholly the man who went up, and that somewhere under that
+gray peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist,
+there lingered still the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Obey.
+
+And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of grayness and
+weariness, the philosopher has labored and eaten and slept and done
+uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long for the
+magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from a
+bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow and well-
+disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination. His good wife
+waxes stouter and his children older and prosier and more useful, and he never
+fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion calls for it. In his glance
+there is not any restless light, and all he ever listens for solemn bells or far elfin
+horns it is only at night when old dreams are wandering. He has never seen
+Kingsport again, for his family disliked the funny old houses and complained
+that the drains were impossibly bad. They have a trim bungalow now at Bristol
+Highlands, where no tall crags tower, and the neighbors are urban and modern.
+
+But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits
+a thing untold by his grandfather. For now, when the wind sweeps boisterous
+out of the north past the high ancient house that is one with the firmament, there
+is broken at last that ominous, brooding silence ever before the bane of
+
+
+
+
+Kingsport's maritime cotters. And old folk tell of pleasing voices heard singing
+there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth's joys; and say that at
+evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly. They say, too, that the
+fierce aurora comes oftener to that spot, shining blue in the north with visions of
+frozen worlds while the crag and the cottage hang black and fantastic against
+wild coruscations. And the mists of the dawn are thicker, and sailors are not
+quite so sure that all the muffled seaward ringing is that of the solemn buoys.
+
+Worst of all, though, is the shrivelling of old fears in the hearts of Kingsport's
+young men, who grow prone to listen at night to the north wind's faint distant
+sounds. They swear no harm or pain can inhabit that high peaked cottage, for in
+the new voices gladness beats, and with them the tinkle of laughter and music.
+What tales the sea-mists may bring to that haunted and northernmost pinnacle
+they do not know, but they long to extract some hint of the wonders that knock
+at the cliff-yawning door when clouds are thickest. And patriarchs dread lest
+some day one by one they seek out that inaccessible peak in the sky, and learn
+what centuried secrets hide beneath the steep shingled roof which is part of the
+rocks and the stars and the ancient fears of Kingsport. That those venturesome
+youths will come back they do not doubt, but they think a light may be gone
+from their eyes, and a will from their hearts. And they do not wish quaint
+Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag listless down the
+years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger and wilder in that
+unknown and terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams of mists stop to rest on
+their way from the sea to the skies.
+
+They do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant hearths and
+gambrel-roofed taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the laughter and song
+in that high rocky place to grow louder. For as the voice which has come has
+brought fresh mists from the sea and from the north fresh lights, so do they say
+that still other voices will bring more mists and more lights, till perhaps the
+olden gods (whose existence they hint only in whispers for fear the
+Congregational parson shall hear} may come out of the deep and from unknown
+Kadath in the cold waste and make their dwelling on that evilly appropriate crag
+so close to the gentle hills and valleys of quiet, simple fisher folk. This they do
+not wish, for to plain people things not of earth are unwelcome; and besides, the
+Terrible Old Man often recalls what Olney said about a knock that the lone
+dweller feared, and a shape seen black and inquisitive against the mist through
+those queer translucent windows of leaded bull's-eyes.
+
+All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile the
+morning mist still comes up by that lovely vertiginous peak with the steep
+ancient house, that gray, low-eaved house where none is seen but where evening
+brings furtive lights while the north wind tells of strange revels, white and
+
+
+
+
+feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank
+pastures and caves of leviathan. And when tales fly thick in the grottoes of
+tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder
+Ones, then great eager vapors flock to heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport,
+nestling uneasy in its lesser cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock,
+sees oceanward only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all
+earth, and the solemn bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
+
+
+
+
+The Street
+
+
+
+Written in 1920
+
+Published in December of 1920 in The Wolverine
+
+There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those
+who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of the Street.
+
+Men of strength and honour fashioned that Street: good valiant men of our blood
+who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea. At first it was but a path
+trodden by bearers of water from the woodland spring to the cluster of houses by
+the beach. Then, as more men came to the growing cluster of houses and looked
+about for places to dwell, they built cabins along the north side, cabins of stout
+oaken logs with masonry on the side toward the forest, for many Indians lurked
+there with fire-arrows. And in a few years more, men built cabins on the south
+side of the Street.
+
+Up and down the Street walked grave men in conical hats, who most of the time
+carried muskets or fowling pieces. And there were also their bonneted wives and
+sober children. In the evening these men with their wives and children would sit
+about gigantic hearths and read and speak. Very simple were the things of which
+they read and spoke, yet things which gave them courage and goodness and
+helped them by day to subdue the forest and till the fields. And the children
+would listen and learn of the laws and deeds of old, and of that dear England
+which they had never seen or could not remember.
+
+There was war, and thereafter no more Indians troubled the Street. The men,
+busy with labour, waxed prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And
+the children grew up comfortable, and more families came from the Mother Land
+to dwell on the Street. And the children's children, and the newcomers' children,
+grew up. The town was now a city, and one by one the cabins gave place to
+houses — simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood, with stone steps and iron
+railings and fanlights over the doors. No flimsy creations were these houses, for
+they were made to serve many a generation. Within there were carven mantels
+and graceful stairs, and sensible, pleasing furniture, china, and silver, brought
+from the Mother Land.
+
+So the Street drank in the dreams of a young people and rejoiced as its dwellers
+became more graceful and happy. Where once had been only strength and
+honour, taste and learning now abode as well. Books and paintings and music
+came to the houses, and the young men went to the university which rose above
+
+
+
+
+the plain to the north. In the place of conical hats and small-swords, of lace and
+snowy periwigs, there were cobblestones over which clattered many a blooded
+horse and rumbled many a gilded coach; and brick sidewalks with horse blocks
+and hitching-posts.
+
+There were in that Street many trees: elms and oaks and maples of dignity; so
+that in the summer, the scene was all soft verdure and twittering bird-song. And
+behind the houses were walled rose-gardens with hedged paths and sundials,
+where at evening the moon and stars would shine bewitchingly while fragrant
+blossoms glistened with dew.
+
+So the Street dreamed on, past wars, calamities, and change. Once, most of the
+young men went away, and some never came back. That was when they furled
+the old flag and put up a new banner of stripes and stars. But though men talked
+of great changes, the Street felt them not, for its folk were still the same, speaking
+of the old familiar things in the old familiar accounts. And the trees still sheltered
+singing birds, and at evening the moon and stars looked down upon dewy
+blossoms in the walled rose-gardens.
+
+In time there were no more swords, three-cornered hats, or periwigs in the Street.
+How strange seemed the inhabitants with their walking-sticks, tall beavers, and
+cropped heads! New sounds came from the distance — first strange puffings and
+shrieks from the river a mile away, and then, many years later, strange puffings
+and shrieks and rumblings from other directions. The air was not quite so pure
+as before, but the spirit of the place had not changed. The blood and soul of their
+ancestors had fashioned the Street. Nor did the spirit change when they tore
+open the earth to lay down strange pipes, or when they set up tall posts bearing
+weird wires. There was so much ancient lore in that Street, that the past could
+not easily be forgotten.
+
+Then came days of evil, when many who had known the Street of old knew it no
+more, and many knew it who had not known it before, and went away, for their
+accents were coarse and strident, and their mien and faces unpleasing. Their
+thoughts, too, fought with the wise, just spirit of the Street, so that the Street
+pined silently as its houses fell into decay, and its trees died one by one, and its
+rose-gardens grew rank with weeds and waste. But it felt a stir of pride one day
+when again marched forth young men, some of whom never came back. These
+young men were clad in blue.
+
+With the years, worse fortune came to the Street. Its trees were all gone now, and
+its rose-gardens were displaced by the backs of cheap, ugly new buildings on
+parallel streets. Yet the houses remained, despite the ravages of the years and the
+storms and worms, for they had been made to serve many a generation. New
+
+
+
+
+kinds of faces appeared in the Street, swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and
+odd features, whose owners spoke unfamihar words and placed signs in known
+and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts crowded
+the gutters. A sordid, undefinable stench settled over the place, and the ancient
+spirit slept.
+
+Great excitement once came to the Street. War and revolution were raging across
+the seas; a dynasty had collapsed, and its degenerate subjects were flocking with
+dubious intent to the Western Land. Many of these took lodgings in the battered
+houses that had once known the songs of birds and the scent of roses. Then the
+Western Land itself awoke and joined the Mother Land in her titanic struggle for
+civilization. Over the cities once more floated the old flag, companioned by the
+new flag, and by a plainer, yet glorious tricolour. But not many flags floated over
+the Street, for therein brooded only fear and hatred and ignorance. Again young
+men went forth, but not quite as did the young men of those other days.
+Something was lacking. And the sons of those young men of other days, who did
+indeed go forth in olive-drab with the true spirit of their ancestors, went from
+distant places and knew not the Street and its ancient spirit.
+
+Over the seas there was a great victory, and in triumph most of the young men
+returned. Those who had lacked something lacked it no longer, yet did fear and
+hatred and ignorance still brood over the Street; for many had stayed behind,
+and many strangers had come from distance places to the ancient houses. And
+the young men who had returned dwelt there no longer. Swarthy and sinister
+were most of the strangers, yet among them one might find a few faces like those
+who fashioned the Street and moulded its spirit. Like and yet unlike, for there
+was in the eyes of all a weird, unhealthy glitter as of greed, ambition,
+vindictiveness, or misguided zeal. Unrest and treason were abroad amongst an
+evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its death blow, that they might
+mount to power over its ruins, even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy,
+frozen land from whence most of them had come. And the heart of that plotting
+was in the Street, whose crumbling houses teemed with alien makers of discord
+and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the appointed
+day of blood, flame and crime.
+
+Of the various odd assemblages in the Street, the Law said much but could prove
+little. With great diligence did men of hidden badges linger and listen about such
+places as Petrovitch's Bakery, the squalid Rifkin School of Modern Economics,
+the Circle Social Club, and the Liberty Cafe. There congregated sinister men in
+great numbers, yet always was their speech guarded or in a foreign tongue. And
+still the old houses stood, with their forgotten lore of nobler, departed centuries;
+of sturdy Colonial tenants and dewy rose-gardens in the moonlight. Sometimes a
+
+
+
+
+lone poet or traveler would come to view them, and would try to picture them in
+their vanished glory; yet of such travelers and poets there were not many.
+
+The rumour now spread widely that these houses contained the leaders of a vast
+band of terrorists, who on a designated day were to launch an orgy of slaughter
+for the extermination of America and of all the fine old traditions which the
+Street had loved. Handbills and papers fluttered about filthy gutters; handbills
+and papers printed in many tongues and in many characters, yet all bearing
+messages of crime and rebellion. In these writings the people were urged to tear
+down the laws and virtues that our fathers had exalted, to stamp out the soul of
+the old America— the soul that was bequeathed through a thousand and a half
+years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and moderation. It was said that the swart
+men who dwelt in the Street and congregated in its rotting edifices were the
+brains of a hideous revolution, that at their word of command many millions of
+brainless, besotted beasts would stretch forth their noisome talons from the
+slums of a thousand cities, burning, slaying, and destroying till the land of our
+fathers should be no more. All this was said and repeated, and many looked
+forward in dread to the fourth day of July, about which the strange writings
+hinted much; yet could nothing be found to place the guilt. None could tell just
+whose arrest might cut off the damnable plotting at its source. Many times came
+bands of blue-coated police to search the shaky houses, though at last they
+ceased to come; for they too had grown tired of law and order, and had
+abandoned all the city to its fate. Then men in olive-drab came, bearing muskets,
+till it seemed as if in its sad sleep the Street must have some haunting dreams of
+those other days, when musketbearing men in conical hats walked along it from
+the woodland spring to the cluster of houses by the beach. Yet could no act be
+performed to check the impending cataclysm, for the swart, sinister men were
+old in cunning.
+
+So the Street slept uneasily on, till one night there gathered in Petrovitch's
+Bakery, and the Rifkin School of Modern Economics, and the Circle Social Club,
+and Liberty Cafe, and in other places as well, vast hordes of men whose eyes
+were big with horrible triumph and expectation. Over hidden wires strange
+messages traveled, and much was said of still stranger messages yet to travel; but
+most of this was not guessed till afterward, when the Western Land was safe
+from the peril. The men in olive-drab could not tell what was happening, or what
+they ought to do; for the swart, sinister men were skilled in subtlety and
+concealment.
+
+And yet the men in olive-drab will always remember that night, and will speak
+of the Street as they tell of it to their grandchildren; for many of them were sent
+there toward morning on a mission unlike that which they had expected. It was
+known that this nest of anarchy was old, and that the houses were tottering from
+
+
+
+
+the ravages of the years and the storms and worms; yet was the happening of
+that summer night a surprise because of its very queer uniformity. It was,
+indeed, an exceedingly singular happening, though after all, a simple one. For
+without warning, in one of the small hours beyond midnight, all the ravages of
+the years and the storms and the worms came to a tremendous climax; and after
+the crash there was nothing left standing in the Street save two ancient chimneys
+and part of a stout brick wall. Nor did anything that had been alive come alive
+from the ruins. A poet and a traveler, who came with the mighty crowd that
+sought the scene, tell odd stories. The poet says that all through the hours before
+dawn he beheld sordid ruins indistinctly in the glare of the arc-lights; that there
+loomed above the wreckage another picture wherein he could describe
+moonlight and fair houses and elms and oaks and maples of dignity. And the
+traveler declares that instead of the place's wonted stench there lingered a
+delicate fragrance as of roses in full bloom. But are not the dreams of poets and
+the tales of travelers notoriously false?
+
+There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those
+who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I have told you of the Street.
+
+
+
+
+The Temple
+
+
+
+Written in 1920
+
+Published in September of 1925 in Weird Tales
+
+Manuscript Found On The Coast Of Yucatan
+
+On August20, 1917, I, Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, Lieutenant-
+Commander in the Imperial German Navy and in charge of the submarine U-29,
+deposit this bottle and record in the Atlantic Ocean at a point to me unknown but
+probably about N. Latitude 20 degrees, W. Longitude 35 degrees, where my ship
+lies disabled on the ocean floor. I do so because of my desire to set certain
+unusual facts before the public; a thing I shall not in all probability survive to
+accomplish in person, since the circumstances surrounding me are as menacing
+as they are extraordinary, and involve not only the hopeless crippling of the U-
+29, but the impairment of my iron German will in a manner most disastrous.
+
+On the afternoon of June 18, as reported by wireless to the U-61, bound for Kiel,
+we torpedoed the British freighter Victory, New York to Liverpool, in N.
+Latitude 45 degrees 16 minutes, W. Longitude 28 degrees 34 minutes; permitting
+the crew to leave in boats in order to obtain a good cinema view for the
+admiralty records. The ship sank quite picturesquely, bow first, the stem rising
+high out of the water whilst the hull shot down perpendicularly to the bottom of
+the sea. Our camera missed nothing, and I regret that so fine a reel of film should
+never reach Berlin. After that we sank the lifeboats with our guns and
+submerged.
+
+When we rose to the surface about sunset, a seaman's body was found on the
+deck, hands gripping the railing in curious fashion. The poor fellow was young,
+rather dark, and very handsome; probably an Italian or Greek, and undoubtedly
+of the Victory's crew. He had evidently sought refuge on the very ship which
+had been forced to destroy his own - one more victim of the unjust war of
+aggression which the English pig-dogs are waging upon the Fatherland. Our
+men searched him for souvenirs, and found in his coat pocket a very odd bit of
+ivory carved to represent a youth's head crowned with laurel. My fellow-officer.
+Lieutenant Kienze, believed that the thing was of great age and artistic value, so
+took it from the men for himself. How it had ever come into the possession of a
+common sailor neither he nor I could imagine.
+
+As the dead man was thrown overboard there occurred two incidents which
+created much disturbance amongst the crew. The fellow's eyes had been closed;
+
+
+
+
+but in the dragging of his body to the rail they were jarred open, and many
+seemed to entertain a queer delusion that they gazed steadily and mockingly at
+Schmidt and Zimmer, who were bent over the corpse. The Boatswain Muller, an
+elderly man who would have known better had he not been a superstitious
+Alsatian swine, became so excited by this impression that he watched the body
+in the water; and swore that after it sank a little it drew its limbs into a
+swiinming position and sped away to the south under the waves. Kienze and I
+did not like these displays of peasant ignorance, and severely reprimanded the
+men, particularly Muller.
+
+The next day a very troublesome situation was created by the indisposition of
+some of the crew. They were evidently suffering from the nervous strain of our
+long voyage, and had had bad dreams. Several seemed quite dazed and stupid;
+and after satisfying myself that they were not feigning their weakness, I excused
+them from their duties. The sea was rather rough, so we descended to a depth
+where the waves were less troublesome. Here we were comparatively calm,
+despite a somewhat puzzling southward current which we could not identify
+from our oceanographic charts. The moans of the sick men were decidedly
+annoying; but since they did not appear to demoralize the rest of the crew, we
+did not resort to extreme measures. It was our plan to remain where we were
+and intercept the liner Dacia, mentioned in information from agents in New
+York.
+
+In the early evening we rose to the surface, and found the sea less heavy. The
+smoke of a battleship was on the northern horizon, but our distance and ability
+to submerge made us safe. What worried us more was the talk of Boatswain
+Muller, which grew wilder as night came on. He was in a detestably childish
+state, and babbled of some illusion of dead bodies drifting past the undersea
+portholes; bodies which looked at him intensely, and which he recognized in
+spite of bloating as having seen dying during some of our victorious German
+exploits. And he said that the young man we had found and tossed overboard
+was their leader. This was very gruesome and abnormal, so we confined Muller
+in irons and had him soundly whipped. The men were not pleased at his
+punishment, but discipline was necessary. We also denied the request of a
+delegation headed by Seaman Zimmer, that the curious carved ivory head be
+cast into the sea.
+
+On June 20, Seaman Bohin and Schmidt, who had been ill the day before, became
+violently insane. I regretted that no physician was included in our complement
+of officers, since German lives are precious; but the constant ravings of the two
+concerning a terrible curse were most subversive of discipline, so drastic steps
+were taken. The crew accepted the event in a sullen fashion, but it seemed to
+
+
+
+
+quiet Muller; who thereafter gave us no trouble. In the evening we released him,
+and he went about his duties silently.
+
+In the week that followed we were all very nervous, watching for the Dacia. The
+tension was aggravated by the disappearance of Muller and Zimmer, who
+undoubtedly committed suicide as a result of the fears which had seemed to
+harass them, though they were not observed in the act of jumping overboard. I
+was rather glad to be rid of Muller, for even his silence had unfavorably affected
+the crew. Everyone seemed inclined to be silent now, as though holding a secret
+fear. Many were ill, but none made a disturbance. Lieutenant Kienze chafed
+under the strain, and was annoyed by the merest trifle - such as the school of
+dolphins which gathered about the U-29 in increasing numbers, and the growing
+intensity of that southward current which was not on our chart.
+
+It at length became apparent that we had missed the Dacia altogether. Such
+failures are not uncommon, and we were more pleased than disappointed, since
+our return to Wilhelmshaven was now in order. At noon June 28 we turned
+northeastward, and despite some rather comical entanglements with the unusual
+masses of dolphins, were soon under way.
+
+The explosion in the engine room at 2 A.M. was wholly a surprise. No defect in
+the machinery or carelessness in the men had been noticed, yet without warning
+the ship was racked from end to end with a colossal shock. Lieutenant Kienze
+hurried to the engine room, finding the fuel-tank and most of the mechanism
+shattered, and Engineers Raabe and Schneider instantly killed. Our situation had
+suddenly become grave indeed; for though the chemical air regenerators were
+intact, and though we could use the devices for raising and submerging the ship
+and opening the hatches as long as compressed air and storage batteries might
+hold out, we were powerless to propel or guide the submarine. To seek rescue in
+the life-boats would be to deliver ourselves into the hands of enemies
+unreasonably embittered against our great German nation, and our wireless had
+failed ever since the Victory affair to put us in touch with a fellow U-boat of the
+Imperial Navy.
+
+From the hour of the accident till July 2 we drifted constantly to the south, almost
+without plans and encountering no vessel. Dolphins still encircled the U-29, a
+somewhat remarkable circumstance considering the distance we had covered.
+On the morning of July 2 we sighted a warship flying American colors, and the
+men became very restless in their desire to surrender. Finally Lieutenant Menze
+had to shoot a seaman named Traube, who urged this un-German act with
+especial violence. This quieted the crew for the time, and we submerged unseen.
+
+
+
+
+The next afternoon a dense flock of sea-birds appeared from the south, and the
+ocean began to heave ominously. Closing our hatches, we awaited developments
+until we realized that we must either submerge or be swamped in the mounting
+waves. Our air pressure and electricity were diminishing, and we wished to
+avoid all unnecessary use of our slender mechanical resources; but in this case
+there was no choice. We did not descend far, and when after several hours the
+sea was calmer, we decided to return to the surface. Here, however, a new
+trouble developed; for the ship failed to respond to our direction in spite of all
+that the mechanics could do. As the men grew more frightened at this undersea
+imprisonment, some of them began to mutter again about Lieutenant Kienze's
+ivory image, but the sight of an automatic pistol calmed them. We kept the poor
+devils as busy as we could, tinkering at the machinery even when we knew it
+was useless.
+
+Kienze and I usually slept at different times; and it was during my sleep, about 5
+A.M., July 4, that the general mutiny broke loose. The six remaining pigs of
+seamen, suspecting that we were lost, had suddenly burst into a mad fury at our
+refusal to surrender to the Yankee battleship two days before, and were in a
+delirium of cursing and destruction. They roared like the animals they were, and
+broke instruments and furniture indiscriminately; screaming about such
+nonsense as the curse of the ivory image and the dark dead youth who looked at
+them and swam away. Lieutenant Kienze seemed paralyzed and inefficient, as
+one might expect of a soft, womanish Rhinelander. I shot all six men, for it was
+necessary, and made sure that none remained alive.
+
+We expelled the bodies through the double hatches and were alone in the U-29.
+Kienze seemed very nervous, and drank heavily. It was decided that we remain
+alive as long as possible, using the large stock of provisions and chemical supply
+of oxygen, none of which had suffered from the crazy antics of those swine-
+hound seamen. Our compasses, depth gauges, and other delicate instruments
+were ruined; so that henceforth our only reckoning would be guess work, based
+on our watches, the calendar, and our apparent drift as judged by any objects we
+might spy through the portholes or from the conning tower. Fortunately we had
+storage batteries still capable of long use, both for interior lighting and for the
+searchlight. We often cast a beam around the ship, but saw only dolphins,
+swimming parallel to our own drifting course. I was scientifically interested in
+those dolphins; for though the ordinary Delphinus delphis is a cetacean
+mammal, unable to subsist without air, I watched one of the swimmers closely
+for two hours, and did not see him alter his submerged condition.
+
+With the passage of time Kienze and I decided that we were still drifting south,
+meanwhile sinking deeper and deeper. We noted the marine fauna and flora, and
+read much on the subject in the books I had carried with.me for spare moments. I
+
+
+
+
+could not help observing, however, the inferior scientific knowledge of my
+companion. His mind was not Prussian, but given to imaginings and
+speculations which have no value. The fact of our coming death affected him
+curiously, and he would frequently pray in remorse over the men, women, and
+children we had sent to the bottom; forgetting that all things are noble which
+serve the German state. After a time he became noticeably unbalanced, gazing
+for hours at his ivory image and weaving fanciful stories of the lost and forgotten
+things under the sea. Sometimes, as a psychological experiment, I would lead
+him on in the wanderings, and listen to his endless poetical quotations and tales
+of sunken ships. I was very sorry for him, for I dislike to see a German suffer; but
+he was not a good man to die with. For myself I was proud, knowing how the
+Fatherland would revere my memory and how my sons would be taught to be
+men like me.
+
+On August 9, we espied the ocean floor, and sent a powerful beam from the
+searchlight over it. It was a vast undulating plain, mostly covered with seaweed,
+and strewn with the shells of small moflusks. Here and there were slimy objects
+of puzzling contour, draped with weeds and encrusted with barnacles, which
+Kienze declared must be ancient ships lying in their graves. He was puzzled by
+one thing, a peak of solid matter, protruding above the oceanbed nearly four feet
+at its apex; about two feet thick, with flat sides and smooth upper surfaces which
+met at a very obtuse angle. I called the peak a bit of outcropping rock, but Kienze
+thought he saw carvings on it. After a while he began to shudder, and turned
+away from the scene, as if frightened; yet could give no explanation save that he
+was overcome with the vastness, darkness, remoteness, antiquity, and mystery of
+the oceanic abysses. His mind was tired, but I am always a German, and was
+quick to notice two things: that the U-29 was standing the deep-sea pressure
+splendidly, and that the peculiar dolphins were still about us, even at a depth
+where the existence of high organisms is considered impossible by most
+naturalists. That I had previously overestimated our depth, I was sure; but none
+the less we must still have been deep enough to make these phenomena
+remarkable. Our southward speed, as gauged by the ocean floor, was about as I
+had estimated from the organisms passed at higher levels.
+
+It was at 3:15 PM., August 12, that poor Kienze went wholly mad. He had been
+in the conning tower using the searchlight when I saw him bound into the library
+compartment where I sat reading, and his face at once betrayed him. I will repeat
+here what he said, underlining the words he emphasized: "He is calling! He is
+calling! I hear him! We must go!" As he spoke he took his ivory image from the
+table, pocketed it, and seized my arm in an effort to drag me up the
+companionway to the deck. In a moment I understood that he meant to open the
+hatch and plunge with me into the water outside, a vagary of suicidal and
+homicidal mania for which I was scarcely prepared. As I hung back and
+
+
+
+
+attempted to soothe him he grew more violent, saying: "Come now - do not wait
+until later; it is better to repent and be forgiven than to defy and be condemned."
+Then I tried the opposite of the soothing plan, and told him he was mad -
+pitifully demented. But he was unmoved, and cried: "If I am mad, it is mercy.
+May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remam sane to the hideous
+end! Come and be mad whilst he still calls with mercy!"
+
+This outburst seemed to relieve a pressure in his brain; for as he finished he grew
+much milder, asking me to let him depart alone if I would not accompany him.
+My course at once became clear. He was a German, but only a Rhinelander and a
+commoner; and he was now a potentially dangerous madman. By complying
+with his suicidal request I could immediately free myself from one who was no
+longer a companion but a menace. I asked him to give me the ivory image before
+he went, but this request brought from him such uncanny laughter that I did not
+repeat it. Then I asked him if he wished to leave any keepsake or lock of hair for
+his family in Germany in case I should be rescued, but again he gave me that
+strange laugh. So as he climbed the ladder I went to the levers and, allowing
+proper time-intervals, operated the machinery which sent him to his death. After
+I saw that he was no longer in the boat I threw the searchlight around the water
+in an effort to obtain a last glimpse of him since I wished to ascertain whether the
+water-pressure would flatten him as it theoretically should, or whether the body
+would be unaffected, like those extraordinary dolphins. I did not, however,
+succeed in finding my late companion, for the dolphins were massed thickly and
+obscuringly about the conning tower.
+
+That evening I regretted that I had not taken the ivory image surreptitiously
+from poor Kienze's pocket as he left, for the memory of it fascinated me. I could
+not forget the youthful, beautiful head with its leafy crown, though I am not by
+nature an artist. I was also sorry that I had no one with whom to converse.
+Kienze, though not my mental equal, was much better than no one. I did not
+sleep well that night, and wondered exactly when the end would come. Surely, I
+had little enough chance of rescue.
+
+The next day I ascended to the conning tower and commenced the customary
+searchlight explorations. Northward the view was much the same as it had been
+all the four days since we had sighted the bottom, but I perceived that the
+drifting of the U-29 was less rapid. As I swung the beam around to the south, I
+noticed that the ocean floor ahead fell away in a marked declivity, and bore
+curiously regular blocks of stone in certain places, disposed as if in accordance
+with definite patterns. The boat did not at once descend to match the greater
+ocean depth, so I was soon forced to adjust the searchlight to cast a sharply
+downward beam. Owing to the abruptness of the change a wire was
+
+
+
+
+disconnected, which necessitated a delay of many minutes for repairs; but at
+length the light streamed on again, flooding the marine valley below me.
+
+I am not given to emotion of any kind, but my amazement was very great when I
+saw what lay revealed in that electrical glow. And yet as one reared in the best
+Kultur of Prussia, I should not have been amazed, for geology and tradition alike
+tell us of great transpositions in oceanic and continental areas. What I saw was an
+extended and elaborate array of ruined edifices; all of magnificent though
+unclassified architecture, and in various stages of preservation. Most appeared to
+be of marble, gleaming whitely in the rays of the searchlight, and the general
+plan was of a large city at the bottom of a narrow valley, with numerous isolated
+temples and villas on the steep slopes above. Roofs were fallen and columns
+were broken, but there still remained an air of immemorially ancient splendor
+which nothing could efface.
+
+Confronted at last with the Atlantis I had formerly deemed largely a myth, I was
+the most eager of explorers. At the bottom of that valley a river once had flowed;
+for as I examined the scene more closely I beheld the remains of stone and
+marble bridges and sea-walls, and terraces and embankments once verdant and
+beautiful. In my enthusiasm I became nearly as idiotic and sentimental as poor
+Kienze, and was very tardy in noticing that the southward current had ceased at
+last, allowing the U-29 to settle slowly down upon the sunken city as an airplane
+settles upon a town of the upper earth. I was slow, to, in realizing that the school
+of unusual dolphins had vanished.
+
+In about two hours the boat rested in a paved plaza close to the rocky wall of the
+valley. On one side I could view the entire city as it sloped from the plaza down
+to the old river-bank; on the other side, in startling proximity, I was confronted
+by the richly ornate and perfectly preserved facade of a great building, evidently
+a temple, hollowed from the solid rock. Of the original workmanship of this
+titanic thing I can only make conjectures. The facade, of immense magnitude,
+apparently covers a continuous hollow recess; for its windows are many and
+widely distributed. In the center yawns a great open door, reached by an
+impressive flight of steps, and surrounded by exquisite carvings like the figures
+of Bacchanals in relief. Foremost of all are the great columns and frieze, both
+decorated with sculptures of inexpressible beauty; obviously portraying
+idealized pastoral scenes and processions of priests and priestesses bearing
+strange ceremonial devices in adoration of a radiant god. The art is of the most
+phenomenal perfection, largely Hellenic in idea, yet strangely individual. It
+imparts an impression of terrible antiquity, as though it were the remotest rather
+than the immediate ancestor of Greek art. Nor can I doubt that every detail of
+this massive product was fashioned from the virgin hillside rock of our planet. It
+is palpably a part of the valley wall, though how the vast interior was ever
+
+
+
+
+excavated I cannot imagine. Perhaps a cavern or series of caverns furnished the
+nucleus. Neither age nor submersion has corroded the pristine grandeur of this
+awful fane - for fane indeed it must be - and today after thousands of years it
+rests untarnished and inviolate in the endless night and silence of an ocean-
+chasm.
+
+I cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its
+buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with its beauty
+and mystery. Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity was consuming;
+and I threw the searchlight beam about in eager quest. The shaft of light
+permitted me to learn many details, but refused to show anything within the
+gaping door of the rock-hewn temple; and after a time I turned off the current,
+conscious of the need of conserving power. The rays were now perceptibly
+dimmer than they had been during the weeks of drifting. And as if sharpened by
+the coming deprivation of light, my desire to explore the watery secrets grew. I, a
+German, should be the first to tread those eon-forgotten ways!
+
+I produced and examined a deep-sea diving suit of jointed metal, and
+experimented with the portable light and air regenerator. Though I should have
+trouble in managing the double hatches alone, I believed I could overcome all
+obstacles with my scientific skill and actually walk about the dead city in person.
+
+On August 16 I effected an exit from the U-29, and laboriously made my way
+through the ruined and mud-choked streets to the ancient river. I found no
+skeletons or other human remains, but gleaned a wealth of archeological lore
+from sculptures and coins. Of this I cannot now speak save to utter my awe at a
+culture in the full noon of glory when cave-dwellers roamed Europe and the Nile
+flowed unwatched to the sea. Others, guided by this manuscript if it shall ever be
+found, must unfold the mysteries at which I can only hint. I returned to the boat
+as my electric batteries grew feeble, resolved to explore the rock temple on the
+following day.
+
+On the 17th, as my impulse to search out the mystery of the temple waxed still
+more insistent, a great disappointment befell me; for I found that the materials
+needed to replenish the portable light had perished in the mutiny of those pigs in
+July. My rage was unbounded, yet my German sense forbade me to venture
+unprepared into an utterly black interior which might prove the lair of some
+indescribable marine monster or a labyrinth of passages from whose windings I
+could never extricate myself. All I could do was to turn on the waning
+searchlight of the U-29, and with its aid walk up the temple steps and study the
+exterior carvings. The shaft of light entered the door at an upward angle, and I
+peered in to see if I could glimpse anything, but all in vain. Not even the roof
+was visible; and though I took a step or two inside after testing the floor with a
+
+
+
+
+staff, I dared not go farther. Moreover, for the first time in my Hfe I experienced
+the emotion of dread. I began to reahze how some of poor Kienze's moods had
+arisen, for as the temple drew me more and more, I feared its aqueous abysses
+with a bhnd and mounting terror. Returning to the submarine, I turned off the
+hghts and sat thinking in the dark. Electricity must now be saved for
+emergencies.
+
+Saturday the 18th I spent in total darkness, tormented by thoughts and memories
+that threatened to overcome my German will. Kienze bad gone mad and
+perished before reaching this sinster remnant of a past unwholesomely remote,
+and had advised me to go with him. Was, indeed. Fate preserving my reason
+only to draw me irresistibly to an end more horrible and unthinkable than any
+man has dreamed of? Clearly, my nerves were sorely taxed, and I must cast off
+these impressions of weaker men.
+
+I could not sleep Saturday night, and turned on the lights regardless of the
+future. It was annoying that the electricity should not last out the air and
+provisions. I revived my thoughts of euthanasia, and examined my automatic
+pistol. Toward morning I must have dropped asleep with the lights on, for I
+awoke in darkness yesterday afternoon to find the batteries dead. I struck several
+matches in succession, and desperately regretted the improvidence which had
+caused us long ago to use up the few candles we carried.
+
+After the fading of the last match I dared to waste, I sat very quietly without a
+light. As I considered the inevitable end my mind ran over preceding events, and
+developed a hitherto dormant impression which would have caused a weaker
+and more superstitious man to shudder. The head of the radiant god in the
+sculptures on the rock temple is the same as that carven bit of ivory which the
+dead sailor brought from the sea and which poor Kienze carried back into the
+sea.
+
+I was a little dazed by this coincidence, but did not become terrified. It is only the
+inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the
+primitive shortcut of supernaturalism. The coincidence was strange, but I was
+too sound a reasoner to connect circumstances which admit of no logical
+connection, or to associate in any uncanny fashion the disastrous events which
+had led from the Victory affair to my present plight. Feeling the need of more
+rest, I took a sedative and secured some more sleep. My nervous condition was
+reflected in my dreams, for I seemed to hear the cries of drowning persons, and
+to see dead faces pressing against the portholes of the boat. And among the dead
+faces was the living, mocking face of the youth with the ivory image.
+
+
+
+
+I must be careful how I record my awakening today, for I am unstrung, and
+much hallucination is necessarily mixed with fact. Psychologically my case is
+most interesting, and I regret that it cannot be observed scientifically by a
+competent German authority. Upon opening my eyes my first sensation was an
+overmastering desire to visit the rock temple; a desire which grew every instant,
+yet which I automatically sought to resist through some emotion of fear which
+operated in the reverse direction. Next there came to me the impression of light
+amidst the darkness of dead batteries, and I seemed to see a sort of
+phosphorescent glow in the water through the porthole which opened toward
+the temple. This aroused my curiosity, for I knew of no deep-sea organism
+capable of emitting such luminosity.
+
+But before I could investigate there came a third impression which because of its
+irrationality caused me to doubt the objectivity of anything my senses might
+record. It was an aural delusion; a sensation of rhythmic, melodic sound as of
+some wild yet beautiful chant or choral hymn, coming from the outside through
+the absolutely sound-proof hull of the U-29. Convinced of my psychological and
+nervous abnormality, I lighted some matches and poured a stiff dose of sodium
+bromide solution, which seemed to calm me to the extent of dispelling the
+illusion of sound. But the phosphorescence remained, and I had difficulty in
+repressing a childish impulse to go to the porthole and seek its source. It was
+horribly realistic, and I could soon distinguish by its aid the familiar objects
+around me, as well as the empty sodium bromide glass of which I had had no
+former visual impression in its present location. This last circumstance made me
+ponder, and I crossed the room and touched the glass. It was indeed in the place
+where I had seemed to see it. Now I knew that the light was either real or part of
+an hallucination so fixed and consistent that I could not hope to dispel it, so
+abandoning all resistance I ascended to the conning tower to look for the
+luminous agency. Might it not actually be another U-boat, offering possibilities of
+rescue?
+
+It is well that the reader accept nothing which follows as objective truth, for since
+the events transcend natural law, they are necessity the subjective and unreal
+creations of my overtaxed mind. When I attained the conning tower I found the
+sea in general far less luminous than I had expected. There was no animal or
+vegetable phosphorescence about, and the city that sloped down to the river was
+invisible in blackness. What I did see was not spectacular, not grotesque or
+terrifying, yet it removed my last vestige of trust in my consciousness. For the
+door and windows of the undersea temple hewn from the rocky hill were vividly
+aglow with a flickering radiance, as from a mighty altar-flame far within.
+
+Later incidents are chaotic. As I stared at the uncannily lighted door and
+windows, I became subject to the most extravagant visions - visions so
+
+
+
+
+extravagant that I cannot even relate them. I fancied that I discerned objects in
+the temple; objects both stationary and moving; and seemed to hear again the
+unreal chant that had floated to me when first I awaked. And over all rose
+thoughts and fears which centered in the youth from the sea and the ivory image
+whose carving was duplicated on the frieze and columns of the temple before
+me. I thought of poor Kienze, and wondered where his body rested with the
+image he had carried back into the sea. He had warned me of something, and I
+had not heeded - but he was a soft-headed Rhinelander who went mad at
+troubles a Prussian could bear with ease.
+
+The rest is very simple. My impulse to visit and enter the temple has now
+become an inexplicable and imperious command which ultimately cannot be
+denied. My own German will no longer controls my acts, and volition is
+henceforward possible only in minor matters. Such madness it was which drove
+Kienze to his death, bare-headed and unprotected in the ocean; but I am a
+Prussian and a man of sense, and will use to the last what little will I have. When
+first I saw that I must go, I prepared my diving suit, helmet, and air regenerator
+for instant donning, and immediately commenced to write this hurried chronicle
+in the hope that it may some day reach the world. I shall seal the manuscript in a
+bottle and entrust it to the sea as I leave the U-29 for ever.
+
+I have no fear, not even from the prophecies of the madman Kienze. What I have
+seen cannot be true, and I know that this madness of my own will at most lead
+only to suffocation when my air is gone. The light in the temple is a sheer
+delusion, and I shall die calmly like a German, in the black and forgotten depths.
+This demoniac laughter which I hear as I write comes only from my own
+weakening brain. So I will carefully don my suit and walk boldly up the steps
+into the primal shrine, that silent secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted
+years.
+
+
+
+
+The Terrible Old Man
+
+Written 28 Jan 1920
+
+Published July 1921 in The Tryout, Vol. 7, No. 4, p. 10-14.
+
+It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the
+Terrible Old Man. This old man dwells all alone in a very ancient house on Water
+Street near the sea, and is reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly
+feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs.
+Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than
+robbery.
+
+The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the Terrible Old
+Man which generally keep him safe from the attention of gentlemen like Mr.
+Ricci and his colleagues, despite the almost certain fact that he hides a fortune of
+indefinite magnitude somewhere about his musty and venerable abode. He is, in
+truth, a very strange person, believed to have been a captain of East India clipper
+ships in his day; so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so
+taciturn that few know his real name. Among the gnarled trees in the front yard
+of his aged and neglected place he maintains a strange collection of large stones,
+oddly grouped and painted so that they resemble the idols in some obscure
+Eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of the small boys who love
+to taunt the Terrible Old Man about his long white hair and beard, or to break
+the small-paned windows of his dwelling with wicked missiles; but there are
+other things which frighten the older and more curious folk who sometimes steal
+up to the house to peer in through the dusty panes. These folk say that on a table
+in a bare room on the ground floor are many peculiar bottles, in each a small
+piece of lead suspended pendulum-wise from a string. And they say that the
+Terrible Old Man talks to these bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack,
+Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he
+speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain definite
+vibrations as if in answer.
+
+Those who have watched the tall, lean. Terrible Old Man in these peculiar
+conversations, do not watch him again. But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and
+Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and
+heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England
+life and traditions, and they saw in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering,
+almost helpless grey-beard, who could not walk without the aid of his knotted
+cane, and whose thin, weak hands shook pitifully. They were really quite sorry
+in their way for the lonely, unpopular old fellow, whom everybody shunned.
+
+
+
+
+and at whom all the dogs barked singularly. But business is business, and to a
+robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure and a challenge about a
+very old and very feeble man who has no account at the bank, and who pays for
+his few necessities at the village store with Spanish gold and silver minted two
+centuries ago.
+
+Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva selected the night of April 11th for their call. Mr.
+Ricci and Mr. Silva were to interview the poor old gentleman, whilst Mr. Czanek
+waited for them and their presumable metallic burden with a covered motor-car
+in Ship Street, by the gate in the tall rear wall of their host's grounds. Desire to
+avoid needless explanations in case of unexpected police intrusions prompted
+these plans for a quiet and unostentatious departure.
+
+As prearranged, the three adventurers started out separately in order to prevent
+any evil-minded suspicions afterward. Messrs. Ricci and Silva met in Water
+Street by the old man's front gate, and although they did not like the way the
+moon shone down upon the painted stones through the budding branches of the
+gnarled trees, they had more important things to think about than mere idle
+superstition. They feared it might be unpleasant work making the Terrible Old
+Man loquacious concerning his hoarded gold and silver, for aged sea-captains
+are notably stubborn and perverse. Still, he was very old and very feeble, and
+there were two visitors. Messrs. Ricci and Silva were experienced in the art of
+making unwilling persons voluble, and the screams of a weak and exceptionally
+venerable man can be easily muffled. So they moved up to the one lighted
+window and heard the Terrible Old Man talking childishly to his bottles with
+pendulums. Then they donned masks and knocked politely at the weather-
+stained oaken door.
+
+Waiting seemed very long to Mr. Czanek as he fidgeted restlessly in the covered
+motor-car by the Terrible Old Man's back gate in Ship Street. He was more than
+ordinarily tender-hearted, and he did not like the hideous screams he had heard
+in the ancient house just after the hour appointed for the deed. Had he not told
+his colleagues to be as gentle as possible with the pathetic old sea-captain? Very
+nervously he watched that narrow oaken gate in the high and ivy-clad stone
+wall. Frequently he consulted his watch, and wondered at the delay. Had the old
+man died before revealing where his treasure was hidden, and had a thorough
+search become necessary? Mr. Czanek did not like to wait so long in the dark in
+such a place. Then he sensed a soft tread or tapping on the walk inside the gate,
+heard a gentle fumbling at the rusty latch, and saw the narrow, heavy door
+swing inward. And in the pallid glow of the single dim street-lamp he strained
+his eyes to see what his colleagues had brought out of that sinister house which
+loomed so close behind. But when he looked, he did not see what he had
+expected; for his colleagues were not there at all, but only the Terrible Old Man
+
+
+
+
+leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously. Mr. Czanek had never
+before noticed the colour of that man's eyes; now he saw that they were yellow.
+
+Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason
+that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three
+unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly
+mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in. And
+some people even spoke of things as trivial as the deserted motor-car found in
+Ship Street, or certain especially inhuman cries, probably of a stray animal or
+migratory bird, heard in the night by wakeful citizens. But in this idle village
+gossip the Terrible Old Man took no interest at all. He was by nature reserved,
+and when one is aged and feeble, one's reserve is doubly strong. Besides, so
+ancient a sea- captain must have witnessed scores of things much more stirring
+in the far-off days of his unremembered youth.
+
+
+
+
+The Thing on the Doorstep
+
+Written 21-24 Aug 1933
+
+Published January 1937 in Weird Tales, Vol. 29, No. 1, p. 52-70.
+
+
+It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I
+hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be
+called a madman - madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham
+Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with
+the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than I
+did after facing the evidence of that horror - that thing on the doorstep.
+
+Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even
+now I ask myself whether I was misled - or whether I am not mad after all. I do
+not know - but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby,
+and even the stolid police are at their wits' ends to account for that last terrible
+visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by
+discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something
+infinitely more terrible and incredible.
+
+So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him,
+and in so doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed
+untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily
+paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that
+happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
+
+I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was
+so precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I
+was sixteen. He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and
+at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which
+astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and
+coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only
+child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused
+them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out
+without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other
+children. All this doubtless fostered a strange secretive life in the boy, with
+imagination as his one avenue of freedom.
+
+At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile
+writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had
+
+
+
+
+leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger
+child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and
+marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in
+which we live - witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging
+gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries
+beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.
+
+As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a
+book of Edward's demoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening.
+Young Derby's odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his
+collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title
+Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a close correspondent of the notorious
+Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and
+died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded
+village in Hungary.
+
+In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded
+because of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of
+childish dependence were fostered by over-careful parents, so that he never
+travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was
+early seen that he would not be equal to a struggle in the business or professional
+arena, but the family fortune was so ample that this formed no tragedy. As he
+grew to years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect of boyishness. Blond
+and blue-eyed, he had the fresh complexion of a child; and his attempt to raise a
+moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His voice was soft and light,
+and his unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness rather than the
+paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome
+face would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to
+seclusion and bookishness.
+
+Derby's parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on
+the surface aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents
+turned more and more toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitiveness and
+yearnings were half-aroused in him. We had great discussions in those days. I
+had been through Harvard, had studied in a Boston architect's office, had
+married, and had finally returned to Arkham to practise my profession - settling
+in the family homestead in Saltonstall Street since my father had moved to
+Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came to
+regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing the
+doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that
+after dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two
+more after a pause. Less frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy
+the obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.
+
+
+
+
+Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkahm since his parents would
+not let him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his
+course in three years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving
+high marks in everything but mathematics and the sciences. He mingled very
+little with the other students, though looking enviously at the "daring" or
+"Bohemian" set - whose superficially "smart" language and meaningless ironic
+pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished he dared adopt.
+
+What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean
+magical lore, for which Miskatonic's library was and is famous. Always a dweller
+on the surface of phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual
+runes and riddles left by a fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of
+posterity. He read things like the frightful Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen
+Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
+Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seen them. Edward was
+twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed pleased when I
+named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton after him.
+
+By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man
+and a fairly well known poet and fantaisiste though his lack of contacts and
+responsibilities had slowed down his literary growth by making his products
+derivative and over-bookish. I was perhaps his closest friend - finding him an
+inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice in
+whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his parents. He remained single -
+more through shyness, inertia, and parental protectiveness than through
+inclination - and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory
+extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home.
+I went to Plattsburg for a commission but never got overseas.
+
+So the years wore on. Edward's mother died when he was thirty four and for
+months he was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took
+him to Europe, however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without
+visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if
+of partial escape from some unseen bondage. He began to mingle in the more
+"advanced" college set despite his middle age, and was present at some
+extremely wild doings - on one occasion paying heavy blackmail (which he
+borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father's notice.
+Some of the whispered rumors about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely
+singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly beyond
+credibility.
+
+
+Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about
+twenty-three at the time; and was taking a special course in mediaeval
+metaphysics at Miskatonic. The daughter of a friend of mine had met her before -
+in the Hall School at Kingsport - and had been inclined to shun her because of
+her odd reputation. She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for
+overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely
+sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin and conversation which
+caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark
+legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted
+Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year
+1850, and of a strange element "not quite human" in the ancient families of the
+run-down fishing port - tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and
+repeat with proper awesomeness.
+
+Asenath's case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite's
+daughter - the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled.
+Ephraim lived in a half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and
+those who had seen the place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever
+they can) declared that the attic windows were always boarded, and that strange
+sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. The old man was
+known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred
+that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him
+once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at
+the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of
+iron-grey beard. He had died insane - under rather queer circumstances - just
+before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered
+the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly
+like him at times.
+
+The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated
+many curious things when the news of Edward's acquaintance with her began to
+spread about. Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and
+had really seemed able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She
+professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, though her seeming success was
+generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedly
+disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by certain motions of her right
+hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of knowledge and
+language very singular - and very shocking - for a young girl; when she would
+frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and
+would seem to extract an obscene zestful irony from her present situation.
+
+Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other
+persons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at
+
+
+
+
+a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged
+personality - as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician's body
+and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and
+protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild claims about the
+nature of consciousness and about its independence of the physical frame - or at
+least from the life-processes of the physical frame. Her crowning rage, however,
+was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique
+and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man's brain, she declared, she could
+not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces.
+
+Edward met Asenath at a gathering of "intelligentsia" held in one of the
+students' rooms, and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next
+day. He had found her full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him
+most, and was in addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had never seen
+the young woman, and recalled casual references only faintly, but I knew who
+she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby should become so upheaved
+about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since infatuation thrives on
+opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.
+
+In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby.
+Others now remarked Edward's autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he
+did not look even nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an escort
+for his bizarre divinity. He was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence and
+self-indulgence, and his face was absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other
+hand, had the premature crow's feet which come from the exercises of an intense
+will.
+
+About this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw that his
+interest was by no means one-sided. She eyed him continually with an almost
+predatory air, and I perceived that their intimacy was beyond untangling. Soon
+afterward I had a visit from old Mr. Derby, whom I had always admired and
+respected. He had heard the tales of his son's new friendship, and had wormed
+the whole truth out of "the boy." Edward meant to marry Asenath, and had even
+been looking at houses in the suburbs. Knowing my usually great influence with
+his son, the father wondered if I could help to break the ill-advised affair off; but
+I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question of Edward's
+weak will but of the woman's strong will. The perennial child had transferred his
+dependence from the parental image to a new and stronger image, and nothing
+could be done about it.
+
+The wedding was performed a month later - by a justice of the peaoe, according
+to the bride's request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered no opposition, and he,
+my wife, my son, and I attended the brief ceremony - the other guests being wild
+
+
+
+
+young people from the college. Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place
+in the country at the end of High Street, and they proposed to settle there after a
+short trip to Innsmouth, whence three servants and some books and household
+goods were to be brought. It was probably not so much consideration for
+Edward and his father as a personal wish to be near the college, its library, and
+its crowd of "sophisticates," that made Asenath settle in Arkham instead of
+returning permanently home.
+
+When Edward called on me after the honeymoon I thought he looked slightly
+changed. Asenath had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache, but
+there was more than that. He looked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual
+pout of childish rebelliousness being exchanged for a look almost of genuine
+sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether I liked or disliked the change.
+Certainly he seemed for the moment more normally adult than ever before.
+Perhaps the marriage was a good thing - might not the change of dependence
+form a start toward actual neutralisaton, leading ultimately to responsible
+independence? He came alone, for Asenath was very busy. She had brought a
+vast store of books and apparatus from Innsmouth (Derby shuddered as he
+spoke the name), and was finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield house
+and grounds.
+
+Her home - in that town - was a rather disgusting place, but certain objects in it
+had taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore
+now that he had Asenath's guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed
+were very daring and radical - he did not feel at liberty to describe them - but he
+had confidence in her powers and intentions. The three servants were very queer
+- an incredibly aged couple who had been with old Ephraim and referred
+occasionally to him and to Asenath's dead mother in a cryptic way, and a
+swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and seemed to
+exude a perpetual odour of fish.
+
+
+For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes
+slip by without the familiar three-and-two strokes at the front door; and when he
+did call - or when, as happened with increasing infrequency, I called on him - he
+was very little disposed to converse on vital topics. He had become secretive
+about those occult studies which he used to describe and discuss so minutely,
+and preferred not to talk of his wife. She had aged tremendously since her
+marriage, till now - oddly enough - she seemed the elder of the two. Her face
+held the most concentratedly determined expression I had ever seen, and her
+whole aspect seemed to gain a vague, unplaceable repulsiveness. My wife and
+son noticed it as much as I, and we all ceased gradually to call on her - for which.
+
+
+
+
+Edward admitted in one of his boyishly tactless moments, she was unmitigatedly
+grateful. Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips - ostensibly to Europe,
+though Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations.
+
+It was after the first year that people began talking about the change in Edward
+Derby. It was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it
+brought up some interesting points. Now and then, it seemed Edward was
+observed to wear an expression and to do things wholly incompatible with his
+usual flabby nature. For example - although in the old days he could not drive a
+car, he was now seen occasionally to dash into or out of the old Crowninshield
+driveway with Asenath's powerful Packard, handling it like a master, and
+meeting traffic entanglements with a skill and determination utterly alien to his
+accustomed nature. In such cases he seemed always to be just back from some
+trip or just starting on one - what sort of trip, no one could guess, although he
+mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.
+
+Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he
+looked too much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these
+moments - or perhaps these moments seemed unnatural because they were so
+rare. Sometimes, hours after starting out in this way, he would return listlessly
+sprawled on the rear seat of the car while an obviously hired chauffeur or
+mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on the streets during his
+decreasing round of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls on me) was
+the old-time indecisive one - its irresponsible childishness even more marked
+than in the past. While Asenath's face aged, Edward - aside from those
+exceptional occasions - actually relaxed into a kind of exaggerated immaturity,
+save when a trace of the new sadness or understanding would flash across it. It
+was really very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped out of the gay
+college circle - not through their own disgust, we heard, but because something
+about their present studies shocked even the most callous of the other decadents.
+
+It was in the third year of the marriage that Edward began to hint openly to me
+of a certain fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things
+"going too far," and would talk darkly about the need of "gaining his identity."
+At first I ignored such references, but in time I began to question him guardedly,
+remembering what my friend's daughter had said about Asenath's hypnotic
+influence over the other girls at school - the cases where students had thought
+they were in her body looking across the room at themselves. This questioning
+seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful, and once he mumbled
+something about having a serious talk with me later. About this time old Mr.
+Derby died, for which I was afterward very thankful. Edward was badly upset,
+though by no means disorganized. He had seen astonishingly little of his parent
+since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated in herself all his vital sense of
+
+
+
+
+family linkage. Some called him callous in his loss - especially since those jaunty
+and confident moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to move back
+into the old family mansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the
+Crowninshield house to which she had become well adjusted.
+
+Not long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend - one of the few
+who had not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High Street to
+call on the couple, and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the drive with
+Edward's oddly confident and almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the
+bell, she had been told by the repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but
+had chanced to look at the house in leaving. There, at one of Edward's library
+windows, she had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face - a face whose expression
+of pain, defeat, and wistful hopelessness was poignant beyond description. It
+was - incredibly enough in view of its usual domineering cast - Asenath' s; yet the
+caller had vowed that in that instant the sad, muddled eyes of poor Edward were
+gazing out from it.
+
+Edward's calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionally
+became concrete. What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and
+legend-haunted Arkham; but he threw out his dark lore with a sincerity and
+convincingness which made one fear for his sanity. He talked about terrible
+meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods
+beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex
+angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of
+hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and
+forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.
+
+He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which
+utterly nonplussed me - elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like
+nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no
+conceivable purpose, and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he
+said, came "from outside"; and his wife knew how to get them. Sometimes - but
+always in frightened and ambiguous whisper - he would suggest things about
+old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library in the
+old days. These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around
+some especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really dead - in
+a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.
+
+At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether
+Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off
+through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism - some power of the kind
+she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me things, for
+as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and glances of a most
+
+
+
+
+inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see me, for although he
+would pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally
+clog his motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His visits
+usually came when Asenath was way - "away in her own body," as he once
+oddly put it. She always found out later - the servants watched his goings and
+coming - but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic.
+
+
+Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got
+that telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he
+was away "on business." Asenath was supposed to be with him, though
+watchful gossip declared there was someone upstairs in the house behind the
+doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by the
+servants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled
+madman who stumbled out of the woods with delirious ravings and screamed to
+me for protection. It was Edward - and he had been just able to recall his own
+name and address.
+
+Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in
+Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and
+forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm,
+vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring
+out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction.
+
+"Dan, for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps...
+the abomination of abominations... I never would let her take me, and then I
+found myself there - la! Shub-Niggurath! - The shape rose up from the altar, and
+there were five hundred that howled - The Hooded Thing bleated 'Kamog!
+Kamog!' - that was old Ephraim's secret name in the coven - 1 was there, where
+she promised she wouldn't take me - A minute before I was locked in the library,
+and then I was there where she had gone with my body - in the place of utter
+blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards
+the gate - 1 saw a shoggoth - it changed shape - 1 can't stand it - I'll kill her if she
+ever sends me there again - I'll kill that entity - her, him, it - I'll kill it! I'll kill it
+with my own hands!"
+
+It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next day I got him
+decent clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of
+hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to be silent, though he began muttering
+darkly to himself when the car passed through Augusta - as if the sight of a city
+aroused unpleasant memories. It was clear that he did not wish to go home; and
+considering the fantastic delusions he seemed to have about his wife - delusions
+
+
+
+
+undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal to which he had been
+subjected - 1 thought it would be better if he did not. I would, I resolved, put him
+up myself for a time; no matter what unpleasantness it would make with
+Asenath. Later I would help him get a divorce, for most assuredly there were
+mental factors which made this marriage suicidal for him. When we struck open
+country again Derby's muttering faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on
+the seat beside me as I drove.
+
+During our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again, more
+distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane drivel
+about Asenath. The extent to which she had preyed on Edward's nerves was
+plain, for he had woven a whole set of hallucinations around her. His present
+predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only one of a long series. She was
+getting hold of him, and he knew that some day she would never let go. Even
+now she probably let him go only when she had to, because she couldn't hold on
+long at a time. She constantly took his body and went to nameless places for
+nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs - but sometimes
+she couldn't hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his own body again
+in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she'd get hold
+of him again and sometimes she couldn't. Often he was left stranded somewhere
+as I had found him - time and again he had to find his way home from frightful
+distances, getting somebody to drive the car after he found it.
+
+The worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer at a time.
+She wanted to be a man - to be fully human - that was why she got hold of him.
+She had sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him. Some
+day she would crowd him out and disappear with his body - disappear to
+become a great magician like her father and leave him marooned in that female
+shell that wasn't even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood
+now. There had been traffick with things from the sea - it was horrible. . . And old
+Ephraim - he had known the secret, and when he grew old did a hideous thing to
+keep alive - he wanted to live forever - Asenath would succeed - one successful
+demonstration had taken place already.
+
+As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression of
+change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in
+better shape than usual - harder, more normally developed, and without the
+trace of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been
+really active and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I
+judged that Asenath's force must have pushed him into unwonted channels of
+motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a pitiable state; for he was
+mumbling wild extravagances about his wife, about black magic, about old
+Ephraim, and about some revelation which would convince even me. He
+
+
+
+
+repeated names which I recognized from bygone browsings in forbidden
+volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological
+consistency - or convincing coherence - which ran through his maundering.
+Again and again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and
+terrible disclosure.
+
+"Dan, Dan, don't you remember him - wild eyes and the unkempt beard that
+never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glares
+that way. And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon - the formula. I
+don't dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand.
+Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on - body to body to
+body - he means never to die. The life-glow - he knows how to break the link. . . it
+can flicker on a while even when the body is dead. I'll give you hints and maybe
+you'll guess. Listen, Dan - do you know why my wife always takes such pains
+with that silly backhand writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of old
+Ephraim's? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes
+Asenath had jotted down?
+
+"Asenath - is there such a person? Why did they half-think there was poison in
+old Ephraim's stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked
+- like a frightened child - when he went mad and Asenath locked him up in the
+padded attic room where - the other - had been? Was it old Ephraim's soul that
+was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for
+someone with a fine mind and a weak will? - Why did he curse that his daughter
+wasn't a son? Tell me? Daniel Upton - what devilish exchange was perpetrated in
+the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-
+willed half-human child at his mercy? Didn't he make it permanent - as she'll do
+in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath writes
+differently off guard, so that you can't tell its script from - "
+
+Then the thing happened. Derby's voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he
+raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought
+of those other occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased -
+when I had half-fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath's mental
+force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether
+different - and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted
+almost unrecognizably for a moment, while through the whole body there
+passed a shivering motion - as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and
+glands were adjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses,
+and general personality.
+
+Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept
+over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion - such a freezing.
+
+
+
+
+petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality - that my grasp of the wheel
+grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend
+than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space - some damnable, utterly
+accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.
+
+I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my
+companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The
+dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind, so I could not see
+much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that
+he must now be in that queerly energized state - so unlike his usual self - which
+so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward
+Derby - he who could never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive -
+should be ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was
+precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my
+inexplicable horror I was glad he did not.
+
+In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at
+the blaze of his eyes. The people were right - he did look damnably like his wife
+and like old Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods
+were disliked - there was certainly something unnatural in them, and I felt the
+sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This
+man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger -
+an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.
+
+He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his
+voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I
+had ever known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether
+changed - though vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling something
+I could not quite place. There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very
+genuine irony in the timbre - not the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony
+of the callow "sophisticate," which Derby had habitually affected, but something
+grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possession so
+soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.
+
+"I hope you'll forget my attack back there, Upton," he was saying. "You know
+what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I'm enormously
+grateful, of course, for this lift home.
+
+"And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my
+wife - and about things in general. That's what comes from overstudy in a field
+like mine. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets
+worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a
+
+
+
+
+rest from now on - you probably won't see me for some time, and you needn't
+blame Asenath for it.
+
+"This trip was a bit queer, but it's really very simple. There are certain Indian
+relics in the north wood - standing stones, and all that - which mean a good deal
+in folklore, and Asenath and I are following that stuff up. It was a hard search, so
+I seem to have gone off my head. I must send somebody for the car when I get
+home. A month's relaxation will put me on my feet."
+
+I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling
+alienage of my seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my
+feeling of elusive cosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium
+of longing for the end of the drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish the wheel,
+and I was glad of the speed with which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed
+by.
+
+At the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth, I
+was half-afraid my driver would take the bleak shore road that goes through that
+damnable place. He did not, however, but darted rapidly past Rowley and
+Ipswich toward our destination. We reached Arkham before midnight, and
+found the lights still on at the old Crowninshield house. Derby left the car with a
+hasty repetition of his thanks, and I drove home alone with a curious feeling of
+relief. It had been a terrible drive - all the more terrible because I could not quite
+tell why - and I did not regret Derby's forecast of a long absence from my
+company.
+
+The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more
+and more in his new energized state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her
+callers. I had only one visit from Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath's car
+- duly reclaimed from wherever he had left it in Maine - to get some books he
+had lent me. He was in his new state, and paused only long enough for some
+evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothing to discuss with me
+when in this condition - and I noticed that he did not even trouble to give the old
+three-and-two signal when ringing the doorbell. As on that evening in the car, I
+felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not explain; so that his swift
+departure was a prodigious relief.
+
+In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent college
+set talked knowingly of the matter - hinting at a meeting with a notorious cult-
+leader, lately expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New
+York. For my part I could not get that strange ride from Maine out of my head.
+The transformation I had witnessed had affected me profoundly, and I caught
+
+
+
+
+myself again and again trying to account for the thing - and for the extreme
+horror it had inspired in me.
+
+But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield
+house. The voice seemed to be a woman's, and some of the younger people
+thought it sounded like Asenath's. It was heard only at rare intervals, and would
+sometimes be choked off as if by force. There was talk of an investigation, but
+this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a
+sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances - apologizing for her recent
+absence and speaking incidentally about the nervous breakdown and hysteria of
+a guest from Boston. The guest was never seen, but Asenath's appearance left
+nothing to be said. And then someone complicated matters by whispering that
+the sobs had once or twice been in a man's voice.
+
+One evening in mid-October, I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the front
+door. Answering it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment
+that his personality was the old one which I had not encountered since the day of
+his ravings on that terrible ride from Chesuncook. His face was twitching with a
+mixture of odd emotions in which fear and triumph seemed to share dominion,
+and he looked furtively over his shoulder as I closed the door behind him.
+
+Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his
+nerves. I forbore to question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever
+he wanted to say. At length he ventured some information in a choking voice.
+
+"Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servants were
+out, and I made her promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain -
+certain occult defences I never told you about. She had to give in, but got
+frightfully angry. Just packed up and started for New York - walked right out to
+catch the eight-twenty in to Boston. I suppose people will talk, but I can't help
+that. You needn't mention that there was any trouble - just say she's gone on a
+long research trip.
+
+"She's probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope
+she'll go west and get a divorce - anyhow, I've made her promise to keep away
+and let me alone. It was horrible, Dan - she was stealing my body - crowding me
+out - making a prisoner of me. I lay low and pretended to let her do it, but I had
+to be on the watch. I could plan if I was careful, for she can't read my mind
+literally, or in detail. All she could read of my planning was a sort of general
+mood of rebellion - and she always thought I was helpless. Never thought I
+could get the best of her. . . but I had a spell or two that worked."
+
+Derby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.
+
+
+
+
+"I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were
+ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. They're her kin - Innsmouth
+people - and were hand and glove with her. I hope they'll let me alone - 1 didn't
+like the way they laughed when they walked away. I must get as many of Dad's
+old servants again as I can. I'll move back home now.
+
+"I suppose you think I'm crazy, Dan - but Arkham history ought to hint at things
+that back up what I've told you - and what I'm going to tell you. You've seen one
+of the changes, too - in your car after I told you about Asenath that day coming
+home from Maine. That was when she got me - drove me out of my body. The
+last thing I remember was when I was all worked up trying to tell you what that
+she-devil is. Then she got me, and in a flash I was back at the house - in the
+library where those damned servants had me locked up - and in that cursed
+fiend's body that isn't even human. . . You know it was she you must have ridden
+home with - that preying wolf in my body - You ought to have known the
+difference!"
+
+I shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had known the difference - yet could I
+accept an explanation as insane as this? But my distracted caller was growing
+even wilder.
+
+"I had to save myself - 1 had to, Dan! She'd have got me for good at Hallowmass
+- they hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice would have
+clinched things. She'd have got me for good - she'd have been I, and I'd have
+been she - forever - too late - My body'd have been hers for good - She'd have
+been a man, and fully human, just as she wanted to be - 1 suppose she'd have put
+me out of the way - killed her own ex-body with me in it, damn her, just as she
+did before - just as she did, or it did before - " Edward's face was now atrociously
+distorted, and he bent it uncomfortably close to mine as his voice fell to a
+whisper.
+
+"You must know what I hinted in the car - that she isn't Asenath at all, but really
+old Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, and I know it now. Her
+handwriting shows it when she goes off guard - sometimes she jots down a note
+in writing that's just like her father's manuscripts, stroke for stroke - and
+sometimes she says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say.
+He changed forms with her when he felt death coming - she was the only one he
+could find with the right kind of brain and a weak enough will - he got her body
+permanently, just as she almost got mine, and then poisoned the old body he'd
+put her into. Haven't you seen old Ephraim's soul glaring out of that she-devil's
+eyes dozens of times - and out of mine when she has control of my body?"
+
+
+
+
+The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing; and when he
+resumed his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum,
+but I would not be the one to send him there. Perhaps time and freedom from
+Asenath would do its work. I could see that he would never wish to dabble in
+morbid occultism again.
+
+"I'll tell you more later - I must have a long rest now. I'll tell you something of
+the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that
+even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to
+keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought
+to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I've been in it up
+to my neck, but that's the end. Today I'd burn that damned Necronomicon and
+all the rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic.
+
+"But she can't get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can,
+and settle down at home. You'll help me, I know, if I need help. Those devilish
+servants, you know - and if people should get too inquisitive about Asenath. You
+see, I can't give them her address... Then there are certain groups of searchers -
+certain cults, you know - that might misunderstand our breaking up... some of
+them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I know you'll stand by me if
+anything happens - even if I have to tell you a lot that will shock you. . ."
+
+I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in the
+morning he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his
+moving back into the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time in
+making the change. He did not call the next evening, but I saw him frequently
+during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little as possible about strange and
+unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derby house, and the
+travels which Edward promised to take with my son and me the following
+summer.
+
+Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly
+disturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connection
+with the strange menage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like
+was what Derby's banker let fall in an over-expansive mood at the Miskatonic
+Club - about the cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses and Abigail
+Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those evil-faced
+servants were extorting some kind of tribute from him - yet he had not
+mentioned the matter to me.
+
+I wished that the summer - and my son's Harvard vacation - would come, so that
+we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I
+had hoped he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his occasional
+
+
+
+
+exhilaration, while his moods of fright and depression were altogether too
+frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet Edward constantly
+put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he
+was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem to begin
+dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to postpone action. When
+I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened. His father's old
+butler - who was there with other reacquired servants - told me one day that
+Edward's occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar,
+looked odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing
+disturbing letters, but the butler said there was no mail which could have come
+from her.
+
+It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me.
+I was steering the conversation toward next summer's travels when he suddenly
+shrieked and leaped up from his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable
+fright - a cosmic panic and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare
+could bring to any sane mind.
+
+"My brain! My brain! God, Dan - it's tugging - from beyond - knocking - clawing
+- that she-devil - even now - Ephraim - Kamog! Kamog! - The pit of the
+shoggoths - la! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!. . .
+
+"The flame - the flame - beyond body, beyond life - in the earth - oh, God!"
+
+I pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his
+frenzy sank to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if
+talking to himself. Presently I realized that he was trying to talk to me, and bent
+my ear to his mouth to catch the feeble words.
+
+"Again, again - she's trying - I might have known - nothing can stop that force;
+not distance nor magic, nor death - it comes and comes, mostly in the night - I
+can't leave - it's horrible - oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how
+horrible it is..."
+
+When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let
+normal sleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said
+of his sanity, and wished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at
+midnight, and I put him to bed upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let
+himself quietly out of the house - and his butler, when called on the wire, said he
+was at home pacing about the library.
+
+Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily
+to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and
+
+
+
+
+having an air of abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always
+on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath
+would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night,
+during which he might eventually do himself harm.
+
+I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the
+physician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted
+from the first questions were violent and pitiable - and that evening a closed car
+took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his
+guardian and called on him twice weekly - almost weeping to hear his wild
+shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases as
+"I had to do it - I had to do it - it'll get me - it'll get me - down there - down there
+in the dark - Mother! Mother! Dan! Save me - save me -"
+
+How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say, but I tried my best to
+be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his
+servants to the Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to
+do about the Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and collections
+of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily
+untouched - telling the Derby household to go over and dust the chief rooms
+once a week, and ordering the furnace man to have a fire on those days.
+
+The final nightmare came before Candlemas - heralded, in cruel irony, by a false
+gleam of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report
+that Edward's reason had suddenly come back. His continuous memory, they
+said, was badly impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of course he must remain
+some time for observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All
+going well, he would surely be free in a week.
+
+I hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me
+to Edward's room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite
+smile; but I saw in an instant that he bore the strangely energized personality
+which had seemed so foreign to his own nature - the competent personality I had
+found so vaguely horrible, and which Edward himself had once vowed was the
+intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazing vision - so like Asenath's
+and old Ephraim's - and the same firm mouth; and when he spoke I could sense
+the same grim, pervasive irony in his voice - the deep irony so redolent of
+potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car through the night five
+months before - the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had
+forgotten the oldtime doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me - and
+now he filled me with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and
+ineffable cosmic hideousness.
+
+
+
+
+He spoke affably of arrangements for release - and there was nothing for me to
+do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt
+that something was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were
+horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a sane person - but was it
+indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it - and where
+was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined - or ought it to be extirpated from
+the face of the earth? There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in everything
+the creature said - the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling mockery to
+certain words about the early liberty earned by an especially close confinement! I
+must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.
+
+All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had
+happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward's
+face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all
+efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up to
+say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a
+nervous collapse-a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my
+subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness of
+mine could account for all the evidence.
+
+
+It was in the night-after that second evening - that stark, utter horror burst over
+me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never
+shake free. It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one
+up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on
+the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very
+faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great
+difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling
+noise - "glub... glub... glub" - which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate,
+unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called "Who is it?" But the only
+answer was "glub... glub... glub-glub." I could only assume that the noise was
+mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able to
+receive but not to send, I added, "I can't hear you. Better hang up and try
+Information." Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.
+
+This, I say, was just about midnight. When the call was traced afterward it was
+found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a
+week from the housemaid's day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at
+that house - the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the
+hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used
+stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor
+fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister
+
+
+
+
+discharged servants - who have dropped out of sight amidst the present furore.
+They speak of a ghouhsh revenge for things that were done, and say I was
+included because I was Edward's best friend and adviser.
+
+Idiots! Do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting?
+Do they fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the
+changes in that body that was Edward's? As for me, I now believe all that
+Edward Derby ever told me. There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not
+suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.
+Ephraim - Asenat - that devil called them in, and they engulfed Edward as they
+are engulfing me.
+
+Can I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form.
+The next day - in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was
+able to walk and talk coherently - 1 went to the madhouse and shot him dead for
+Edward's and the world's sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are
+keeping the body for some silly autopsies by different doctors - but I say he must
+be cremated. He must be cremated - he who was not Edward Derby when I shot
+him. I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak -
+and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it.
+One life - Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward - who now? I will not be driven out of
+my body. . . I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!
+
+But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the
+police persistently ignored - the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous
+thing met by at least three wayfarers in High Street just before two o'clock, and
+the nature of the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about
+two the doorbell and knocker waked me - doorbell and knocker both, aplied
+alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying to
+keep Edward's old signal of three-and-two strokes.
+
+Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door -
+and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it...
+was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such
+evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped?
+Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his
+own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving
+him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old
+Edward again, and I would help him!
+
+When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably
+foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second
+scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been
+
+
+
+
+Edward's, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time
+to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.
+
+The caller had on one of Edward's overcoats - its bottom almost touching the
+ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was
+a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I
+stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had
+heard over the telephone - "glub... glub..." - and thrust at me a large, closely
+written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid
+and unaccountable foetor, I seized the paper and tried to read it in the light from
+the doorway.
+
+Beyond question, it was in Edward's script. But why had he written when he was
+close enough to ring - and why was the script so awkward, coarse and shaky? I
+could make out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the
+dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the inner door's
+threshold. The odour of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I
+hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.
+
+Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I
+was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my
+fear-rigid hand. This is what it said.
+
+"Dan - go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn't Edward Derby any
+more. She got me - it's Asenath - and she has been dead three months and a half.
+I lied when I said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we
+were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her
+head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.
+
+"I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned
+up all the traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such
+secrets that they dare not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what
+they - and others of the cult - will do.
+
+"I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I
+knew what it was - I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers - or Ephraim's -
+is half detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was
+getting me - making me change bodies with her-seizing my body and purting me
+in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar.
+
+"I knew what was coming - that's why I snapped and had to go to the asylum.
+Then it came - I found myself choked in the dark - in Asenath's rotting carcass
+down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be
+
+
+
+
+in my body at the sanitarium - permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the
+sacrifice would work even without her being there - sane, and ready for release
+as a menace to the world. I was desperate, and in spite of everything I clawed my
+way out.
+
+"I'm too far gone to talk - I couldn't manage to telephone - but I can still write.
+I'll get fixed up somehow and bring this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if
+you value the peace and comfort of the world. See that it is cremated. If you
+don't, it will live on and on, body to body forever, and I can't tell you what it will
+do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan, it's the devil's business. Goodbye - you've
+been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they'll believe - and I'm damnably
+sorry to drag all this on you. I'll be at peace before long - this thing won't hold
+together much more. Hope you can read this. And kill that thing - kill it.
+
+Yours - Ed."
+
+It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the
+end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what
+cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger
+would not move or have consciousness any more.
+
+The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the
+morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken
+upstairs to bed, but the - other mass - lay where it had collapsed in the night. The
+men put handkerchiefs to their noses.
+
+What they finally found inside Edward's oddly-assorted clothes was mostly
+liquescent horror. There were bones, to - and a crushed-in skull. Some dental
+work positively identified the skull as Asenath's.
+
+
+
+
+The Tomb
+
+
+
+Written June 1917
+
+Published March 1922 in The Vagrant, No. 14, p. 50-64.
+
+In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this
+refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a
+natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the
+bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and
+intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically
+sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect
+know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all
+things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and
+mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic
+materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight
+which penetrate the common veil of obvious empricism.
+
+My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer
+and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and
+temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreation of my
+acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world;
+spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little known books, and in
+roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not
+think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was
+exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since
+detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which
+I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It
+is sufficient for me to relate events without analyzing causes.
+
+I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I
+dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the
+living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are
+no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in
+whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming.
+Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around
+its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well
+did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched
+their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon but of these things I
+must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside
+thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last
+
+
+
+
+direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before
+my birth.
+
+The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discolored by the
+mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the
+structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding
+slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly
+sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a
+gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are
+here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long
+since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a stroke of lightning. Of
+the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants
+of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what
+they call 'divine wrath' in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the
+always strong fascination which I had felt for the forest-darkened sepulcher. One
+man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this
+place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant
+land, to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one
+remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the
+depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn
+stones.
+
+I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden
+house of death. It was in midsummer, when the alchemy of nature transmutes
+the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when
+the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and
+the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings
+the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and
+echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled
+consciousness.
+
+All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking
+thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In
+years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown to the throng;
+and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between
+two savage clumps of briars, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I
+had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The dark blocks of granite, the door
+so curiously ajar, and the funeral carvings above the arch, aroused in me no
+associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I knew and
+imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from
+all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone house
+on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and
+its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so
+
+
+
+
+tantalizingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant
+of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this
+hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the
+hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the
+ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I
+alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone
+door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already
+provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was now frantic;
+and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the
+hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to
+the black, chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the
+iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room, once told a visitor that this
+decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final
+judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.
+
+The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the
+complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded
+inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure. With the traditionally
+receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though an habitual secretiveness
+caused me to tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth
+mentioning that I was not at all surprised or terrified on learning of the nature of
+the vault. My rather original ideas regarding life and death had caused me to
+associate the cold clay with the breathing body in a vague fashion; and I felt that
+the great and sinister family of the burned-down mansion was in some way
+represented within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the
+weird rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a
+new and potent interest in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a
+time each day. Once I thrust a candie within the nearly closed entrance, but could
+see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward. The odor of the
+place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote
+beyond all recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.
+
+The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation
+of Plutarch's Lives in the book-filled attic of my home. Reading the life of
+Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling of the great stone beneath
+which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny whenever he should
+become old enough to lift its enormous weight. The legend had the effect of
+dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for it made me feel that the
+time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength and
+ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily chained door with ease;
+but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed the will of Fate.
+
+
+
+
+Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of
+my time was spent in other though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes
+rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in those church-yards and
+places of burial from which I had been kept by my parents. What I did there I
+may not say, for I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but I know
+that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble I would often astonish those about
+me with my knowledge of topics almost forgotten for many generations. It was
+after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queer conceit about
+the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker of local history
+who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing a graven skull and
+crossbones, was slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment of childish
+imagination I vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had
+stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin small-clothes of the
+deceased before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had
+turned twice in his mound- covered coffin on the day after interment.
+
+But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed
+stimulated by the unexpected genealogical discovery that my own maternal
+ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly extinct family of the
+Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this older and more
+mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to look forward with
+hot eagerness to the time when I might pass within that stone door and down
+those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed the habit of listening very
+intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my favorite hours of midnight
+stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made a small clearing
+in the thicket before the mold-stained facade of the hillside, allowing the
+surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the walls and
+roof of a sylvan bower. This bower was my temple, the fastened door my shrine,
+and here I would lie outstretched on the mossy ground, thinking strange
+thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.
+
+The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen asleep from
+fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. Of
+these tones and accents I hesitate to speak; of their quality I will not speak; but I
+may say that they presented certain uncanny differences in vocabulary,
+pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every shade of New England dialect,
+from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty
+years ago, seemed represented in that shadowy colloquy, though it was only
+later that I noticed the fact. At the time, indeed, my attention was distracted from
+this matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenon so fleeting that I could not
+take oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had been
+hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulcher. I do not think I was either
+astounded or panic-stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently
+
+
+
+
+changed that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a
+rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with
+ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.
+
+It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the vault on the
+abandoned slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I
+can but ill describe. As I closed the door behind me and descended the dripping
+steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to know the way; and though the
+candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I felt singularly at home in the
+musty, charnel- house air. Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs
+bearing coffins, or the remains of coffins. Some of these were sealed and intact,
+but others had nearly vanished, leaving the silver handles and plates isolated
+amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read the name of
+Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years
+later. In a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well preserved and untenanted
+casket, adorned with a single name which brought me both a smile and a
+shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the broad slab, extinguish
+my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.
+
+In the gray light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the chain of the
+door behind me. I was no longer a young man, though but twenty-one winters
+had chilled my bodily frame. Early-rising villagers who observed my homeward
+progress looked at me strangely, and marveled at the signs of ribald revelry
+which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober and solitary. I did not
+appear before my parents till after a long and refreshing sleep.
+
+Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I
+must never recall. My speech, always susceptible to environmental influences,
+was the first thing to succumb to the change; and my suddenly acquired
+archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer boldness and
+recklessness came into my demeanor, till I unconsciously grew to possess the
+bearing of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. My formerly silent
+tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the godless
+cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterly unlike the
+fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and covered the fly-
+leaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which brought up
+suggestions of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustan wits and
+rimesters. One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in
+palpably liquorish accents an effusion of Eighteenth Century bacchanalian mirth,
+a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran something like
+this:
+
+
+
+
+Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale. And drink to the present before
+it shall fail; Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef. For 'tis eating and
+drinking that bring us relief: So fill up your glass. For life will soon pass; When
+you're dead ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!
+
+Anacreon had a red nose, so they say; But what's a red nose if ye're happy and
+gay? Gad split me! I'd rather be red whilst I'm here. Than white as a lily and
+dead half a year! So Betty, my miss. Come give me a kiss; In hell there's no
+innkeeper's daughter like this!
+
+Young Harry, propp'd up just as straight as he's able. Will soon lose his wig and
+slip under the table. But fill up your goblets and pass 'em around Better under
+the table than under the ground! So revel and chaff As ye thirstily quaff: Under
+six feet of dirt 'tis less easy to laugh!
+
+The fiend strike me blue! I'm scarce able to walk. And damn me if I can stand
+upright or talk! Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair; I'll try home for a
+while, for my wife is not there! So lend me a hand; I'm not able to stand. But I'm
+gay whilst I linger on top of the land!
+
+About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms.
+Previously indifferent to such things, I had now an unspeakable horror of them;
+and would retire to the innermost recesses of the house whenever the heavens
+threatened an electrical display. A favorite haunt of mine during the day was the
+ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture
+the structure as it had been in its prime. On one occasion I startled a villager by
+leading him confidently to a shallow subcellar, of whose existence I seemed to
+know in spite of the fact that it had been unseen and forgotten for many
+generations.
+
+At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at the altered
+manner and appearance of their only son, commenced to exert over my
+movements a kindly espionage which threatened to result in disaster. I had told
+no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret purpose with
+religious zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care in threading
+the mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possible pursuer. My
+key to the vault I kept suspended from a cord about my neck, its presence known
+only to me. I never carried out of the sepulcher any of the things I came upon
+whilst within its walls.
+
+One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain of the
+portal with none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded
+face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for my bower was discovered, and
+
+
+
+
+the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did not accost me, so I
+hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report to my careworn
+father. Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to be proclaimed to the
+world? Imagine my delighted astonishment on hearing the spy inform my parent
+in a cautious whisper that I had spent the night in the bower outside the tomb;
+my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the padlocked portal stood
+ajar! By what miracle had the watcher been thus deluded? I was now convinced
+that a supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this heaven-sent
+circumstance, I began to resume perfect openness in going to the vault; confident
+that no one could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to the full joys of that
+charnel conviviality which I must not describe, when the thing happened, and I
+was borne away to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.
+
+I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the
+clouds, and a hellish phosphoresence rose from the rank swamp at the bottom of
+the hollow. The call of the dead, too, was different. Instead of the hillside tomb, it
+was the charred cellar on the crest of the slope whose presiding demon beckoned
+to me with unseen fingers. As I emerged from an intervening grove upon the
+plain before the ruin, I beheld in the misty moonlight a thing I had always
+vaguely expected. The mansion, gone for a century, once more reared its stately
+height to the raptured vision; every window ablaze with the splendor of many
+candles. Up the long drive rolled the coaches of the Boston gentry, whilst on foot
+came a numerous assemblage of powdered exquisites from the neighboring
+mansions. With this throng I mingled, though I knew I belonged with the hosts
+rather than with the guests. Inside the hall were music, laughter, and wine on
+every hand. Several faces I recognized; though I should have known them better
+had they been shriveled or eaten away by death and decomposition. Amidst a
+wild and reckless throng I was the wildest and most abandoned. Gay blasphemy
+poured in torrents from my lips, and in shocking sallies I heeded no law of God,
+or nature.
+
+Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the swinish revelry,
+clave the very roof and laid a hush of fear upon the boisterous company. Red
+tongues of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfed the house; and the
+roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a calamity which seemed to
+transcend the bounds of unguided nature, fled shrieking into the night. I alone
+remained, riveted to my seat by a groveling fear which I had never felt before.
+And then a second horror took possession of my soul. Burnt alive to ashes, my
+body dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the tomb of the Hydes!
+Was not my coffin prepared for me? Had I not a right to rest till eternity amongst
+the descendants of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claim my heritage of death,
+even though my soul go seeking through the ages for another corporeal
+
+
+
+
+tenement to represent it on that vacant slab in the alcove of the vault. Jervas
+Hyde should never share the sad fate of Palinurus!
+
+As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming and
+struggling madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spy who had
+followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon the
+southern horizon were flashes of lightning that had so lately passed over our
+heads. My father, his face lined with sorrow, stood by as I shouted my demands
+to be laid within the tomb, frequently admonishing my captors to treat me as
+gently as they could. A blackened circle on the floor of the ruined cellar told of a
+violent stroke from the heavens; and from this spot a group of curious villagers
+with lanterns were prying a small box of antique workmanship, which the
+thunderbolt had brought to light.
+
+Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I watched the spectators as they
+viewed the treasure- trove, and was permitted to share in their discoveries. The
+box, whose fastenings were broken by the stroke which had unearthed it,
+contained many papers and objects of value, but I had eyes for one thing alone. It
+was the porcelain miniature of a young man in a smartly curled bag-wig, and
+bore the initials 'J- H.' The face was such that as I gazed, I might well have been
+studying my mirror.
+
+On the following day I was brought to this room with the barred windows, but I
+have been kept informed of certain things through an aged and simple-minded
+servitor, for whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who, like me, loves the
+churchyard. What I have dared relate of my experiences within the vault has
+brought me only pitying smiles. My father, who visits me frequently, declares
+that at no time did I pass the chained portal, and swears that the rusted padlock
+had not been touched for fifty years when he examined it. He even says that all
+the village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that I was often watched as I
+slept in the bower outside the grim facade, my half-open eyes fixed on the
+crevice that leads to the interior. Against these assertions I have no tangible proof
+to offer, since my key to the padlock was lost in the struggle on that night of
+horrors. The strange things of the past which I have learned during those
+nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and
+omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it
+not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite
+convinced of my madness.
+
+But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has done that which impels
+me to make public at least part of my story. A week ago he burst open the lock
+which chains the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, and descended with a lantern
+into the murky depths. On a slab in an alcove he found an old but empty coffin
+
+
+
+
+whose tarnished plate bears the single word: Jervas. In that coffin and in that
+vault they have promised me I shall be buried.
+
+
+
+
+The Transition of Juan Romero
+
+Written September 16, 1919
+
+Published in Marginalia, Arkham House, 1944, p. 276-84
+
+Of the events which took place at the Norton Mine on October eighteenth and
+nineteenth, 1894, I have no desire to speak. A sense of duty to science is all that
+impels me to recall, in the last years of my life, scenes and happenings fraught
+with a terror doubly acute because I cannot wholly define it. But I believe that
+before I die I should tell what I know of the - shall I say transition - of Juan
+Romero.
+
+My name and origin need not be related to posterity; in fact, I fancy it is better
+that they should not be, for when a man suddenly migrates to the States or the
+Colonies, he leaves his past behind him. Besides, what I once was is not in the
+least relevant to my narrative; save perhaps the fact that during my service in
+India I was more at home amongst white-bearded native teachers than amongst
+my brother-officers. I had delved not a little into odd Eastern lore when
+overtaken by the calamities which brought about my new life in America's vast
+West - a life wherein I found it well to accept a name - my present one - which is
+very common and carries no meaning.
+
+In the summer and autumn of 1894 I dwelt in the drear expanses of the Cactus
+Mountains, employed as a common labourer at the celebrated Norton Mine,
+whose discovery by an aged prospector some years before had turned the
+surrounding region from a nearly unpeopled waste to a seething cauldron of
+sordid life. A cavern of gold, lying deep beneath a mountain lake, had enriched
+its venerable finder beyond his wildest dreams, and now formed the seat of
+extensive tunneling operations on the part of the corporation to which it had
+finally been sold. Additional grottoes had been found, and the yield of yellow
+metal was exceedingly great; so that a mighty and heterogeneous army of miners
+toiled day and night in the numerous passages and rock hollows. The
+Superintendent, a Mr. Arthur, often discussed the singularity of the local
+geological formations; speculating on the probable extent of the chain of caves,
+and estimating the future of the titanic mining enterprises. He considered the
+auriferous cavities the result of the action of water, and believed the last of them
+would soon be opened.
+
+It was not long after my arrival and employment that Juan Romero came to the
+Norton Mine. One of the large herd of unkempt Mexicans attracted thither from
+the neighbouring country, he at first attracted attention only because of his
+
+
+
+
+features; which though plainly of the Red Indian type, were yet remarkable for
+their light colour and refined conformation, being vastly unlike those of the
+average "greaser" or Piute of the locality. It is curious that although he differed
+so widely from the mass of Hispanicised and tribal Indians, Romero gave not the
+least impression of Caucasian blood. It was not the Castilian conquistador or the
+American pioneer, but the ancient and noble Aztec, whom imagination called to
+view when the silent peon would rise in the early morning and gaze in
+fascination at the sun as it crept above the eastern hills, meanwhile stretching out
+his arms to the orb as if in the performance of some rite whose nature he did not
+himself comprehend. But save for his face, Romero was not in any way
+suggestive of nobility. Ignorant and dirty, he was at home amongst the other
+brown-skinned Mexicans; having come (so I was afterward told) from the very
+lowest sort of surroundings. He had been found as a child in a crude mountain
+hut, the only survivor of an epidemic which had stalked lethally by. Near the
+hut, close to a rather unusual rock fissure, had lain two skeletons, newly picked
+by vultures, and presumably forming the sole remains of his parents. No one
+recalled their identity, and they were soon forgotten by the many. Indeed, the
+crumbling of the adobe hut and the closing of the rock-fissure by a subsequent
+avalanche had helped to efface even the scene from recollection. Reared by a
+Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his name, Juan differed little from his
+fellows.
+
+The attachment which Romero manifested toward me was undoubtedly
+commenced through the quaint and ancient Hindoo ring which I wore when not
+engaged in active labour. Of its nature, and manner of coming into my
+possession, I cannot speak. It was my last link with a chapter of my life forever
+closed, and I valued it highly. Soon I observed that the odd-looking Mexican was
+likewise interested; eyeing it with an expression that banished all suspicion of
+mere covetousness. Its hoary hieroglyphs seemed to stir some faint recollection
+in his untutored but active mind, though he could not possibly have beheld their
+like before. Within a few weeks after his advent, Romero was like a faithful
+servant to me; this notwithstanding the fact that I was myself but an ordinary
+miner. Our conversation was necessarily limited. He knew but a few words of
+English, while I found my Oxonian Spanish was something quite different from
+the patois of the peon of New Spain.
+
+The event which I am about to relate was unheralded by long premonitions.
+Though the man Romero had interested me, and though my ring had affected
+him peculiarly, I think that neither of us had any expectation of what was to
+follow when the great blast was set off. Geological considerations had dictated
+an extension of the mine directly downward from the deepest part of the
+subterranean area; and the belief of the Superintendent that only solid rock
+would be encountered, had led to the placing of a prodigious charge of
+
+
+
+
+dynamite. With this work Romero and I were not connected, wherefore our first
+knowledge of extraordinary conditions came from others. The charge, heavier
+perhaps than had been estimated, had seemed to shake the entire mountain.
+Windows in shanties on the slope outside were shattered by the shock, whilst
+miners throughout the nearer passages were knocked from their feet. Jewel Lake,
+which lay above the scene of action, heaved as in a tempest. Upon investigation it
+was seen that a new abyss yawned indefinitely below the seat of the blast; an
+abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathom it, nor any lamp illuminate
+it. Baffled, the excavators sought a conference with the Superintendent, who
+ordered great lengths of rope to be taken to the pit, and spliced and lowered
+without cessation till a bottom might be discovered.
+
+Shortly afterward the pale-faced workmen apprised the Superintendent of their
+failure. Firmly though respectfully, they signified their refusal to revisit the
+chasm or indeed to work further in the mine until it might be sealed. Something
+beyond their experience was evidently confronting them, for so far as they could
+ascertain, the void below was infinite. The Superintendent did not reproach
+them. Instead, he pondered deeply, and made plans for the following day. The
+night shift did not go on that evening. At two in the morning a lone coyote on the
+mountain began to howl dismally. From somewhere within the works a dog
+barked an answer; either to the coyote - or to something else. A storm was
+gathering around the peaks of the range, and weirdly shaped clouds scudded
+horribly across the blurred patch of celestial light which marked a gibbous
+moon's attempts to shine through many layers of cirro-stratus vapours. It was
+Romero's voice, coming from the bunk above, that awakened me, a voice excited
+and tense with some vague expectation I could not understand:
+
+"Madre de Dios! - el sonido - ese sonido - oiga Vd! - lo oye Vd? - senor, THAT
+SOUND!"
+
+I listened, wondering what sound he meant. The coyote, the dog, the storm, all
+were audible; the last named now gaining ascendancy as the wind shrieked more
+and more frantically. Flashes of lightning were visible through the bunk-house
+window. I questioned the nervous Mexican, repeating the sounds I had heard:
+
+"El coyote - el perro - el viento?"
+
+But Romero did not reply. Then he commenced whispering as in awe:
+
+"El ritmo, senor - el ritmo de la tierra - THAT THROB DOWN IN THE
+GROUND!"
+
+
+
+
+And now I also heard; heard and shivered and without knowing why. Deep,
+deep, below me was a sound - a rhythm, just as the peon had said - which,
+though exceedingly faint, yet dominated even the dog, the coyote, and the
+increasing tempest. To seek to describe it was useless - for it was such that no
+description is possible. Perhaps it was like the pulsing of the engines far down in
+a great liner, as sensed from the deck, yet it was not so mechanical; not so devoid
+of the element of the life and consciousness. Of all its qualities, remoteness in the
+earth most impressed me. To my mind rushed fragments of a passage in Joseph
+Glanvil which Poe has quoted with tremendous effectl:
+
+" the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a
+
+depth in them greater than the well of Democritus."
+
+Suddenly Romero leaped from his bunk, pausing before me to gaze at the
+strange ring on my hand, which glistened queerly in every flash of lightning, and
+then staring intently in the direction of the mine shaft. I also rose, and both of us
+stood motionless for a time, straining our ears as the uncanny rhythm seemed
+more and more to take on a vital quality. Then without apparent volition we
+began to move toward the door, whose rattling in the gale held a comforting
+suggestion of earthly reality. The chanting in the depths - for such the sound now
+seemed to be - grew in volume and distinctness; and we felt irresistibly urged
+out into the storm and thence to the gaping blackness of the shaft.
+
+We encountered no living creature, for the men of the night shift had been
+released from duty, and were doubtless at the Dry Gulch settlement pouring
+sinister rumours into the ear of some drowsy bartender. From the watchman's
+cabin, however, gleamed a small square of yellow light like a guardian eye. I
+dimly wondered how the rhythmic sound had affected the watchman; but
+Romero was moving more swiftly now, and I followed without pausing.
+
+As we descended the shaft, the sound beneath grew definitely composite. It
+struck me as horribly like a sort of Oriental ceremony, with beating of drums and
+chanting of many voices. I have, as you are aware, been much in India. Romero
+and I moved without material hesitancy through drifts and down ladders; ever
+toward the thing that allured us, yet ever with a pitifully helpless fear and
+reluctance. At one time I fancied I had gone mad - this was when, on wondering
+how our way was lighted in the absence of lamp or candle, I realized that the
+ancient ring on my finger was glowing with eerie radiance, diffusing a pallid
+lustre through the damp, heavy air around.
+
+It was without warning that Romero, after clambering down one of the many
+wide ladders, broke into a run and left me alone. Some new and wild note in the
+drumming and chanting, perceptible but slightly to me, had acted on him in a
+
+
+
+
+startling fashion; and with a wild outcry he forged ahead unguided in the
+cavern's gloom. I heard his repeated shrieks before me, as he stumbled
+awkwardly along the level places and scrambled madly down the rickety
+ladders. And frightened as I was, I yet retained enough of my perception to note
+that his speech, when articulate, was not of any sort known to me. Harsh but
+impressive polysyllables had replaced the customary mixture of bad Spanish and
+worse English, and of these, only the oft repeated cry "Huitzilopotchli" seemed
+in the least familiar. Later I definitely placed that word in the works of a great
+historian! - and shuddered when the association came to me.
+
+The climax of that awful night was composite but fairly brief, beginning just as I
+reached the final cavern of the journey. Out of the darkness immediately ahead
+burst a final shriek from the Mexican, which was joined by such a chorus of
+uncouth sound as I could never hear again and survive. In that moment it
+seemed as if all the hidden terrors and monstrosities of earth had become
+articulate in an effort to overwhelm the human race. Simultaneously the light
+from my ring was extinguished, and I saw a new light glimmering from lower
+space but a few yards ahead of me. I had arrived at the abyss, which was now
+redly aglow, and which had evidently swallowed up the unfortunate Romero.
+Advancing, I peered over the edge of that chasm which no line could fathom,
+and which was now a pandemonium of flickering flame and hideous uproar. At
+first I beheld nothing but a seething blur of luminosity; but then shapes, all
+infinitely distant, began to detach themselves from the confusion, and I saw -
+was it Juan Romero? - but God! I dare not tell you what I saw! ...Some power
+from heaven, coming to my aid, obliterated both sights and sounds in such a
+crash as may be heard when two universes collide in space. Chaos supervened,
+and I knew the peace of oblivion.
+
+I hardly know how to continue, since conditions so singular are involved; but I
+will do my best, not even trying to differentiate betwixt the real and the
+apparent. When I awakened, I was safe in my bunk and the red glow of dawn
+was visible at the window. Some distance away the lifeless body of Juan Romero
+lay upon a table, surrounded by a group of men, including the camp doctor. The
+men were discussing the strange death of the Mexican as he lay asleep; a death
+seemingly connected in some way with the terrible bolt of lightning which had
+struck and shaken the mountain. No direct cause was evident, and an autopsy
+failed to show any reason why Romero should not be living. Snatches of
+conversation indicated beyond a doubt that neither Romero nor I had left the
+bunk-house during the night; that neither of us had been awake during the
+frightful storm which had passed over the Cactus range. That storm, said men
+who had ventured down the mine shaft, had caused extensive caving-in, and had
+completely closed the deep abyss which had created so much apprehension the
+day before. When I asked the watchman what sounds he had heard prior to the
+
+
+
+
+mighty thunder-bolt; he mentioned a coyote, a dog, and the snarHng mountain
+wind - nothing more. Nor do I doubt his word.
+
+Upon the resumption of work. Superintendent Arthur called upon some
+especially dependable men to make a few investigations around the spot where
+the gulf had appeared. Though hardly eager, they obeyed, and a deep boring
+was made. Results were very curious. The roof of the void, as seen when it was
+open, was not by any means thick; yet now the drills of the investigators met
+what appeared to be a limitless extent of solid rock. Finding nothing else, not
+even gold, the Superintendent abandoned his attempts; but a perplexed look
+occasionally steals over his countenance as he sits thinking at his desk.
+
+One other thing is curious. Shortly after waking on that morning after the storm,
+I noticed the unaccountable absence of my Hindoo ring from my finger. I had
+prized it greatly, yet nevertheless felt a sensation of relief at its disappearance. If
+one of my fellow-miners appropriated it, he must have been quite clever in
+disposing of his booty, for despite advertisements and a police search, the ring
+was never seen again. Somehow I doubt if it was stolen by mortal hands, for
+many strange things were taught me in India.
+
+My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight,
+and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but
+sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when the winds and
+animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a
+damnable suggestion of rhythmical throbbing ...and I feel that the transition of
+Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.
+
+Notes:
+
+1 - Motto of A Descent into the Maelstrom
+
+2 - Prescott, Conquest of Mexico
+
+
+
+
+The Tree
+
+
+
+Written 1920
+
+Published October 1921 ii\ The Tryout, Vol. 7, No. 7, p. 3-10.
+
+On a verdant slope of Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia, there stands an olive grove
+about the ruins of a villa. Close by is a tomb, once beautiful with the sublimest
+sculptures, but now fallen into as great decay as the house. At one end of that
+tomb, its curious roots displacing the time-stained blocks of Panhellic marble,
+grows an unnaturally large olive tree of oddly repellent shape; so like to some
+grotesque man, or death- distorted body of a man, that the country folk fear to
+pass it at night when the moon shines faintly through the crooked boughs.
+Mount Maenalus is a chosen haunt of dreaded Pan, whose queer companions are
+many, and simple swains believe that the tree must have some hideous kinship
+to these weird Panisci; but an old bee-keeper who lives in the neighboring
+cottage told me a different story.
+
+Many years ago, when the hillside villa was new and resplendent, there dwelt
+within it the two sculptors Kalos and Musides. From Lydia to Neapolis the
+beauty of their work was praised, and none dared say that the one excelled the
+other in skill. The Hermes of Kalos stood in a marble shrine in Corinth, and the
+Pallas of Musides surmounted a pillar in Athens near the Parthenon. All men
+paid homage to Kalos and Musides, and marvelled that no shadow of artistic
+jealousy cooled the warmth of their brotherly friendship.
+
+But though Kalos and Musides dwelt in unbroken harmony, their natures were
+not alike. Whilst Musides revelled by night amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea,
+Saios would remain at home; stealing away from the sight of his slaves into the
+cool recesses of the olive grove. There he would meditate upon the visions that
+filled his mind, and there devise the forms of beauty which later became
+immortal in breathing marble. Idle folk, indeed, said that Kalos conversed with
+the spirits of the grove, and that his statues were but images of the fauns and
+dryads he met there for he patterned his work after no living model.
+
+So famous were Kalos and Musides, that none wondered when the Tyrant of
+Syracuse sent to them deputies to speak of the costly statue of Tyche which he
+had planned for his city. Of great size and cunning workmanship must the statue
+be, for it was to form a wonder of nations and a goal of travellers. Exalted
+beyond thought would be he whose work should gain acceptance, and for this
+honor Kalos and Musides were invited to compete. Their brotherly love was well
+known, and the crafty Tyrant surmised that each, instead of concealing his work
+
+
+
+
+from the other, would offer aid and advice; this charity producing two images of
+unheard of beauty, the loveher of which would eclipse even the dreams of poets.
+
+With joy the sculptors hailed the Tyrant's offer, so that in the days that followed
+their slaves heard the ceaseless blows of chisels. Not from each other did Kalos
+and Musides conceal their work, but the sight was for them alone. Saving theirs,
+no eyes beheld the two divine figures released by skillful blows from the rough
+blocks that had imprisoned them since the world began.
+
+At night, as of yore, Musides sought the banquet halls of Tegea whilst Kalos
+wandered alone in the olive Grove. But as time passed, men observed a want of
+gaiety in the once sparkling Musides. It was strange, they said amongst
+themselves that depression should thus seize one with so great a chance to win
+art's loftiest reward. Many months passed yet in the sour face of Musides came
+nothing of the sharp expectancy which the situation should arouse.
+
+Then one day Musides spoke of the illness of Kalos, after which none marvelled
+again at his sadness, since the sculptors' attachment was known to be deep and
+sacred. Subsequently many went to visit Kalos, and indeed noticed the pallor of
+his face; but there was about him a happy serenity which made his glance more
+magical than the glance of Musides who was clearly distracted with anxiety and
+who pushed aside all the slaves in his eagerness to feed and wait upon his friend
+with his own hands. Hidden behind heavy curtains stood the two unfinished
+figures of Tyche, little touched of late by the sick man and his faithful attendant.
+
+As Kalos grew inexplicably weaker and weaker despite the ministrations of
+puzzled physicians and of his assiduous friend, he desired to be carried often to
+the grove which he so loved. There he would ask to be left alone, as if wishing to
+speak with unseen things. Musides ever granted his requests, though his eyes
+filled with visible tears at the thought that Kalos should care more for the fauns
+and the dryads than for him. At last the end drew near, and Kalos discoursed of
+things beyond this life. Musides, weeping, promised him a sepulchre more
+lovely than the tomb of Mausolus; but Kalos bade him speak no more of marble
+glories. Only one wish now haunted the mind of the dying man; that twigs from
+certain olive trees in the grove be buried by his resting place-close to his head.
+And one night, sitting alone in the darkness of the olive grove, Kalos died.
+Beautiful beyond words was the marble sepulchre which stricken Musides
+carved for his beloved friend. None but Kalos himself could have fashioned such
+basreliefs, wherein were displayed all the splendours of Elysium. Nor did
+Musides fail to bury close to Kalos' head the olive twigs from the grove.
+
+As the first violence of Musides' grief gave place to resignation, he labored with
+diligence upon his figure of Tyche. All honour was now his, since the Tyrant of
+
+
+
+
+Syracuse would have the work of none save him or Kalos. His task proved a vent
+for his emotion and he toiled more steadily each day, shunning the gaieties he
+once had relished. Meanwhile his evenings were spent beside the tomb of his
+friend, where a young olive tree had sprung up near the sleeper's head. So swift
+was the growth of this tree, and so strange was its form, that all who beheld it
+exclaimed in surprise; and Musides seemed at once fascinated and repelled.
+
+Three years after the death of Kalos, Musides despatched a messenger to the
+Tyrant, and it was whispered in the agora at Tegea that the mighty statue was
+finished. By this time the tree by the tomb had attained amazing proportions,
+exceeding all other trees of its kind, and sending out a singularly heavy branch
+above the apartment in which Musides labored. As many visitors came to view
+the prodigious tree, as to admire the art of the sculptor, so that Musides was
+seldom alone. But he did not mind his multitude of guests; indeed, he seemed to
+dread being alone now that his absorbing work was done. The bleak mountain
+wind, sighing through the olive grove and the tomb-tree, had an uncanny way of
+forming vaguely articulate sounds.
+
+The sky was dark on the evening that the Tyrant's emissaries came to Tegea. It
+was definitely known that they had come to bear away the great image of Tyche
+and bring eternal honour to Musides, so their reception by the proxenoi was of
+great warmth. As the night wore on a violent storm of wind broke over the crest
+of Maenalus, and the men from far Syracuse were glad that they rested snugly in
+the town. They talked of their illustrious Tyrant, and of the splendour of his
+capital and exulted in the glory of the statue which Musides had wrought for
+him. And then the men of Tegea spoke of the goodness of Musides, and of his
+heavy grief for his friend and how not even the coming laurels of art could
+console him in the absence of Kalos, who might have worn those laurels instead.
+Of the tree which grew by the tomb, near the head of Kalos, they also spoke. The
+wind shrieked more horribly, and both the Syracusans and the Arcadians prayed
+to Aiolos.
+
+In the sunshine of the morning the proxenoi led the Tyrant's messengers up the
+slope to the abode of the sculptor, but the night wind had done strange things.
+Slaves' cries ascended from a scene of desolation, and no more amidst the olive
+grove rose the gleaming colonnades of that vast hall wherein Musides had
+dreamed and toiled. Lone and shaken mourned the humble courts and the lower
+walls, for upon the sumptuous greater peri-style had fallen squarely the heavy
+overhanging bough of the strange new tree, reducing the stately poem in marble
+with odd completeness to a mound of unsightly ruins. Strangers and Tegeans
+stood aghast, looking from the wreckage to the great, sinister tree whose aspect
+was so weirdly human and whose roots reached so queerly into the sculptured
+sepulchre of Kalos. And their fear and dismay increased when they searched the
+
+
+
+
+fallen apartment, for of the gentle Musides, and of the marvellously fashioned
+image of Tyche, no trace could be discovered. Amidst such stupendous ruin only
+chaos dwelt, and the representatives of two cities left disappointed; Syracusans
+that they had no statue to bear home, Tegeans that they had no artist to crown.
+However, the Syracusans obtained after a while a very splendid statue in Athens,
+and the Tegeans consoled themselves by erecting in the agora a marble temple
+commemorating the gifts, virtues, and brotherly piety of Musides.
+
+But the olive grove still stands, as does the tree growing out of the tomb of Kalos,
+and the old bee-keeper told me that sometimes the boughs whisper to one
+another in the night wind, saying over and over again. "Oida! Oida! -I know! I
+know!"
+
+
+
+
+The Unnatnable
+
+
+
+Written Sept 1923
+
+Published July 1925 in Weird Tales, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 78-82.
+
+We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon
+of an autumn day at the old burying ground in Arkham, and speculating about
+the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the cemetery, whose trunk
+had nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark
+about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots
+must be sucking from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for
+such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a
+century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an
+ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about "unnamable" and
+"unmentionable" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my
+lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or
+sounds which paralyzed my heroes' faculties and left them without courage,
+words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he
+said, only through our five senses or our intuitions; wherefore it is quite
+impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by
+the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology - preferably those
+of the Congregationalist, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur
+Conan Doyle may supply.
+
+With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal
+of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England's
+self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only
+our normal, objective experiences possess any esthetic significance, and that it is
+the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy,
+and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate,
+detailed transcripts of everyday affairs. Especially did he object to my
+preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in
+the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it is
+sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest
+pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic
+recombinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the
+hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to his
+clear, practical, and logical intellect. With him all things and feelings had fixed
+dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that
+the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical,
+classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an
+
+
+
+
+arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and
+understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can
+be really "unnamable." It didn't sound sensible to him.
+
+Though I well realized the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments
+against the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of
+this afternoon colloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The
+crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of
+the witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to rouse my
+spirit in defense of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the
+enemy's own country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack, for I
+knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives' superstitions
+which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of
+dying persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the
+windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these
+whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence
+of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material
+counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal
+notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across
+the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose
+that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem
+with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order
+to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the
+laws of matter, why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in
+shapes - or absences of shapes - which must for human spectators be utterly and
+appallingly "unnamable"? "Common sense" in reflecting on these subjects, I
+assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination
+and mental flexibility.
+
+Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking.
+Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them,
+having that confidence in his own opinions which had doubtless caused his
+success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The dusk
+fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did not
+move. Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic
+friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed
+brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the
+intervention of a tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house between us and
+the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted
+house, we talked on about the "unnamable" and after my friend had finished his
+scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had
+scoffed the most.
+
+
+
+
+My tale had been called The Attic Window, and appeared in the January, 1922,
+issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific
+coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milk-sops;
+but New England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my
+extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with;
+merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been
+gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so
+poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where
+the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old
+mystic - that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional
+scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a
+cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people's
+windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till
+someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn't describe what it was
+that turned his hair gray. All this was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton
+was not slow to insist on that fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old
+diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile
+from where we were sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my
+ancestor's chest and back which the diary described. I told him, too, of the fears
+of others in that region, and how they were whispered down for generations;
+and how no mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an
+abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there.
+
+It had been an eldritch thing - no wonder sensitive students shudder at the
+Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the
+surface - so little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in
+occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on
+what was stewing in men's crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no
+beauty; no freedom - we can see that from the architectural and household
+remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that
+rusted iron straitjacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism.
+Here, truly, was the apotheosis of The Unnamable.
+
+Cotton Mather, in that demoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark,
+minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and
+laconically unamazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that
+had brought forth what was more than beast but less than man - the thing with
+the blemished eye - and of the screaming drunken wretch that hanged for having
+such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after.
+Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others
+knew, but did not dare to tell - there is no public hint of why they whispered
+about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken.
+
+
+
+
+embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave,
+although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.
+
+It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive
+tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted
+meadows near the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley
+road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of apelike claws on his
+back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed
+marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he
+saw an old man chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on
+Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him.
+Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old
+man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate
+slab. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was,
+dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered;
+and hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hoping
+when the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one
+piece. With the years the legends take on a spectral character - I suppose the
+thing, if it was a living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered
+hideously - all the more hideous because it was so secret.
+
+During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that
+my words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite
+seriously about the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been
+the hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that shunned,
+deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be interested, since he believed
+that windows retained latent images of those who had sat at them. The boy had
+gone to look at the windows of that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen
+behind them, and had come back screaming maniacally.
+
+Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his
+analytical mood. He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural
+monster had really existed, but reminded me that even the most morbid
+perversion of nature need not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable. I
+admired his clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations I had
+collected among the old people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain,
+related to monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be;
+apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only
+tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the
+crypt behind it, and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible
+slab. Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to
+death, as told in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and
+consistent impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though
+
+
+
+
+largely forgotten by the last two generations - perhaps dying for lack of being
+thought about. Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic
+emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent
+representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as
+the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against
+nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a
+vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly
+unnamable?
+
+The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by
+me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt
+him raise his arm. Presently he spoke.
+
+"But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?"
+
+"Yes," I answered, "I have seen it."
+
+"And did you find anything there - in the attic or anywhere else?"
+
+"There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy
+saw - if he was sensitive he wouldn't have needed anything in the window-glass
+to unhinge him. If they all came from the same object it must have been an
+hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such
+bones in the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind
+the house. There was an opening where I could dump them in. Don't think I was
+a fool - you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and
+jaw something like yours and mine."
+
+At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near.
+But his curiosity was undeterred.
+
+"And what about the window-panes?"
+
+"They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in all the others
+there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were that kind
+- the old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. 1 don't believe they've
+had any glass for a hundred years or more - maybe the boy broke 'em if he got
+that far; the legend doesn't say."
+
+Manton was reflecting again.
+
+"I'd like to see that house. Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must explore it
+a little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an
+inscription - the whole thing must be a bit terrible."
+
+
+
+
+"You did see it - until it got dark."
+
+My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of
+harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried
+out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. It
+was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was answered. For as it was
+still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew
+that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And
+because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the grisly
+glassless frame of that demoniac attic window.
+
+Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded
+direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted
+tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome
+bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but
+undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mold of that
+abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping
+and whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of
+the misshapen damned. There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then
+the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could
+learn what it meant.
+
+Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at
+almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by
+side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary's Hospital.
+Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by
+telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the farmer who had found
+us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying
+ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood.
+Manton had two malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or
+gougings in the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and
+contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof.
+It was plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled
+and interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were. Then he said
+we were the victims of a vicious bull - though the animal was a difficult thing to
+place and account for.
+
+After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck question:
+
+"Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars - was it like that?"
+
+And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half
+expected -
+
+
+
+
+"No - it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere - a gelatin - a slime yet it had
+shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes - and a
+blemish. It was the pit - the maelstrom - the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was
+the unnamable!
+
+
+
+
+The Very Old Folk
+
+
+
+From a letter written to "Melmoth" (Donald Wandrei) on Thursday, November
+3, 1927
+
+It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of Pompelo,
+at the foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have been in the
+late republic, for the province was still ruled by a senatorial proconsul instead of
+a praetorian legate of Augustus, and the day was the first before the Kalends of
+November. The hills rose scarlet and gold to the north of the little town, and the
+westering sun shone ruddily and mystically on the crude new stone and plaster
+buildings of the dusty forum and the wooden walls of the circus some distance to
+the east. Groups of citizens - broad-browed Roman colonists and coarse-haired
+Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids of the two strains, alike clad
+in cheap woollen togas - and sprinklings of helmeted legionaries and coarse-
+mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient Vascones - all thronged
+the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and ill-defined
+uneasiness.
+
+I myself had just alighted from a litter, which the Illyrian bearers seemed to have
+brought in some haste from Calagurris, across the Iberus to the southward. It
+appeared that I was a provincial quaestor named L. Caelius Rufus, and that I had
+been summoned by the proconsul, P. Scribonius Libo, who had come from
+Tarraco some days before. The soldiers were the fifth cohort of the Xllth legion,
+under the military tribune Sex. Asellius; and the legatus of the whole region, Cn.
+Balbutius, had also come from Calagurris, where the permanent station was.
+
+The cause of the conference was a horror that brooded on the hills. All the
+townsfolk were frightened, and had begged the presence of a cohort from
+Calagurris. It was the Terrible Season of the autumn, and the wild people in the
+mountains were preparing for the frightful ceremonies which only rumour told
+of in the towns. They were the very old folk who dwelt higher up in the hills and
+spoke a choppy language which the Vascones could not understand. One seldom
+saw them; but a few times a year they sent down little yellow, squint-eyed
+messengers (who looked like Scythians) to trade with the merchants by means of
+gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous rites on the
+peaks, their bowlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages. Always the
+same - the night before the Kalends of Mains and the night before the Kalends of
+November. Townsfolk would disappear just before these nights, and would
+never be heard of again. And there were whispers that the native shepherds and
+farmers were not ill-disposed toward the very old folk - that more than one
+thatched hut was vacant before midnight on the two hideous Sabbaths.
+
+
+
+
+This year the horror was very great, for the people knew that the wrath of the
+very old folk was upon Pompelo. Three months previously five of the little
+squint-eyed traders had come down from the hills, and in a market brawl three
+of them had been killed. The remaining two had gone back wordlessly to their
+mountains - and this autumn not a single villager had disappeared. There was
+menace in this immunity. It was not like the very old folk to spare their victims at
+the Sabbath. It was too good to be normal, and the villagers were afraid.
+
+For many nights there had been a hollow drumming on the hills, and at last the
+aedile Tib. Annaeus Stilpo (half native in blood) had sent to Balbutius at
+Calagurris for a cohort to stamp out the Sabbath on the terrible night. Balbutius
+had carelessly refused, on the ground that the villagers' fears were empty, and
+that the loathsome rites of hill folk were of no concern to the Roman People
+unless our own citizens were menaced. I, however, who seemed to be a close
+friend of Balbutius, had disagreed with him; averring that I had studied deeply
+in the black forbidden lore, and that I believed the very old folk capable of
+visiting almost any nameless doom upon the town, which after all was a Roman
+settlement and contained a great number of our citizens. The complaining
+aedile's own mother Helvia was a pure Roman, the daughter of M. Helvius
+Cinna, who had come over with Scipio's army. Accordingly I had sent a slave - a
+nimble little Greek called Antipater - to the proconsul with letters, and
+Scribonius had heeded my plea and ordered Balbutius to send his fifth cohort,
+under Asellius, to Pompelo; entering the hills at dusk on the eve of November's
+Kalends and stamping out whatever nameless orgies he might find - bringing
+such prisoners as he might take to Tarraco for the next propraetor's court.
+Balbutius, however, had protested, so that more correspondence had ensued. I
+had written so much to the proconsul that he had become gravely interested, and
+had resolved to make a personal inquiry into the horror.
+
+He had at length proceeded to Pompelo with his lictors and attendants; there
+hearing enough rumours to be greatly impressed and disturbed, and standing
+firmly by his order for the Sabbath's extirpation. Desirous of conferring with one
+who had studied the subject, he ordered me to accompany Asellius' cohort - and
+Balbutius had also come along to press his adverse advice, for he honestly
+believed that drastic military action would stir up a dangerous sentiment of
+unrest amongst the Vascones both tribal and settled.
+
+So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills - old Scribonius Libo
+in his toga praetexta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head and
+wrinkled hawk face, Balbutius with his gleaming helmet and breastplate, blue-
+shaven lips compressed in conscientiously dogged opposition, young Asellius
+with his polished greaves and superior sneer, and the curious throng of
+townsfolk, legionaries, tribesmen, peasants, lictors, slaves, and attendants. I
+
+
+
+
+myself seemed to wear a common toga, and to have no especially distinguishing
+characteristic. And everywhere horror brooded. The town and country folk
+scarcely dared speak aloud, and the men of Libo's entourage, who had been
+there nearly a week, seemed to have caught something of the nameless dread.
+Old Scribonius himself looked very grave, and the sharp voices of us later
+comers seemed to hold something of curious inappropriateness, as in a place of
+death or the temple of some mystic god.
+
+We entered the praetorium and held grave converse. Balbutius pressed his
+objections, and was sustained by Asellius, who appeared to hold all the natives
+in extreme contempt while at the same time deeming it inadvisable to excite
+them. Both soldiers maintained that we could better afford to antagonise the
+minority of colonists and civilised natives by inaction, than to antagonise a
+probable majority of tribesmen and cottagers by stamping out the dread rites.
+
+I, on the other hand, renewed my demand for action, and offered to accompany
+the cohort on any expedition it might undertake. I pointed out that the barbarous
+Vascones were at best turbulent and uncertain, so that skirmishes with them
+were inevitable sooner or later whichever course we might take; that they had
+not in the past proved dangerous adversaries to our legions, and that it would ill
+become the representatives of the Roman People to suffer barbarians to interfere
+with a course which the justice and prestige of the Republic demanded. That, on
+the other hand, the successful administration of a province depended primarily
+upon the safety and good-will of the civilised element in whose hands the local
+machinery of commerce and prosperity reposed, and in whose veins a large
+mixture of our own Italian blood coursed. These, though in numbers they might
+form a minority, were the stable element whose constancy might be relied on,
+and whose cooperation would most firmly bind the province to the Imperium of
+the Senate and the Roman People. It was at once a duty and an advantage to
+afford them the protection due to Roman citizens; even (and here I shot a
+sarcastic look at Balbutius and Asellius) at the expense of a little trouble and
+activity, and of a slight interruption of the draught-playing and cock- fighting at
+the camp in Calagurris. That the danger to the town and inhabitants of Pompelo
+was a real one, I could not from my studies doubt. I had read many scrolls out of
+Syria and ^gyptus, and the cryptic towns of Etruria, and had talked at length
+with the bloodthirsty priest of Diana Aricina in his temple in the woods
+bordering Lacus Nemorensis. There were shocking dooms that might be called
+out of the hills on the Sabbaths; dooms which ought not to exist within the
+territories of the Roman People; and to permit orgies of the kind known to
+prevail at Sabbaths would be but little in consonance with the customs of those
+whose forefathers, A. Postumius being consul, had executed so many Roman
+citizens for the practice of the Bacchanalia - a matter kept ever in memory by the
+Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, graven upon bronze and set open to every
+
+
+
+
+eye. Checked in time, before the progress of the rites might evoke anything with
+which the iron of a Roman pilum might not be able to deal, the Sabbath would
+not be too much for the powers of a single cohort. Only participants need be
+apprehended, and the sparing of a great number of mere spectators would
+considerably lessen the resentment which any of the sympathising country folk
+might feel. In short, both principle and policy demanded stern action; and I could
+not doubt but that Publius Scribonius, bearing in mind the dignity and
+obligations of the Roman People, would adhere to his plan of despatching the
+cohort, me accompanying, despite such objections as Balbutius and Asellius -
+speaking indeed more like provincials than Romans - might see fit to offer and
+multiply.
+
+The slanting sun was now very low, and the whole hushed town seemed draped
+in an unreal and malign glamour. Then P. Scribonius the proconsul signified his
+approval of my words, and stationed me with the cohort in the provisional
+capacity of a centurio primipilus; Balbutius and Asellius assenting, the former
+with better grace than the latter. As twilight fell on the wild autumnal slopes, a
+measured, hideous beating of strange drums floated down from afar in terrible
+rhythm. Some few of the legionarii shewed timidity, but sharp commands
+brought them into line, and the whole cohort was soon drawn up on the open
+plain east of the circus. Libo himself, as well as Balbutius, insisted on
+accompanying the cohort; but great difficulty was suffered in getting a native
+guide to point out the paths up the mountain. Finally a young man named
+Vercellius, the son of pure Roman parents, agreed to take us at least past the
+foothills. We began to march in the new dusk, with the thin silver sickle of a
+young moon trembling over the woods on our left. That which disquieted us
+most was the fact that the Sabbath was to be held at all. Reports of the coming
+cohort must have reached the hills, and even the lack of a final decision could not
+make the rumour less alarming - yet there were the sinister drums as of yore, as
+if the celebrants had some peculiar reason to be indifferent whether or not the
+forces of the Roman People marched against them. The sound grew louder as we
+entered a rising gap in the hills, steep wooded banks enclosing us narrowly on
+either side, and displaying curiously fantastic tree-trunks in the light of our
+bobbing torches. All were afoot save Libo, Balbutius, Asellius, two or three of the
+centuriones, and myself, and at length the way became so steep and narrow that
+those who had horses were forced to leave them; a squad of ten men being left to
+guard them, though robber bands were not likely to be abroad on such a night of
+terror. Once in a while it seemed as though we detected a skulking form in the
+woods nearby, and after a half- hour's climb the steepness and narrowness of the
+way made the advance of so great a body of men - over 300, all told - exceedingly
+cumbrous and difficult. Then with utter and horrifying suddenness we heard a
+frightful sound from below. It was from the tethered horses - they had screamed,
+not neighed, but screamed... and there was no light down there, nor the sound
+
+
+
+
+of any human thing, to shew why they had done so. At the same moment
+bonfires blazed out on all the peaks ahead, so that terror seemed to lurk equally
+well before and behind us. Looking for the youth Vercellius, our guide, we found
+only a crumpled heap weltering in a pool of blood. In his hand was a short
+sword snatched from the belt of D. Vibulanus, a subcenturio, and on his face was
+such a look of terror that the stoutest veterans turned pale at the sight. He had
+killed himself when the horses screamed... he, who had been born and lived all
+his life in that region, and knew what men whispered about the hills. All the
+torches now began to dim, and the cries of frightened legionaries mingled with
+the unceasing screams of the tethered horses. The air grew perceptibly colder,
+more suddenly so than is usual at November's brink, and seemed stirred by
+terrible undulations which I could not help connecting with the beating of huge
+wings. The whole cohort now remained at a standstill, and as the torches faded I
+watched what I thought were fantastic shadows outlined in the sky by the
+spectral luminosity of the Via Lactea as it flowed through Perseus, Cassiopeia,
+Cepheus, and Cygnus. Then suddenly all the stars were blotted from the sky -
+even bright Deneb and Vega ahead, and the lone Altair and Fomalhaut behind
+us. And as the torches died out altogether, there remained above the stricken and
+shrieking cohort only the noxious and horrible altar-flames on the towering
+peaks; hellish and red, and now silhouetting the mad, leaping, and colossal
+forms of such nameless beasts as had never a Phrygian priest or Campanian
+grandam whispered of in the wildest of furtive tales. And above the nighted
+screaming of men and horses that daemonic drumming rose to louder pitch,
+whilst an ice-cold wind of shocking sentience and deliberateness swept down
+from those forbidden heights and coiled about each man separately, till all the
+cohort was struggling and screaming in the dark, as if acting out the fate of
+Laocoon and his sons. Only old Scribonius Libo seemed resigned. He uttered
+words amidst the screaming, and they echo still in my ears. "Malitia vetus -
+malitia vetus est . . . venit . . . tandem venit ..."
+
+And then I waked. It was the most vivid dream in years, drawing upon wells of
+the subconscious long untouched and forgotten. Of the fate of that cohort no
+record exists, but the town at least was saved - for encyclopaedias tell of the
+survival of Pompelo to this day, under the modern Spanish name of
+Pompelona...
+
+Yrs for Gothick Supremacy -
+
+C . IVLIVS . VERVS . MAXIMINVS.
+
+"Wickness of old ... it is wickeness of old . . . happened . . . happened at last ..."
+
+
+
+
+The Whisperer in Darkness
+
+Written 24 Feb-26 Sept 1930
+
+Published August 1931 in Weird Tales, Vol. 18, No. 1, p. 32-73
+
+
+Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say
+that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred - that last straw which sent
+me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills
+of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night - is to ignore the plainest facts of
+my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep things I saw and heard, and the
+admitted vividness the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot
+prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after
+all Akeley's disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in
+his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as
+though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return.
+There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible
+cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally
+feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had
+been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are subject to
+just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his
+strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.
+
+The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and
+unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an
+instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and
+an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood,
+amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organized relief which filled
+the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of
+the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions
+and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at
+having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the
+wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic
+superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted
+that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumors.
+
+The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings;
+though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a
+letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was
+essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate
+
+
+
+
+instances involved - one connected with the Winooski River near Montpeher,
+another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a
+third centering in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of
+course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they
+all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing
+one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that
+poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency
+to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend
+which old people resurrected for the occasion.
+
+What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had
+ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the
+streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt
+quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in
+size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind
+of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with
+crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous wings and
+several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered
+with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It
+was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources tended to
+coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends,
+shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid
+picture which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the witnesses
+concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses - in every case naive and
+simple backwoods folk - had glimpsed the battered and bloated bodies of human
+beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the half-
+remembered folklore to invest these pitiful objects with fantastic attributes.
+
+The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by the present
+generation, was of a highly singular character, and obviously reflected the
+influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew it well, though I had never been in
+Vermont, through the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which
+embraces material orally obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the
+state. This material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had
+personally heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire.
+Briefly summarized, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked
+somewhere among the remoter hills - in the deep woods of the highest peaks,
+and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources. These beings
+were seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were reported by those
+who had ventured farther than usual up the slopes of certain mountains or into
+certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even the wolves shunned.
+
+
+
+
+There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins and
+barren patches, and curious circles of stones, with the grass around them worn
+away, which did not seem to have been placed or entirely shaped by Nature.
+There were, too, certain caves of problematical depth in the sides of the hills;
+with mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with more
+than an average quota of the queer prints leading both toward and away from
+them - if indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated. And worst
+of all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen very rarely in
+the twilight of the remotest valleys and the dense perpendicular woods above
+the limits of normal hill- climbing.
+
+It would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these things had
+not agreed so well. As it was, nearly all the rumors had several points in
+common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with
+many pairs of legs and with two great batlike wings in the middle of the back.
+They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair
+only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one
+occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading
+along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined
+formation. Once a specimen was seen flying - launching itself from the top of a
+bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings
+had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon
+
+These things seemed content, on the whole, to let mankind alone; though they
+were at times held responsible for the disappearance of venturesome individuals
+- especially persons who built houses too close to certain valleys or too high up
+on certain mountains. Many localities came to be known as inadvisable to settle
+in, the feeling persisting long after the cause was forgotten. People would look
+up at some of the neighbouring mountain-precipices with a shudder, even when
+not recalling how many settlers had been lost, and how many farmhouses burnt
+to ashes, on the lower slopes of those grim, green sentinels.
+
+But while according to the earliest legends the creatures would appear to have
+harmed only those trespassing on their privacy; there were later accounts of their
+curiosity respecting men, and of their attempts to establish secret outposts in the
+human world. There were tales of the queer claw-prints seen around farmhouse
+windows in the morning, and of occasional disappearances in regions outside the
+obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human
+speech which made surprising offers to lone travelers on roads and cart-paths in
+the deep woods, and of children frightened out of their wits by things seen or
+heard where the primal forest pressed close upon their door-yards. In the final
+layer of legends - the layer just preceding the decline of superstition and the
+abandonment of close contact with the dreaded places - there are shocked
+
+
+
+
+references to hermits and remote farmers who at some period of Hfe appeared to
+have undergone a repellent mental change, and who were shunned and
+whispered about as mortals who had sold themselves to the strange beings. In
+one of the northeastern counties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to accuse
+eccentric and unpopular recluses of being allies or representatives of the
+abhorred things.
+
+As to what the things were - explanations naturally varied. The common name
+applied to them was "those ones/' or "the old ones/' though other terms had a
+local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the Puritan settlers set them down
+bluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them a basis of awed theological
+speculation. Those with Celtic legendry in their heritage - mainly the Scotch-Irish
+element of New Hampshire, and their kindred who had settled in Vermont on
+Governor Wentworth's colonial grants - linked them vaguely with the malign
+fairies and "little people" of the bogs and raths, and protected themselves with
+scraps of incantation handed down through many generations. But the Indians
+had the most fantastic theories of all. While different tribal legends differed,
+there was a marked consensus of belief in certain vital particulars; it being
+unanimously agreed that the creatures were not native to this earth.
+
+The Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque, taught
+that the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our
+earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other
+world. They did not live here, said the myths, but merely maintained outposts
+and flew back with vast cargoes of stone to their own stars in the north. They
+harmed only those earth-people who got too near them or spied upon them.
+Animals shunned them through instinctive hatred, not because of being hunted.
+They could not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own food
+from the stars. It was bad to get near them, and sometimes young hunters who
+went into their hills never came back. It was not good, either, to listen to what
+they whispered at night in the forest with voices like a bee's that tried to be like
+the voices of men. They knew the speech of all kinds of men - Pennacooks,
+Hurons, men of the Five Nations - but did not seem to have or need any speech
+of their own. They talked with their heads, which changed colour in different
+ways to mean different things.
+
+All the legendry, of course, white and Indian alike, died down during the
+nineteenth century, except for occasional atavistical flareups. The ways of the
+Vermonters became settled; and once their habitual paths and dwellings were
+established according to a certain fixed plan, they remembered less and less what
+fears and avoidances had determined that plan, and even that there had been
+any fears or avoidances. Most people simply knew that certain hilly regions were
+considered as highly unhealthy, unprofitable, and generally unlucky to live in.
+
+
+
+
+and that the farther one kept from them the better off one usually was. In time
+the ruts of custom and economic interest became so deeply cut in approved
+places that there was no longer any reason for going outside them, and the
+haunted hills were left deserted by accident rather than by design. Save during
+infrequent local scares, only wonder-loving grandmothers and retrospective
+nonagenarians ever whispered of beings dwelling in those hills; and even such
+whispers admitted that there was not much to fear from those things now that
+they were used to the presence of houses and settlements, and now that human
+beings let their chosen territory severely alone.
+
+All this I had long known from my reading, and from certain folk tales picked up
+in New Hampshire; hence when the flood-time rumours began to appear, I could
+easily guess what imaginative background had evolved them. I took great pains
+to explain this to my friends, and was correspondingly amused when several
+contentious souls continued to insist on a possible element of truth in the reports.
+Such persons tried to point out that the early legends had a significant
+persistence and uniformity, and that the virtually unexplored nature of the
+Vermont hills made it unwise to be dogmatic about what might or might not
+dwell among them; nor could they be silenced by my assurance that all the
+myths were of a well-known pattern common to most of mankind and
+determined by early phases of imaginative experience which always produced
+the same type of delusion.
+
+It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont myths
+differed but little in essence from those universal legends of natural
+personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs,
+suggested the kallikanzarai of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales and
+Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes
+and burrowers. No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar
+belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-
+Men" who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan
+summits. When I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me
+by claiming that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that it
+must argue the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding
+after the advent and dominance of mankind, which might very conceivably have
+survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent times - or even to the present.
+
+The more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends asseverated
+them; adding that even without the heritage of legend the recent reports were
+too clear, consistent, detailed, and sanely prosaic in manner of telling, to be
+completely ignored. Two or three fanatical extremists went so far as to hint at
+possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a
+nonterrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their
+
+
+
+
+claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited the
+earth. Most of my foes, however, were merely romanticists who insisted on
+trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking "little people" made
+popular by the magnificent horror- fiction of Arthur Machen.
+
+
+As was only natural under the circumstances, this piquant debating finally got
+into print in the form of letters to the Arkham Advertiser; some of which were
+copied in the press of those Vermont regions whence the flood-stories came. The
+Rutland Herald gave half a page of extracts from the letters on both sides, while
+the Brattleboro Reformer reprinted one of my long historical and mythological
+summaries in full, with some accompanying comments in "The Pendrifter's"
+thoughtful column which supported and applauded my skeptical conclusions.
+By the spring of 1928 I was almost a well-known figure in Vermont,
+notwithstanding the fact that I had never set foot in the state. Then came the
+challenging letters from Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly, and
+which took me for the first and last time to that fascinating realm of crowded
+green precipices and muttering forest streams.
+
+Most of what I know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by
+correspondence with his neighbours, and with his only son in California, after
+my experience in his lonely farmhouse. He was, I discovered, the last
+representative on his home soil of a long, locally distinguished line of jurists,
+administrators, and gentlemen-agriculturists. In him, however, the family
+mentally had veered away from practical affairs to pure scholarship; so that he
+had been a notable student of mathematics, astronomy, biology, anthropology,
+and folklore at the University of Vermont. I had never previously heard of him,
+and he did not give many autobiographical details in his communications; but
+from the first I saw he was a man of character, education, and intelligence, albeit
+a recluse with very little worldly sophistication.
+
+Despite the incredible nature of what he claimed, I could not help at once taking
+Akeley more seriously than I had taken any of the other challengers of my views.
+For one thing, he was really close to the actual phenomena - visible and tangible -
+that he speculated so grotesquely about; and for another thing, he was amazingly
+willing to leave his conclusions in a tenative state like a true man of science. He
+had no personal preferences to advance, and was always guided by what he took
+to be solid evidence. Of course I began by considering him mistaken, but gave
+him credit for being intelligently mistaken; and at no time did I emulate some of
+his friends in attributing his ideas, and his fear of the lonely green hills, to
+insanity. I could see that there was a great deal to the man, and knew that what
+he reported must surely come from strange circumstance deserving
+
+
+
+
+investigation, however little it might have to do with the fantastic causes he
+assigned. Later on I received from him certain material proofs which placed the
+matter on a somewhat different and bewilderingly bizarre basis.
+
+I cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible, the long letter in
+which Akeley introduced himself, and which formed such an important
+landmark in my own intellectual history. It is no longer in my possession, but my
+memory holds almost every word of its portentous message; and again I affirm
+my confidence in the sanity of the man who wrote it. Here is the text - a text
+which reached me in the cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who had
+obviously not mingled much with the world during his sedate, scholarly life.
+
+
+
+R.F.D.
+
+
+
+
+#2,
+
+
+Townshend,
+
+
+Windham Co.,
+
+
+Vermont.
+
+
+May 5,1928
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Albert
+
+
+N. Wilmarth,
+
+
+Esq.,
+
+
+
+Saltonstall
+
+
+St.,
+
+
+Arkham, Mass.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+My Dear Sir:
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I have read with great interest the Brattleboro Reformer's reprint (Apr. 23, '28) of
+your letter on the recent stories of strange bodies seen floating in our flooded
+streams last fall, and on the curious folklore they so well agree with. It is easy to
+see why an outlander would take the position you take, and even why
+"Pendrifter" agrees with you. That is the attitude generally taken by educated
+persons both in and out of Vermont, and was my own attitude as a young man (I
+am now b7) before my studies, both general and in Davenport's book, led me to
+do some exploring in parts of the hills hereabouts not usually visited.
+
+I was directed toward such studies by the queer old tales I used to hear from
+elderly farmers of the more ignorant sort, but now I wish I had let the whole
+matter alone. I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of
+anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of it
+at college, and am familiar with most of the standard authorities such as Tylor,
+Lubbock, Frazer, Quatrefages, Murray, Osborn, Keith, Boule, G. Elliott Smith,
+and so on. It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind.
+I have seen the reprints of letters from you, and those agreeing with you, in the
+Rutland Herald, and guess I know about where your controversy stands at the
+present time.
+
+
+
+
+What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are nearer right
+than yourself, even though all reason seems to be on your side. They are nearer
+right than they realise themselves - for of course they go only by theory, and
+cannot know what I know. If I knew as little of the matter as they, I would feel
+justified in believing as they do. I would be wholly on your side.
+
+You can see that I am having a hard time getting to the point, probably because I
+really dread getting to the point; but the upshot of the matter is that I have
+certain evidence that monstrous things do indeed live in the woods on the high
+hills which nobody visits. I have not seen any of the things floating in the rivers,
+as reported, but I have seen things like them under circumstances I dread to
+repeat. I have seen footprints, and of late have seen them nearer my own home (I
+live in the old Akeley place south of Townshend Village, on the side of Dark
+Mountain) than I dare tell you now. And I have overheard voices in the woods at
+certain points that I will not even begin to describe on paper.
+
+At one place I heard them so much that I took a phonograph therewith a
+dictaphone attachment and wax blank - and I shall try to arrange to have you
+hear the record I got. I have run it on the machine for some of the old people up
+here, and one of the voices had nearly scared them paralysed by reason of its
+likeness to a certain voice (that buzzing voice in the woods which Davenport
+mentions) that their grandmothers have told about and mimicked for them. I
+know what most people think of a man who tells about "hearing voices" - but
+before you draw conclusions just listen to this record and ask some of the older
+backwoods people what they think of it. If you can account for it normally, very
+well; but there must be something behind it. Ex nihilo nihil fit, you know.
+
+Now my object in writing you is not to start an argument but to give you
+information which I think a man of your tastes will find deeply interesting. This
+is private. Publicly I am on your side, for certain things show me that it does not
+do for people to know too much about these matters. My own studies are now
+wholly private, and I would not think of saying anything to attract people's
+attention and cause them to visit the places I have explored. It is true - terribly
+true - that there are non-human creatures watching us all the time; with spies
+among us gathering information. It is from a wretched man who, if he was sane
+(as I think he was) was one of those spies, that I got a large part of my clues to
+the matter. He later killed himself, but I have reason to think there are others
+now.
+
+The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space and
+fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the
+aether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them
+about on earth. I will tell you about this later if you do not dismiss me at once as
+
+
+
+
+a madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under the
+hills, and I think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us if we let
+them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we get too curious about
+them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out their mining colony. That is
+what they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from outside -
+any number of them. They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so
+far because they have not needed to. They would rather leave things as they are
+to save bother.
+
+I think they mean to get rid of me because of what I have discovered. There is a
+great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in
+the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything
+became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take
+me off the earth to where they come from. They like to take away men of
+learning once in a while, to keep informed on the state of things in the human
+world.
+
+This leads me to my secondary purpose in addressing you - namely, to urge you
+to hush up the present debate rather than give it more publicity. People must be
+kept away from these hills, and in order to effect this, their curiosity ought not to
+be aroused any further. Heaven knows there is peril enough anyway, with
+promoters and real estate men flooding Vermont with herds of summer people
+to overrun the wild places and cover the hills with cheap bungalows.
+
+I shall welcome further communication with you, and shall try to send you that
+phonograph record and black stone (which is so worn that photographs don't
+show much) by express if you are willing. I say "try" because I think those
+creatures have a way of tampering with things around here. There is a sullen
+furtive fellow named Brown, on a farm near the village, who I think is their spy.
+Little by little they are trying to cut me off from our world because I know too
+much about their world.
+
+They have the most amazing way of finding out what I do. You may not even get
+this letter. I think I shall have to leave this part of the country and go live with
+my son in San Diego, Cal., if things get any worse, but it is not easy to give up
+the place you were born in, and where your family has lived for six generations.
+Also, I would hardly dare sell this house to anybody now that the creatures have
+taken notice of it. They seem to be trying to get the black stone back and destroy
+the phonograph record, but I shall not let them if I can help it. My great police
+dogs always hold them back, for there are very few here as yet, and they are
+clumsy in getting about. As I have said, their wings are not much use for short
+flights on earth. I am on the very brink of deciphering that stone - in a very
+terrible way - and with your knowledge of folklore you may be able to supply
+
+
+
+
+the missing links enough to help me. I suppose you know all about the fearful
+myths antedating the coming of man to the earth - the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu
+cycles - which are hinted at in the Necronomicon. I had access to a copy of that
+once, and hear that you have one in your college library under lock and key.
+
+To conclude, Mr. Wilmarth, I think that with our respective studies we can be
+very useful to each other. I don't wish to put you in any peril, and suppose I
+ought to warn you that possession of the stone and the record won't be very safe;
+but I think you will find any risks worth running for the sake of knowledge. I
+will drive down to Newfane or Brattleboro to send whatever you authorize me to
+send, for the express offices there are more to be trusted. I might say that I live
+quite alone now, since I can't keep hired help any more. They won't stay because
+of the things that try to get near the house at night, and that keep the dogs
+barking continually. I am glad I didn't get as deep as this into the business while
+my wife was alive, for it would have driven her mad.
+
+Hoping that I am not bothering you unduly, and that you will decide to get in
+touch with me rather than
+
+throw this letter into the waste basket as a madman's raving, I am
+
+Yrs. very truly,
+
+Henry W. Akeley
+
+P.S. I am making some extra prints of certain photographs taken by me, which I
+think will help to prove a number of the points I have touched on. The old
+people think they are monstrously true. I shall send you these very soon if you
+are interested.
+
+H. W. A.
+
+It would be difficult to describe my sentiments upon reading this strange
+document for the first time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to have laughed more
+loudly at these extravagances than at the far milder theories which had
+previously moved me to mirth; yet something in the tone of the letter made me
+take it with paradoxical seriousness. Not that I believed for a moment in the
+hidden race from the stars which my correspondent spoke of; but that, after some
+grave preliminary doubts, I grew to feel oddly sure of his sanity and sincerity,
+and of his confrontation by some genuine though singular and abnormal
+phenomenon which he could not explain except in this imaginative way. It could
+not be as he thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand, it could not be
+otherwise than worthy of investigation. The man seemed unduly excited and
+alarmed about something, but it was hard to think that all cause was lacking. He
+
+
+
+
+was so specific and logical in certain ways - and after all, his yarn did fit in so
+perplexingly well with some of the old myths - even the wildest Indian legends.
+
+That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had really found
+the black stone he spoke about, was wholly possible despite the crazy inferences
+he had made - inferences probably suggested by the man who had claimed to be
+a spy of the outer beings and had later killed himself. It was easy to deduce that
+this man must have been wholly insane, but that he probably had a streak of
+perverse outward logic which made the naive Akeley - already prepared for such
+things by his folklore studies - believe his tale. As for the latest developments - it
+appeared from his inability to keep hired help that Akeley's humbler rustic
+neighbours were as convinced as he that his house was besieged by uncanny
+things at night. The dogs really barked, too.
+
+And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but believe he
+had obtained in the way he said. It must mean something; whether animal noises
+deceptively like human speech, or the speech of some hidden, night-haunting
+human being decayed to a state not much above that of lower animals. From this
+my thoughts went back to the black hieroglyphed stone, and to speculations
+upon what it might mean. Then, too, what of the photographs which Akeley said
+he was about to send, and which the old people had found so convincingly
+terrible?
+
+As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my credulous
+opponents might have more on their side than I had conceded. After all, there
+might be some queer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen outcasts in those
+shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born monsters as folklore
+claimed. And if there were, then the presence of strange bodies in the flooded
+streams would not be wholly beyond belief. Was it too presumptuous to suppose
+that both the old legends and the recent reports had this much of reality behind
+them? But even as I harboured these doubts I felt ashamed that so fantastic a
+piece of bizarrerie as Henry Akeley's wild letter had brought them up.
+
+In the end I answered Akeley's letter, adopting a tone of friendly interest and
+soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by return mail; and
+contained, true to promise, a number of Kodak views of scenes and objects
+illustrating what he had to tell. Glancing at these pictures as I took them from the
+envelope, I felt a curious sense of fright and nearness to forbidden things; for in
+spite of the vagueness of most of them, they had a damnably suggestive power
+which was intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs - actual
+optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an impersonal
+transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity.
+
+
+
+
+The more I looked at them, the more I saw that my senous estimate of Akeley
+and his story had not been unjustified. Certainly, these pictures carried
+conclusive evidence of something in the Vermont hills which was at least vastly
+outside the radius of our common knowledge and belief. The worst thing of all
+was the footprint - a view taken where the sun shone on a mud patch somewhere
+in a deserted upland. This was no cheaply counterfeited thing, I could see at a
+glance; for the sharply defined pebbles and grassblades in the field of vision gave
+a clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double exposure. I have
+called the thing a "footprint," but "claw-print" would be a better term. Even now
+I can scarcely describe it save to say that it was hideously crablike, and that there
+seemed to be some ambiguity about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh
+print, but seemed to be about the size of an average man's foot. From a central
+pad, pairs of saw-toothed nippers projected in opposite directions - quite baffling
+as to function, if indeed the whole object were exclusively an organ of
+locomotion.
+
+Another photograph - evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow - was of
+the mouth of a woodland cave, with a boulder of, rounded regularity choking
+the aperture. On the bare ground in front of, it one could just discern a dense
+network of curious tracks, and when I studied the picture with a magnifier I felt
+uneasily sure that the tracks were like the one in the other view. A third pictured
+showed a druid-like circle of standing stones on the summit of a wild hill.
+Around the cryptic circle the grass was very much beaten down and worn away,
+though I could not detect any footprints even with the glass. The extreme
+remoteness of the place was apparent from the veritable sea of tenantless:
+mountains which formed the background and stretched away toward a. misty
+horizon.
+
+But if the most disturbing of all the views was that of the footprint, the' most
+curiously suggestive was that of the great black stone found in the Round Hill
+woods. Akeley had photographed it on what was evidently his study table, for I
+could see rows of books and a bust of Milton in the background. The thing, as
+nearly as one might guess, had faced the camera vertically with a somewhat
+irregularly curved surface of one by two feet; but to say anything definite about
+that surface, or about the general shape of the whole mass, almost defies the
+power of language. What outlandish geometrical principles had guided its
+cutting - for artificially cut it surely was - I could not even begin to guess; and
+never before had I seen anything which struck me as so strangely and
+unmistakably alien to this world. Of the hieroglyphics on the surface I could
+discern very few, but one or two that I did see gave rather a shock. Of course
+they might be fraudulent, for others besides myself had read the monstrous and
+abhorred Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; but it nevertheless
+made me shiver to recognise certain ideographs which study had taught me to
+
+
+
+
+link with the most blood-curdhng and blasphemous whispers of things that had
+had a kind of mad half-existence before the earth and the other inner worlds of
+the solar system were made.
+
+Of the five remaining pictures, three were of swamp and hill scenes which
+seemed to bear traces of hidden and unwholesome tenancy. Another was of a
+queer mark in the ground very near Akeley's house, which he said he had
+photographed the morning after a night on which the dogs had barked more
+violently than usual. It was very blurred, and one could really draw no certain
+conclusions from it; but it did seem fiendishly like that other mark or claw -print
+photographed on the deserted upland. The final picture was of the Akeley place
+itself; a trim white house of two stories and attic, about a century and a quarter
+old, and with a well-kept lawn and stone-bordered path leading up to a
+tastefully carved Georgian doorway. There were several huge police dogs on the
+lawn, squatting near a pleasant-faced man with a close-cropped grey beard
+whom I took to be Akeley himself - his own photographer, one might infer from
+the tube-connected bulb in his right hand.
+
+From the pictures I turned to the bulky, closely-written letter itself; and for the
+next three hours was immersed in a gulf of unutterable horror. Where Akeley
+had given only outlines before, he now entered into minute details; presenting
+long transcripts of words overheard in the woods at night, long accounts of
+monstrous pinkish forms spied in thickets at twilight on the hills, and a terrible
+cosmic narrative derived from the application of profound and varied
+scholarship to the endless bygone discourses of the mad self- styled spy who had
+killed himself. I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard
+elsewhere in the most hideous of connections - Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu,
+Tsathoggua, YogSothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng,
+the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L'mur- Kathulos, Bran, and the
+Magnum Innominandum - and was drawn back through nameless aeons and
+inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed
+author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way. I was told of
+the pits of primal life, and of the streams that had trickled down therefrom; and
+finally, of the tiny rivulets from one of those streams which had become
+entangled with the destinies of our own earth.
+
+My brain whirled; and where before I had attempted to explain things away, I
+now began to believe in the most abnormal and incredible wonders. The array of
+vital evidence was damnably vast and overwhelming; and the cool, scientific
+attitude of Akeley - an attitude removed as far as imaginable from the demented,
+the fanatical, the hysterical, or even the. extravagantly speculative - had a
+tremendous effect on my thought and judgment. By the time I laid the frightful
+letter aside I could understand the fears he had come to entertain, and was ready
+
+
+
+
+to do anything in my power to keep people away from those wild, haunted hills.
+Even now, when time has dulled the impression and made me half-question my
+own experience and horrible doubts, there are things in that letter of Akeley's
+which I would not quote, or even form into words on paper. I am almost glad
+that the letter and record and photographs are gone now - and I wish, for reasons
+I shall soon make clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been
+discovered.
+
+With the reading of that letter my public debating about the Vermont horror
+permanently ended. Arguments from opponents remained unanswered or put
+off with promises, and eventually the controversy petered out into oblivion.
+During late May and June I was in constant correspondence with Akeley; though
+once in a while a letter would be lost, so that we would have to retrace our
+ground and perform considerable laborious copying. What we were trying to do,
+as a whole, was to compare notes in matters of obscure mythological scholarship
+and arrive at a clearer correlation of the Vermont horrors with the general body
+of primitive world legend.
+
+For one thing, we virtually decided that these morbidities and the hellish
+Himalayan Mi-Go were one and the same order of incarnated nightmare. There
+was also absorbing zoological conjectures, which I would have referred to
+Professor Dexter in my own college but for Akeley's imperative command to tell
+no one of the matter before us. If I seem to disobey that command now, it is only
+because I think that at this stage a warning about those farther Vermont hills -
+and about those Himalayan peaks which bold explorers are more and more
+determined to ascend - is more conducive to public safety than silence would be.
+One specific thing we were leading up to was a deciphering of the hieroglyphics
+on that infamous black stone - a deciphering which might well place us in
+possession of secrets deeper and more dizzying than any formerly known to
+man.
+
+
+Toward the end of June the phonograph record came - shipped from Brattleboro,
+since Akeley was unwilling to trust conditions on the branch line north of there.
+He had begun to feel an increased sense of espionage, aggravated by the loss of
+some of our letters; and said much about the insidious deeds of certain men
+whom he considered tools and agents of the hidden beings. Most of all he
+suspected the surly farmer Walter Brown, who lived alone on a run-down
+hillside place near the deep woods, and who was often seen loafing around
+corners in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and South Londonderry in the
+most inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way. Brown's voice, he felt
+convinced, was one of those he had overheard on a certain occasion in a very
+
+
+
+
+terrible conversation; and he had once found a footprint or clawprint near
+Brown's house which might possess the most ominous significance. It had been
+curiously near some of Brown's own footprints - footprints that faced toward it.
+
+So the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in his Ford
+car along the lonely Vermont back roads. He confessed in an accompanying note
+that he was beginning to be afraid of those roads, and that he would not even go
+into Townshend for supplies now except in broad daylight. It did not pay, he
+repeated again and again, to know too much unless one were very remote from
+those silent and problematical hills. He would be going to California pretty soon
+to live with his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all one's memories
+and ancestral feelings centered.
+
+Before trying the record on the commercial machine which I borrowed from the
+college administration building I carefully went over all the explanatory matter
+in Akeley's various letters. This record, he had said, was obtained about 1 A.M.
+on the 1st of May, 1915, near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west
+slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee's swamp. The place had always been
+unusually plagued with strange voices, this being the reason he had brought the
+phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results. Former experience
+had told him that May Eve - the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European
+legend - would probably be more fruitful than any other date, and he was not
+disappointed. It was noteworthy, though, that he never again heard voices at
+that particular spot.
+
+Unlike most of the overheard forest voices, the substance of the record was
+quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice which Akeley had
+never been able to place. It was not Brown's, but seemed to be that of a man of
+greater cultivation. The second voice, however, was the real crux of the thing -
+for this was the accursed buzzing which had no likeness to humanity despite the
+human words which it uttered in good English grammar and a scholarly accent.
+
+The recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly well, and
+had of course been at a great disadvantage because of the remote and muffled
+nature of the overheard ritual; so that the actual speech secured was very
+fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript of what he believed the spoken
+words to be, and I glanced through this again as I prepared the machine for
+action. The text was darkly mysterious rather than openly horrible, though a
+knowledge of its origin and manner of gathering gave it all the associative horror
+which any words could well possess. I will present it here in full as I remember it
+- and I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by heart, not only from
+reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and over again. It is
+not a thing which one might readily forget!
+
+
+
+
+(Indistinguishable Sounds)
+
+(A Cultivated Male Human Voice)
+
+...is the Lord of the Wood, even to... and the gifts of the men of Leng... so from
+the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of
+night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not
+to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods,
+la! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!
+
+(A Buzzing Imitation of Human Speech)
+
+la! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
+
+(Human Voice)
+
+And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being... seven and nine,
+down the onyx steps . . . (tri)butes to Him in the Gulf, Azathoth, He of Whom
+Thou has taught us marv(els). . . on the wings of night out beyond space, out
+beyond th... to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in
+black aether at the rim. . .
+
+(Buzzing Voice)
+
+...go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf may know.
+To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put
+on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come
+down from the world of Seven Suns to mock. . .
+
+(Human Voice)
+
+(Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the
+void. Father of the Million
+
+Favoured Ones, Stalker among. . .
+
+(Speech Cut Off by End of Record)
+
+Such were the words for which I was to listen when I started the phonograph. It
+was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that I pressed the lever and
+heard the preliminary scratching of the sapphire point, and I was glad that the
+first faint, fragmentary words were in a human voice - a mellow, educated voice
+which seemed vaguely Bostonian in accent, and which was certainly not that of
+any native of the Vermont hills. As I listened to the tantalisingly feeble rendering.
+
+
+
+
+I seemed to find the speech identical with Akeley's carefully prepared transcript.
+On it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice. . . "la! Shub- Niggurath! The Goat
+with a Thousand Young!. . ."
+
+And then I heard the other voice. To this hour I shudder retrospectively when I
+think of how it struck me, prepared though I was by Akeley's accounts. Those to
+whom I have since described the record profess to find nothing but cheap
+imposture or madness in it; but could they have the accursed thing itself, or read
+the bulk of Akeley's correspondence, (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic
+second letter), I know they would think differently. It is, after all, a tremendous
+pity that I did not disobey Akeley and play the record for others - a tremendous
+pity, too, that all of his letters were lost. To me, with my first-hand impression of
+the actual sounds, and with my knowledge of the background and surrounding
+circumstances, the voice was a monstrous thing. It swiftly followed the human
+voice in ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo winging
+its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. It is more
+than two years now since I last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at
+this moment, and at all other moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish
+buzzing as it reached me for the first time.
+
+"la! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"
+
+But though the voice is always in my ears, I have not even yet been able to
+analyse it well enough for a graphic description. It was like the drone of some
+loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an
+alien species, and I am perfectly certain that the organs producing it can have no
+resemblance to the vocal organs of man, or indeed to those of any of the
+mammalia. There were singularities in timbre, range, and overtones which
+placed this phenomenon wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life.
+Its sudden advent that first time almost stunned me, and I heard the rest of the
+record through in a sort of abstracted daze. When the longer passage of buzzing
+came, there was a sharp intensification of that feeling of blasphemous infinity
+which had struck me during the shorter and earlier passage. At last the record
+ended abruptly, during an unusually clear speech of the human and Bostonian
+voice; but I sat stupidly staring long after the machine had automatically
+stopped.
+
+I hardly need say that I gave that shocking record many another playing, and
+that I made exhaustive attempts at analysis and comment in comparing notes
+with Akeley. It would be both useless and disturbing to repeat here all that we
+concluded; but I may hint that we agreed in believing we had secured a clue to
+the source of some of the most repulsive primordial customs in the cryptic elder
+religions of mankind. It seemed plain to us, also, that there were ancient and
+
+
+
+
+elaborate alliance; between the hidden outer creatures and certain members of
+the human race. How extensive these alliances were, and how their state today
+might compare with their state in earlier ages, we had no means of guessing; yet
+at best there was room for a limitless amount of horrified speculation. There
+seemed to be an awful, immemorial linkage in several definite stages betwixt
+man and nameless infinity. The blasphemies which appeared on earth, it was
+hinted, came from the dark planet Yuggoth, at the rim of the solar system; but
+this was itself merely the populous outpost of a frightful interstellar race whose
+ultimate source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time continuum
+or greatest known cosmos.
+
+Meanwhile we continued to discuss the black stone and the best way of getting it
+to Arkham - Akeley deeming it inadvisable to have me visit him at the scene of
+his nightmare studies. For some reason or other, Akeley was afraid to trust the
+thing to any ordinary or expected transportation route. His final idea was to take
+it across country to Bellows Falls and ship it on the Boston and Maine system
+through Keene and Winchendon and Fitchburg, even though this would
+necessitate his driving along somewhat lonelier and more forest-traversing hill
+roads than the main highway to Brattleboro. He said he had noticed a man
+around the express office at Brattleboro when he had sent the phonograph
+record, whose actions and expression had been far from reassuring. This man
+had seemed too anxious to talk with the clerks, and had taken the train on which
+the record was shipped. Akeley confessed that he had not felt strictly at ease
+about that record until he heard from me of its safe receipt.
+
+About this time - the second week in July - another letter of mine went astray, as
+I learned through an anxious communication from Akeley. After that he told me
+to address him no more at Townshend, but to send all mail in care of the General
+Delivery at Brattleboro; whither he would make frequent trips either in his car or
+on the motor-coach line which had lately replaced passenger service on the
+lagging branch railway. I could see that he was getting more and more anxious,
+for he went into much detail about the increased barking of the dogs on
+moonless nights, and about the fresh claw-prints he sometimes found in the road
+and in the mud at the back of his farmyard when morning came. Once he told
+about a veritable army of prints drawn up in a line facing an equally thick and
+resolute line of dog-tracks, and sent a loathsomely disturbing Kodak picture to
+prove it. That was after a night on which the dogs had outdone themselves in
+barking and howling.
+
+On the morning of Wednesday, July 18, 1 received a telegram from Bellows Falls,
+in which Akeley said he was expressing the black stone over the B. & M. on Train
+No. 5508, leaving Bellows Falls at 12:15 P.M., standard time, and due at the
+North Station in Boston at 4:12 P.M. It ought, I calculated, to get up to Arkham at
+
+
+
+
+least by the next noon; and accordingly I stayed in all Thursday morning to
+receive it. But noon came and went without its advent, and when I telephoned
+down to the express office I was informed that no shipment for me had arrived.
+My next act, performed amidst a growing alarm, was to give a long- distance call
+to the express agent at the Boston North Station; and I was scarcely surprised to
+learn that my consignment had not appeared. Train No. 5508 had pulled in only
+35 minutes late on the day before, but had contained no box addressed to me.
+The agent promised, however, to institute a searching inquiry; and I ended the
+day by sending Akeley a night-letter outlining the situation.
+
+With commendable promptness a report came from the Boston office on the
+following afternoon, the agent telephoning as soon as he learned the facts. It
+seemed that the railway express clerk on No. 5508 had been able to recall an
+incident which might have much bearing on my loss - an argument with a very
+curious-voiced man, lean, sandy, and rustic-looking, when the train was waiting
+at Keene, N. H., shortly after one o'clock standard time. The man, he said, was
+greatly excited about a heavy box which he claimed to expect, but which was
+neither on the train nor entered on the company's books. He had given the name
+of Stanley Adams, and had had such a queerly thick droning voice, that it made
+the clerk abnormally dizzy and sleepy to listen to him. The clerk could not
+remember quite how the conversation had ended, but recalled starting into a
+fuller awakeness when the train began to move. The Boston agent added that this
+clerk was a young man of wholly unquestioned veracity and reliability, of
+known antecedents and long with the company.
+
+That evening I went to Boston to interview the clerk in person, having obtained
+his name and address from the office. He was a frank, prepossessing fellow, but I
+saw that he could add nothing to his original account. Oddly, he was scarcely
+sure that he could even recognise the strange inquirer again. Realising that he
+had no more to tell, I returned to Arkham and sat up till morning writing letters
+to Akeley, to the express company and to the police department and station
+agent in Keene. I felt that the strange-voiced man who had so queerly affected
+the clerk must have a pivotal place in the ominous business, and hoped that
+Keene station employees and telegraph-office records might tell something about
+him and about how he happened to make his inquiry when and where he did.
+
+I must admit, however, that all my investigations came to nothing. The queer-
+voiced man had indeed been noticed around the Keene station in the early
+afternoon of July 18, and one lounger seemed to couple him vaguely with a
+heavy box; but he was altogether unknown, and had not been seen before or
+since. He had not visited the telegraph office or received any message so far as
+could be learned, nor had any message which might justly be considered a notice
+of the black stone's presence on No. 5508 come through the office for anyone.
+
+
+
+
+Naturally Akeley joined with me in conducting these inquiries, and even made a
+personal trip to Keene to question the people around the station; but his attitude
+toward the matter was more fatalistic than mine. He seemed to find the loss of
+the box a portentous and menacing fulfillment of inevitable tendencies, and had
+no real hope at all of its recovery. He spoke of the undoubted telepathic and
+hypnotic powers of the hill creatures and their agents, and in one letter hinted
+that he did not believe the stone was on this earth any longer. For my part, I was
+duly enraged, for I had felt there was at least a chance of learning profound and
+astonishing things from the old, blurred hieroglyphs. The matter would have
+rankled bitterly in my mind had not Akeley's immediately subsequent letters
+brought up a new phase of the whole horrible hill problem which at once seized
+all my attention.
+
+
+The unknown things, Akeley wrote in a script grown pitifully tremulous, had
+begun to close in on him with a wholly new degree of determination. The
+nocturnal barking of the dogs whenever the moon, was dim or absent was
+hideous now, and there had been attempts to molest him on the lonely roads he
+had to traverse by day. On the second of August, while bound for the village in
+his car, he had found a tree-trunk laid in his path at a point where the highway
+ran through a deep patch of woods; while the savage barking of the two great
+dogs he had with him told all too well of the things which must have been
+lurking near. What would have happened had the dogs not been there, he did
+not dare guess - but he never went out now without at least two of his faithful
+and powerful pack. Other road experiences had occurred on August fifth and
+sixth; a shot grazing his car on one occasion, and the barking of the dogs telling
+of unholy woodland presences on the other.
+
+On August fifteenth I received a frantic letter which disturbed me greatly, and
+which made me wish Akeley could put aside his lonely reticence and call in the
+aid of the law. There had been frightful happening on the night of the 12-13th,
+bullets flying outside the farmhouse, and three of the twelve great dogs being
+found shot dead in the morning. There were myriads of claw-prints in the road,
+with the human prints of Walter Brown among them. Akeley had started to
+telephone to Brattleboro for more dogs, but the wire had gone dead before he
+had a chance to say much. Later he went to Brattleboro in his car, and learned
+there that linemen had found the main cable neatly cut at a point where it ran
+through the deserted hills north of Newfane. But he was about to start home
+with four fine new dogs, and several cases of ammunition for his big-game
+repeating rifle. The letter was written at the post office in Brattleboro, and came
+through to me without delay.
+
+
+
+
+My attitude toward the matter was by this time quickly shpping from a scientific
+to an alarmedly personal one. I was afraid for Akeley in his remote, lonely
+farmhouse, and half afraid for myself because of my now definite connection
+with the strange hill problem. The thing was reaching out so. Would it suck me
+in and engulf me? In replying to his letter I urged him to seek help, and hinted
+that I might take action myself if he did not. I spoke of visiting Vermont in
+person in spite of his wishes, and of helping him explain the situation to the
+proper authorities. In return, however, I received only a telegram from Bellows
+Falls which read thus:
+
+APPRECIATE YOUR POSITION BUT CAN DO NOTHING TAKE NO ACTION
+YOURSELF FOR IT COULD ONLY HARM BOTH WAIT FOR EXPLANATION
+
+HENRY AKELY
+
+But the affair was steadily deepening. Upon my replying to the telegram I
+received a shaky note from Akeley with the astonishing news that he had not
+only never sent the wire, but had not received the letter from me to which it was
+an obvious reply. Hasty inquiries by him at Bellows Falls had brought out that
+the message was deposited by a strange sandy-haired man with a curiously
+thick, droning voice, though more than this he could not learn. The clerk showed
+him the original text as scrawled in pencil by the sender, but the handwriting
+was wholly unfamiliar. It was noticeable that the signature was misspelled - A-
+K-E-L-Y, without the second "E." Certain conjectures were inevitable, but amidst
+the obvious crisis he did not stop to elaborate upon them.
+
+He spoke of the death of more dogs and the purchase of still others, and of the
+exchange of gunfire which had become a settled feature each moonless night.
+Brown's prints, and the prints of at least one or two more shod human figures,
+were now found regularly among the claw-prints in the road, and at the back of
+the farmyard. It was, Akeley admitted, a pretty bad business; and before long he
+would probably have to go to live with his California son whether or not he
+could sell the old place. But it was not easy to leave the only spot one could
+really think of as home. He must try to hang on a little longer; perhaps he could
+scare off the intruders - especially if he openly gave up all further attempts to
+penetrate their secrets.
+
+Writing Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again of visiting
+him and helping him convince the authorities of his dire peril. In his reply he
+seemed less set against that plan than his past attitude would have led one to
+predict, but said he would like to hold off a little while longer - long enough to
+get his things in order and reconcile himself to the idea of leaving an almost
+morbidly cherished birthplace. People looked askance at his studies and
+
+
+
+
+speculations and it would be better to get quietly off without setting the
+countryside in a turmoil and creating widespread doubts of his own sanity. He
+had had enough, he admitted, but he. wanted to make a dignified exit if he
+could.
+
+This letter reached me on the 28th of August, and I prepared and mailed as
+encouraging a reply as I could. Apparently the encouragement had effect, for
+Akeley had fewer terrors to report when he acknowledged my note. He was not
+very optimistic, though, and expressed the belief that it was only the full moon
+season which was holding the creatures off. He hoped there would not be many
+densely cloudy nights, and talked vaguely of boarding in Brattleboro when the
+moon waned. Again I wrote him encouragingly but on September 5th there came
+a fresh communication which had obviously crossed my letter in the mails; and
+to this I could not give any such hopeful response. In view of its importance I
+believe I had better give it in full - as best I can do from memory of the shaky
+script. It ran substantially as follows:
+
+Monday
+
+Dear Wilmarth
+
+A rather discouraging P. S. to my last. Last night was thickly cloudy - though no
+rain - and not a bit of moonlight got through. Things were pretty bad, and I think
+the end is getting near, in spite of all we have hoped. After midnight something
+landed on the roof of the house, and the dogs all rushed up to see what it was. I
+could hear them snapping and tearing around, and then one managed to get on
+the roof by jumping from the low ell. There was a terrible fight up there, and I
+heard a frightful buzzing which I'll never forget. And then there was a shocking
+smell. About the same time bullets came through the window and nearly grazed
+me. I think the main line of the hill creatures had got close to the house when the
+dogs divided because of the roof business. What was up there I don't know yet,
+but I'm afraid the creatures are learning to steer better with their space wings. I
+put out the light and used the windows for loopholes, and raked all around the
+house with rifle fire aimed just high enough not to hit the dogs. That seemed to
+end the business, but in the morning I found great pools of blood in the yard,
+besides pools of a green sticky stuff that had the worst odour I have ever
+smelled. I climbed up on the roof and found more of the sticky stuff there. Five of
+the dogs were killed - I'm afraid I hit one myself by aiming too low, for he was
+shot in the back. Now I am setting the panes the shots broke, and am going to
+Brattleboro for more dogs. I guess the men at the kennels think I am crazy. Will
+drop another note later. Suppose I'll be ready for moving in a week or two,
+though it nearly kills me to think of it.
+
+
+
+
+Hastily - Akeley
+
+But this was not the only letter from Akeley to cross mine. On the next morning -
+September 6th - still another came; this time a frantic scrawl which utterly
+unnerved me and put me at a loss what to say or do next. Again I cannot do
+better than quote the text as faithfully as memory will let me.
+
+Tuesday
+
+Clouds didn't break, so no moon again - and going into the wane anyhow. I'd
+have the house wired for electricity and put in a searchlight if I didn't know
+they'd cut the cables as fast as they could be mended.
+
+I think I am going crazy. It may be that all I have ever written you is a dream or
+madness. It was bad enough before, but this time it is too much. They talked to
+me last night - talked in that cursed buzzing voice and told me things that I dare
+not repeat to you. I heard them plainly above the barking of the dogs, and once
+when they were drowned out a human voice helped them. Keep out of this,
+Wilmarth - it is worse than either you or I ever suspected. They don't mean to let
+me get to California now - they want to take me off alive, or what theoretically
+and mentally amounts to alive - not only to Yuggoth, but beyond that - away
+outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last curved rim of space. I told them I
+wouldn't go where they wish, or in the terrible way they propose to take me, but
+I'm afraid it will be no use. My place is so far out that they may come by day as
+well as by night before long. Six more dogs killed, and I felt presences all along
+the wooded parts of the road when I drove to Brattleboro today. It was a mistake
+for me to try to send you that phonograph record and black stone. Better smash
+the record before it's too late. Will drop you another line tomorrow if I'm still
+here. Wish I could arrange to get my books and things to Brattleboro and board
+there. I would run off without anything if I could but something inside my mind
+holds me back. I can slip out to Brattleboro, where I ought to be safe, but I feel
+just as much a prisoner there as at the house. And I seem to know that I couldn't
+get much farther even if I dropped everything and tried. It is horrible - don't get
+mixed up in this.
+
+Yrs - Akeley
+
+I did not sleep at all the night after receiving this terrible thing, and was utterly
+baffled as to Akeley's remaining degree of sanity. The substance of the note was
+wholly insane, yet the manner of expression - in view of all that had gone before
+- had a grimly potent quality of convincingness. I made no attempt to answer it,
+thinking it better to wait until Akeley might have time to reply to my latest
+communication. Such a reply indeed came on the following day, though the
+
+
+
+
+fresh material in it quite overshadowed any of the points brought up by the letter
+nominally answered. Here is what I recall of the text, scrawled and blotted as it
+was in the course of a plainly frantic and hurried composition.
+
+Wednesday
+
+W-
+
+Your letter came, but it's no use to discuss anything any more. I am fully
+resigned. Wonder that I have even enough will power left to fight them off. Can't
+escape even if I were willing to give up everything and run. They'll get me.
+
+Had a letter from them yesterday - R.F.D. man brought it while I was at
+Brattleboro. Typed and postmarked Bellows Falls. Tells what they want to do
+with me - 1 can't repeat it. Look out for yourself, too! Smash that record. Cloudy
+nights keep up, and moon waning all the time. Wish I dared to get help - it might
+brace up my will power - but everyone who would dare to come at all would call
+me crazy unless there happened to be some proof. Couldn't ask people to come
+for no reason at all - am all out of touch with everybody and have been for years.
+
+But I haven't told you the worst, Wilmarth. Brace up to read this, for it will give
+you a shock. I am telling the truth, though. It is this - I have seen and touched
+one of the things, or part of one of the things. God, man, but it's awful! It was
+dead, of course. One of the dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this
+morning. I tried to save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole
+thing, but it all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, all those
+things in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And
+here's the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I developed the film
+there wasn't anything visible except the woodshed. What can the thing have
+been made of? I saw it and felt it, and they all leave footprints. It was surely
+made of matter - but what kind of matter? The shape can't be described. It was a
+great crab with a lot of pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff
+covered with feelers where a man's head would be. That green sticky stuff is its
+blood or juice. And there are more of them due on earth any minute.
+
+Walter Brown is missing - hasn't been seen loafing around any of his usual
+corners in the villages hereabouts. I must have got him with one of my shots,
+though the creatures always seem to try to take their dead and wounded away.
+
+Got into town this afternoon without any trouble, but am afraid they're
+beginning to hold off because they're sure of me. Am writing this in Brattleboro
+P. 0. This may be goodbye - if it is, write my son George Goodenough Akeley,
+
+
+
+
+176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., but don't come up here. Write the boy if you
+don't hear from me in a week, and watch the papers for news.
+
+I'm going to play my last two cards now - if I have the will power left. First to try
+poison gas on the things (I've got the right chemicals and have fixed up masks
+for myself and the dogs) and then if that doesn't work, tell the sheriff. They can
+lock me in a madhouse if they want to - it'll be better than what the other
+creatures would do. Perhaps I can get them to pay attention to the prints around
+the house - they are faint, but I can find them every morning. Suppose, though,
+police would say I faked them somehow; for they all think I'm a queer character.
+
+Must try to have a state policeman spend a night here and see for himself -
+though it would be just like the creatures to learn about it and hold off that night.
+They cut my wires whenever I try to telephone in the night - the linemen think it
+is very queer, and may testify for me if they don't go and imagine I cut them
+myself. I haven't tried to keep them repaired for over a week now.
+
+I could get some of the ignorant people to testify for me about the reality of the
+horrors, but everybody laughs at what they say, and anyway, they have shunned
+my place for so long that they don't know any of the new events. You couldn't
+get one of those rundown farmers to come within a mile of my house for love or
+money. The mail-carrier hears what they say and jokes me about it - God! If I
+only dared tell him how real it is! I think I'll try to get him to notice the prints,
+but he comes in the afternoon and they're usually about gone by that time. If I
+kept one by setting a box or pan over it, he'd think surely it was a fake or joke.
+
+Wish I hadn't gotten to be such a hermit, so folks don't drop around as they used
+to. I've never dared show the black stone or the Kodak pictures, or play that
+record, to anybody but the ignorant people. The others would say I faked the
+whole business and do nothing but laugh. But I may yet try showing the
+pictures. They give those claw -prints clearly, even if the things that made them
+can't be photographed. What a shame nobody else saw that thing this morning
+before it went to nothing!
+
+But I don't know as I care. After what I've been through, a madhouse is as good a
+place as any. The doctors can help me make up my mind to get away from this
+house, and that is all that will save me.
+
+Write my son George if you don't hear soon. Goodbye, smash that record, and
+don't mix up in this.
+
+Yrs - Akeley
+
+
+
+
+This letter frankly plunged me into the blackest of terror. I did not know what to
+say in answer, but scratched off some incoherent words of advice and
+encouragement and sent them by registered mail. I recall urging Akeley to move
+to Brattleboro at once, and place himself under the protection of the authorities;
+adding that I would come to that town with the phonograph record and help
+convince the courts of his sanity. It was time, too, I think I wrote, to alarm the
+people generally against this thing in their midst. It will be observed that at this
+moment of stress my own belief in all Akeley had told and claimed was virtually
+complete, though I did think his failure to get a picture of the dead monster was
+due not to any freak of Nature but to some excited slip of his own.
+
+
+Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday
+afternoon, September 8th, came that curiously different and calming letter neatly
+typed on a new machine; that strange letter of reassurance and invitation which
+must have marked so prodigious a transition in the whole nightmare drama of
+the lonely hills. Again I will quote from memory - seeking for special reasons to
+preserve as much of the flavour of the style as I can. It was postmarked Bellows
+Falls, and the signature as well as the body of the letter was typed - as is frequent
+with beginners in typing. The text, though, was marvellously accurate for a tyro's
+work; and I concluded that Akeley must have used a machine at some previous
+period - perhaps in college. To say that the letter relieved me would be only fair,
+yet beneath my relief lay a substratum of uneasiness. If Akeley had been sane in
+his terror, was he now sane in his deliverance? And the sort of "improved
+rapport" mentioned . . . what was it? The entire thing implied such a diametrical
+reversal of Akeley's previous attitude! But here is the substance of the text,
+carefully transcribed from a memory in which I take some pride.
+
+Townshend, Vermont,
+
+Thursday, Sept. 6, 1928.
+
+My dear Wilmarth: -
+
+It gives me great pleasure to be able to set you at rest regarding all the silly
+things I've been writing you. I say "silly," although by that I mean my frightened
+attitude rather than my descriptions of certain phenomena. Those phenomena
+are real and important enough; my mistake had been in establishing an
+anomalous attitude toward them.
+
+I think I mentioned that my strange visitors were beginning to communicate
+with me, and to attempt such communication. Last night this exchange of speech
+became actual. In response to certain signals I admitted to the house a messenger
+
+
+
+
+from those outside - a fellow-human, let me hasten to say. He told me much that
+neither you nor I had even begun to guess, and showed clearly how totally we
+had misjudged and misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in maintaining
+their secret colony on this planet.
+
+It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men, and what
+they wish in connection with the earth, are wholly the result of an ignorant
+misconception of allegorical speech - speech, of course, moulded by cultural
+backgrounds and thought-habits vastly different from anything we dream of. My
+own conjectures, I freely own, shot as widely past the mark as any of the guesses
+of illiterate farmers and savage Indians. What I had thought morbid and
+shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind- expanding and even
+glorious - my previous estimate being merely a phase of man's eternal tendency
+to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.
+
+Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and incredible beings in
+the course of our nightly skirmishes. If only I had consented to talk peacefully
+and reasonably with them in the first place! But they bear me no grudge, their
+emotions being organised very differently from ours. It is their misfortune to
+have had as their human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens - the
+late Walter Brown, for example. He prejudiced me vastly against them. Actually,
+they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged
+and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of
+your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and
+the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring
+them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these
+aggressors - not against normal humanity - that the drastic precautions of the
+Outer Ones are directed. Incidentally, I learned that many of our lost letters were
+stolen not by the Outer Ones but by the emissaries of this malign cult.
+
+All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation and an
+increasing intellectual rapport. This latter is absolutely necessary now that our
+inventions and devices are expanding our knowledge and motions, and making
+it more and more impossible for the Outer Ones' necessary outposts to exist
+secretly on this planet. The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, and
+to have a few of mankind's philosophic and scientific leaders know more about
+them. With such an exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a satisfactory
+modus Vivendi be established. The very idea of any attempt to enslave or
+degrade mankind is ridiculous.
+
+As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have naturally chosen
+me - whose knowledge of them is already so considerable - as their primary
+interpreter on earth. Much was told me last night - facts of the most stupendous
+
+
+
+
+and vista-opening nature - and more will be subsequently communicated to me
+both orally and in writing. I shall not be called upon to make any trip outside just
+yet, though I shall probably wish to do so later on - employing special means and
+transcending everything which we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as
+human experience. My house will be besieged no longer. Everything has
+reverted to normal, and the dogs will have no further occupation. In place of
+terror I have been given a rich boon of knowledge and intellectual adventure
+which few other mortals have ever shared.
+
+The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond
+all space and time-members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-forms
+are merely degenerate variants. They are more vegetable than animal, if these
+terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat
+fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very
+singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic
+fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of
+space - with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate. That is why the
+beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary camera films and plates of our
+known universe, even though our eyes can see them. With proper knowledge,
+however, any good chemist could make a photographic emulsion which would
+record their images.
+
+The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and airless interstellar
+void in full corporeal form, and some of its variants cannot do this without
+mechanical aid or curious surgical transpositions. Only a few species have the
+ether-resisting wings characteristic of the Vermont variety. Those inhabiting
+certain remote peaks in the Old World were brought in other ways. Their
+external resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we understand as
+material, is a matter of parallel evolution rather than of close kinship. Their
+brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving life-form, although the winged
+types of our hill country are by no means the most highly developed. Telepathy
+is their usual means of discourse, though we have rudimentary vocal organs
+which, after a slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly expert and everyday
+thing among them), can roughly duplicate the speech of such types of organism
+as still use speech.
+
+Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at
+the very edge of our solar system - beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance
+from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as
+"Yuggoth" in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the
+scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate
+mental rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers become sufficiently
+sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones
+
+
+
+
+wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The main
+body of the beings inhabits strangely organized abysses wholly beyond the
+utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we
+recognize as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine
+infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold
+is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty other
+men since the human race has existed.
+
+You will probably call this raving at first, Wilmarth, but in time you will
+appreciate the titanic opportunity I have stumbled upon. I want you to share as
+much of it as is possible, and to that end must tell you thousands of things that
+won't go on paper. In the past I have warned you not to come to see me. Now
+that all is safe, I take pleasure in rescinding that warning and inviting you.
+
+Can't you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It would be
+marvelously delightful if you could. Bring along the phonograph record and all
+my letters to you as consultative data - we shall need them in piecing together
+the whole tremendous story. You might bring the Kodak prints, too, since I seem
+to have mislaid the negatives and my own prints in all this recent excitement. But
+what a wealth of facts I have to add to all this groping and tentative material -
+and what a stupendous device I have to supplement my additions!
+
+Don't hesitate - I am free from espionage now, and you will not meet anything
+unnatural or disturbing. Just come along and let my car meet you at the
+Brattleboro station - prepare to stay as long as you can, and expect many an
+evening of discussion of things beyond all human conjecture. Don't tell anyone
+about it, of course - for this matter must not get to the promiscuous public.
+
+The train service to Brattleboro is not bad - you can get a timetable in Boston.
+Take the B. & M. to Greenfield, and then change for the brief remainder of the
+way. I suggest your taking the convenient 4:10 P.M. - standard-from Boston. This
+gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches
+Brattleboro at 10:01. That is weekdays. Let me know the date and I'll have my car
+on hand at the station.
+
+Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting has grown shaky of late, as you
+know, and I don't feel equal to long stretches of script. I got this new Corona in
+Brattleboro yesterday - it seems to work very well.
+
+Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph record and
+all my letters - and the Kodak prints -
+
+
+
+
+I am
+
+Yours in anticipation,
+
+Henry W. Akeley
+
+TO ALBERT N. WILMARTH, ESQ.,
+
+MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY,
+
+ARKHAM, MASS.
+
+The complexity of my emotions upon reading, re-reading, and pondering over
+this strange and unlooked- for letter is past adequate description. I have said that
+I was at once relieved and made uneasy, but this expresses only crudely the
+overtones of diverse and largely subconscious feelings which comprised both the
+relief and the uneasiness. To begin with, the thing was so antipodally at variance
+with the whole chain of horrors preceding it - the change of mood from stark
+terror to cool complacency and even exultation was so unheralded, lightning-
+like, and complete! I could scarcely believe that a single day could so alter the
+psychological perspective of one who had written that final frenzied bulletin of
+Wednesday, no matter what relieving disclosures that day might have brought.
+At certain moments a sense of conflicting unrealities made me wonder whether
+this whole distantly reported drama of fantastic forces were not a kind of half-
+illusory dream created largely within my own mind. Then I thought of the
+phonograph record and gave way to still greater bewilderment.
+
+The letter seemed so unlike anything which could have been expected! As I
+analysed my impression, I saw that it consisted of two distinct phases. First,
+granting that Akeley had been sane before and was still sane, the indicated
+change in the situation itself was so swift and unthinkable. And secondly, the
+change in Akeley's own manner, attitude, and language was so vastly beyond
+the normal or the predictable. The man's whole personality seemed to have
+undergone an insidious mutation - a mutation so deep that one could scarcely
+reconcile his two aspects with the supposition that both represented equal sanity.
+Word- choice, spelling - all were subtly different. And with my academic
+sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profound divergences in his commonest
+reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional cataclysm or revelation
+which could produce so radical an overturn must be an extreme one indeed! Yet
+in another way the letter seemed quite characteristic of Akeley. The same old
+passion for infinity - the same old scholarly inquisitiveness. I could not a moment
+- or more than a moment - credit the idea of spuriousness or malign substitution.
+Did not the invitation - the willingness to have me test the truth of the letter in
+person - prove its genuineness?
+
+I did not retire Saturday night, but sat up thinking of the shadows and marvels
+behind the letter I had received. My mind, aching from the quick succession of
+
+
+
+
+monstrous conceptions it had been forced to confront during the last four
+months, worked upon this starthng new material in a cycle of doubt and
+acceptance which repeated most of the steps experienced in facing the earlier
+wonders; till long before dawn a burning interest and curiosity had begun to
+replace the original storm of perplexity and uneasiness. Mad or sane,
+metamorphosed or merely relieved, the chances were that Akeley had actually
+encountered some stupendous change of perspective in his hazardous research;
+some change at once diminishing his danger - real or fancied - and opening dizzy
+new vistas of cosmic and superhuman knowledge. My own zeal for the
+unknown flared up to meet his, and I felt myself touched by the contagion of the
+morbid barrier-breaking. To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations
+of time and space and natural law - to be linked with the vast outside - to come
+close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate - surely
+such a thing was worth the risk of one's life, soul, and sanity! And Akeley had
+said there was no longer any peril - he had invited me to visit him instead of
+warning me away as before. I tingled at the thought of what he might now have
+to tell me - there was an almost paralysing fascination in the thought of sitting in
+that lonely and lately-beleaguered farmhouse with a man who had talked with
+actual emissaries from outer space; sitting there with the terrible record and the
+pile of letters in which Akeley had summarised his earlier conclusions.
+
+So late Sunday morning I telegraphed Akeley that I would meet him in
+Brattleboro on the following Wednesday - September 12th - if that date were
+convenient for him. In only one respect did I depart from his suggestions, and
+that concerned the choice of a train. Frankly, I did not feel like arriving in that
+haunted Vermont region late at night; so instead of accepting the train he chose I
+telephoned the station and devised another arrangement. By rising early and
+taking the 8:07 A.M. (standard) into Boston, I could catch the 9:25 for Greenfield;
+arriving there at 12:22 noon. This connected exactly with a train reaching
+Brattleboro at 1:08 p.m. - a much more comfortable hour than 10:01 for meeting
+Akeley and riding with him into the close-packed, secret-guarding hills.
+
+I mentioned this choice in my telegram, and was glad to learn in the reply which
+came toward evening that it had met with my prospective host's endorsement.
+His wire ran thus:
+
+ARRANGEMENT SATISFACTORY WILL MEET ONE EIGHT TRAIN
+WEDNESDAY DONT FORGET RECORD AND LETTERS AND PRINTS KEEP
+DESTINATION QUIET EXPECT GREAT REVELATIONS
+
+AKELEY
+
+
+
+
+Receipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeley - and necessarily
+delivered to his house from the Townshend station either by official messenger
+or by a restored telephone service - removed any lingering subconscious doubts I
+may have had about the authorship of the perplexing letter. My relief was
+marked - indeed, it was greater than I could account for at the time; since all such
+doubts had been rather deeply buried. But I slept soundly and long that night,
+and was eagerly busy with preparations during the ensuing two days.
+
+
+On Wednesday I started as agreed,, taking with me a valise full of simple
+necessities and scientific data, including the hideous phonograph record, the
+Kodak prints, and the entire file of Akeley's correspondence. As requested, I had
+told no one where I was going; for I could see that the matter demanded utmost
+privacy, even allowing for its most favourable turns. The thought of actual
+mental contact with alien, outside entities was stupefying enough to my trained
+and somewhat prepared mind; and this being so, what might one think of its
+effect on the vast masses of uninformed laymen? I do not know whether dread or
+adventurous expectancy was uppermost in me as I changed trains at Boston and
+began the long westward run out of familiar regions into those I knew less
+thoroughly. Waltham - Concord - Ayer - Fitchburg - Gardner - Athol -
+
+My train reached Greenfield seven minutes late, but the northbound connecting
+express had been held. Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the
+cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had
+always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether
+older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised,
+urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an
+unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke,
+bill-boards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched.
+There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots
+make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape - the continuous native life
+which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy,
+marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.
+
+Now and then I saw the blue Connecticut River gleaming in the sun, and after
+leaving Northfield we crossed it. Ahead loomed green and cryptical hills, and
+when the conductor came around I learned that I was at last in Vermont. He told
+me to set my watch back an hour, since the northern hill country will have no
+dealings with new-fangled daylight time schemes. As I did so it seemed to me
+that I was likewise turning the calendar back a century.
+
+
+
+
+The train kept close to the river, and across in New Hampshire I could see the
+approaching slope of steep Wantastiquet, about which singular old legends
+cluster. Then streets appeared on my left, and a green island showed in the
+stream on my right. People rose and filed to the door, and I followed them. The
+car stopped, and I alighted beneath the long train-shed of the Brattleboro station.
+
+Looking over the line of waiting motors I hesitated a moment to see which one
+might turn out to be the Akeley Ford, but my identity was divined before I could
+take the initiative. And yet it was clearly not Akeley himself who advanced to
+meet me with an outstretched hand and a mellowly phrased query as to whether
+I was indeed Mr. Albert N. Wilmarth of Arkham. This man bore no resemblance
+to the bearded, grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger and more
+urbane person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache.
+His cultivated voice held an odd and almost disturbing hint of vague familiarity,
+though I could not definitely place it in my memory.
+
+As I surveyed him I heard him explaining that he was a friend of my prospective
+host's who had come down from Townshend in his stead. Akeley, he declared,
+had suffered a sudden attack of some asthmatic trouble, and did not feel equal to
+making a trip in the outdoor air. It was not serious, however, and there was to be
+no change in plans regarding my visit. I could not make out just how much this
+Mr. Noyes - as he announced himself - knew of Akeley's researches and
+discoveries, though it seemed to me that his casual manner stamped him as a
+comparative outsider. Remembering what a hermit Akeley had been, I was a
+trifle surprised at the ready availability of such a friend; but did not let my
+puzzlement deter me from entering the motor to which he gestured me. It was
+not the small ancient car I had expected from Akeley's descriptions, but a large
+and immaculate specimen of recent pattern - apparently Noyes's own, and
+bearing Massachusetts license plates with the amusing "sacred codfish" device of
+that year. My guide, I concluded, must be a summer transient in the Townshend
+region.
+
+Noyes climbed into the car beside me and started it at once. I was glad that he
+did not overflow with conversation, for some peculiar atmospheric tensity made
+me feel disinclined to talk. The town seemed very attractive in the afternoon
+sunlight as we swept up an incline and turned to the right into the main street. It
+drowsed like the older New England cities which one remembers from boyhood,
+and something in the collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick
+walls formed contours touching deep viol- strings of ancestral emotion. I could
+tell that I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of
+unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a
+chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up.
+
+
+
+
+As we passed out of Brattleboro my sense of constraint and foreboding
+increased, for a vague quality in the hill-crowded countryside with its towering,
+threatening, close-pressing green and granite slopes hinted at obscure secrets and
+immemorial survivals which might or might not be hostile to mankind. For a
+time our course followed a broad, shallow river which flowed down from
+unknown hills in the north, and I shivered when my companion told me it was
+the West River. It was in this stream, I recalled from newspaper items, that one of
+the morbid crablike beings had been seen floating after the floods.
+
+Gradually the country around us grew wilder and more deserted. Archaic
+covered bridges lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets of the hills, and
+the half-abandoned railway track paralleling the river seemed to exhale a
+nebulously visible air of desolation. There were awesome sweeps of vivid valley
+where great cliffs rose. New England's virgin granite showing grey and austere
+through the verdure that scaled the crests. There were gorges where untamed
+streams leaped, bearing down toward the river the unimagined secrets of a
+thousand pathless peaks. Branching away now and then were narrow, half-
+concealed roads that bored their way through solid, luxuriant masses of forest
+among whose primal trees whole armies of elemental spirits might well lurk. As
+I saw these I thought of how Akeley had been molested by unseen agencies on
+his drives along this very route, and did not wonder that such things could be.
+
+The quaint, sightly village of Newfane, reached in less than an hour, was our last
+link with that world which man can definitely call his own by virtue of conquest
+and complete occupancy. After that we cast off all allegiance to immediate,
+tangible, and time-touched things, and entered a fantastic world of hushed
+unreality in which the narrow, ribbon-like road rose and fell and curved with an
+almost sentient and purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless green peaks and
+half-deserted valleys. Except for the sound of the motor, and the faint stir of the
+few lonely farms we passed at infrequent intervals, the only thing that reached
+my ears was the gurgling, insidious trickle of strange waters from numberless
+hidden fountains in the shadowy woods.
+
+The nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, domed hills now became veritably
+breath-taking. Their steepness and abruptness were even greater than I had
+imagined from hearsay, and suggested nothing in common with the prosaic
+objective world we know. The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible
+slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very
+outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as
+if they were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live
+only in rare, deep dreams. All the legends of the past, and all the stupefying
+imputations of Henry Akeley's letters and exhibits, welled up in my memory to
+heighten the atmosphere of tension and growing menace. The purpose of my
+
+
+
+
+visit, and the frightful abnormahties it postulated struck at me all at once with a
+chill sensation that nearly over-balanced my ardour for strange delvings.
+
+My guide must have noticed my disturbed attitude; for as the road grew wilder
+and more irregular, and our motion slower and more jolting, his occasional
+pleasant comments expanded into a steadier flow of discourse. He spoke of the
+beauty and weirdness of the country, and revealed some acquaintance with the
+folklore studies of my prospective host. From his polite questions it was obvious
+that he knew I had come for a scientific purpose, and that I was bringing data of
+some importance; but he gave no sign of appreciating the depth and awfulness of
+the knowledge which Akeley had finally reached.
+
+His manner was so cheerful, normal, and urbane that his remarks ought to have
+calmed and reassured me; but oddly enough. I felt only the more disturbed as we
+bumped and veered onward into the unknown wilderness of hills and woods. At
+times it seemed as if he were pumping me to see what I knew of the monstrous
+secrets of the place, and with every fresh utterance that vague, teasing, baffling
+familiarity in his voice increased. It was not an ordinary or healthy familiarity
+despite the thoroughly wholesome and cultivated nature of the voice. I somehow
+linked it with forgotten nightmares, and felt that I might go mad if I recognised
+it. If any good excuse had existed, I think I would have turned back from my
+visit. As it was, I could not well do so - and it occurred to me that a cool,
+scientific conversation with Akeley himself after my arrival would help greatly
+to pull me together.
+
+Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic
+landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost
+itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves
+of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries - the hoary groves,
+the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals
+the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical
+precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a
+supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the
+whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that
+sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo
+conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of
+Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the
+picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or
+inherited and for which I had always been vainly searching.
+
+Suddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp ascent, the car
+came to a standstill. On my left, across a well-kept lawn which stretched to the
+road and flaunted a border of whitewashed stones, rose a white, two-and-a-half-
+
+
+
+
+story house of unusual size and elegance for the region, with a congenes of
+contiguous or arcade-linked barns, sheds, and windmill behind and to the right. I
+recognised it at once from the snapshot I had received, and was not surprised to
+see the name of Henry Akeley on the galvanised-iron mailbox near the road. For
+some distance back of the house a level stretch of marshy and sparsely-wooded
+land extended, beyond which soared a steep, thickly-forested hillside ending in a
+jagged leafy crest. This latter, I knew, was the summit of Dark Mountain, half
+way up which we must have climbed already.
+
+Alighting from the car and taking my valise, Noyes asked me to wait while he
+went in and notified Akeley of my advent. He himself, he added, had important
+business elsewhere, and could not stop for more than a moment. As he briskly
+walked up the path to the house I climbed out of the car myself, wishing to
+stretch my legs a little before settling down to a sedentary conversation. My
+feeling of nervousness and tension had risen to a maximum again now that I was
+on the actual scene of the morbid beleaguering described so hauntingly in
+Akeley's letters, and I honestly dreaded the coming discussions which were to
+link me with such alien and forbidden worlds.
+
+Close contact with the utterly bizarre is often more terrifying than inspiring, and
+it did not cheer me to think that this very bit of dusty road was the place where
+those monstrous tracks and that foetid green ichor had been found after
+moonless nights of fear and death. Idly I noticed that none of Akeley's dogs
+seemed to be about. Had he sold them all as soon as the Outer Ones made peace
+with him? Try as I might, I could not have the same confidence in the depth and
+sincerity of that peace which appeared in Akeley's final and queerly different
+letter. After all, he was a man of much simplicity and with little worldly
+experience. Was there not, perhaps, some deep and sinister undercurrent
+beneath the surface of the new alliance?
+
+Led by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the powdery road surface
+which had held such hideous testimonies. The last few days had been dry, and
+tracks of all sorts cluttered the rutted, irregular highway despite the
+unfrequented nature of the district. With a vague curiosity I began to trace the
+outline of some of the heterogeneous impressions, trying meanwhile to curb the
+flights of macabre fancy which the place and its memories suggested. There was
+something menacing and uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in the muffled,
+subtle trickle of distant brooks, and in the crowding green peaks and black-
+wooded precipices that choked the narrow horizon.
+
+And then an image shot into my consciousness which made those vague
+menaces and flights of fancy seem mild and insignificant indeed. I have said that
+I was scanning the miscellaneous prints in the road with a kind of idle curiosity -
+
+
+
+
+but all at once that curiosity was shockingly snuffed out by a sudden and
+paralysing gust of active terror. For though the dust tracks were in general
+confused and overlapping, and unlikely to arrest any casual gaze, my restless
+vision had caught certain details near the spot where the path to the house joined
+the highway; and had recognised beyond doubt or hope the frightful significance
+of those details. It was not for nothing, alas, that I had pored for hours over the
+Kodak views of the Outer Ones' claw-prints which Akeley had sent. Too well did
+I know the marks of those loathsome nippers, and that hint of ambiguous
+direction which stamped the horrors as no creatures of this planet. No chance
+had been left me for merciful mistake. Here, indeed, in objective form before my
+own eyes, and surely made not many hours ago, were at least three marks which
+stood out blasphemously among the surprising plethora of blurred footprints
+leading to and from the Akeley farmhouse. They were the hellish tracks of the
+living fungi from Yuggoth.
+
+I pulled myself together in time to stifle a scream. After all, what more was there
+than I might have expected, assuming that I had really believed Akeley's letters?
+He had spoken of making peace with the things. Why, then, was it strange that
+some of them had visited his house? But the terror was stronger than the
+reassurance. Could any man be expected to look unmoved for the first time upon
+the claw-marks of animate beings from outer depths of space? Just then I saw
+Noyes emerge from the door and approach with a brisk step. I must, I reflected,
+keep command of myself, for the chances were that this genial friend knew
+nothing of Akeley's profoundest and most stupendous probings into the
+forbidden.
+
+Akeley, Noyes hastened to inform me, was glad and ready to see me; although
+his sudden attack of asthma would prevent him from being a very competent
+host for a day or two. These spells hit him hard when they came, and were
+always accompanied by a debilitating fever and general weakness. He never was
+good for much while they lasted - had to talk in a whisper, and was very clumsy
+and feeble in getting about. His feet and ankles swelled, too, so that he had to
+bandage them like a gouty old beef-eater. Today he was in rather bad shape, so
+that I would have to attend very largely to my own needs; but he was none the
+less eager for conversation. I would find him in the study at the left of the front
+hall - the room where the blinds were shut. He had to keep the sunlight out
+when he was ill, for his eyes were very sensitive.
+
+As Noyes bade me adieu and rode off northward in his car I began to walk
+slowly toward the house. The door had been left ajar for me; but before
+approaching and entering I cast a searching glance around the whole place,
+trying to decide what had struck me as so intangibly queer about it. The barns
+and sheds looked trimly prosaic enough, and I noticed Akeley's battered Ford in
+
+
+
+
+its capacious, unguarded shelter. Then the secret of the queerness reached me. It
+was the total silence. Ordinarily a farm is at least moderately murmurous from
+its various kinds of livestock, but here all signs of life were missing. What of the
+hens and the dogs? The cows, of which Akeley had said he possessed several,
+might conceivably be out to pasture, and the dogs might possibly have been sold;
+but the absence of any trace of cackling or grunting was truly singular.
+
+I did not pause long on the path, but resolutely entered the open house door and
+closed it behind me. It had cost me a distinct psychological effort to do so, and
+now that I was shut inside I had a momentary longing for precipitate retreat. Not
+that the place was in the least sinister in visual suggestion; on the contrary, I
+thought the graceful late-colonial hallway very tasteful and wholesome, and
+admired the evident breeding of the man who had furnished it. What made me
+wish to flee was something very attenuated and indefinable. Perhaps it was a
+certain odd odour which I thought I noticed - though I well knew how common
+musty odours are in even the best of ancient farmhouses.
+
+
+Refusing to let these cloudy qualms overmaster me, I recalled Noyes's
+instructions and pushed open the six-panelled, brass-latched white door on my
+left. The room beyond was darkened as I had known before; and as I entered it I
+noticed that the queer odour was stronger there. There likewise appeared to be
+some faint, half-imaginary rhythm or vibration in the air. For a moment the
+closed blinds allowed me to see very little, but then a kind of apologetic hacking
+or whispering sound drew my attention to a great easy- chair in the farther,
+darker corner of the room. Within its shadowy depths I saw the white blur of a
+man's face and hands; and in a moment I had crossed to greet the figure who had
+tried to speak. Dim though the light was, I perceived that this was indeed my
+host. I had studied the Kodak picture repeatedly, and there could be no mistake
+about this firm, weather-beaten face with the cropped, grizzled beard.
+
+But as I looked again my recognition was mixed with sadness and anxiety; for
+certainly, his face was that of a very sick man. I felt that there must be something
+more than asthma behind that strained, rigid, immobile expression and
+unwinking glassy stare; and realised how terribly the strain of his frightful
+experiences must have told on him. Was it not enough to break any human being
+- even a younger man than this intrepid delver into the forbidden? The strange
+and sudden relief, I feared, had come too late to save him from something like a
+general breakdown. There was a touch of the pitiful in the limp, lifeless way his
+lean hands rested in his lap. He had on a loose dressing-gown, and was swathed
+around the head and high around the neck with a vivid yellow scarf or hood.
+
+
+
+
+And then I saw that he was trying to talk in the same hacking whisper with
+which he had greeted me. It was a hard whisper to catch at first, since the grey
+moustache concealed all movements of the lips, and something in its timbre
+disturbed me greatly; but by concentrating my attention I could soon make out
+its purport surprisingly well. The accent was by no means a rustic one, and the
+language was even more polished than correspondence had led me to expect.
+
+"Mr. Wilmarth, I presume? You must pardon my not rising. I am quite ill, as Mr.
+Noyes must have told you; but I could not resist having you come just the same.
+You know what I wrote in my last letter - there is so much to tell you tomorrow
+when I shall feel better. I can't say how glad I am to see you in person after all
+our many letters. You have the file with you, of course? And the Kodak prints
+and records? Noyes put your valise in the hall - I suppose you saw it. For tonight
+I fear you'll have to wait on yourself to a great extent. Your room is upstairs - the
+one over this - and you'll see the bathroom door open at the head of the staircase.
+There's a meal spread for you in the dining-room - right through this door at
+your right - which you can take whenever you feel like it. I'll be a better host
+tomorrow - but just now weakness leaves me helpless.
+
+"Make yourself at home - you might take out the letters and pictures and records
+and put them on the table here before you go upstairs with your bag. It is here
+that we shall discuss them - you can see my phonograph on that corner stand.
+
+"No, thanks - there's nothing you can do for me. I know these spells of old. Just
+come back for a little quiet visiting before night, and then go to bed when you
+please. I'll rest right here - perhaps sleep here all night as I often do. In the
+morning I'll be far better able to go into the things we must go into. You realise,
+of course, the utterly stupendous nature of the matter before us. To us, as to only
+a few men on this earth, there will be opened up gulfs of time and space and
+knowledge beyond anything within the conception of human science or
+philosophy.
+
+"Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can
+move with a velocity greater than that of light? With proper aid I expect to go
+backward and forward in time, and actually see and feel the earth of remote past
+and future epochs. You can't imagine the degree to which those beings have
+carried science. There is nothing they can't do with the mind and body of living
+organisms. I expect to visit other planets, and even other stars and galaxies. The
+first trip will be to Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. It is a
+strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system - unknown to earthly
+astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At the proper time,
+you know, the beings there will direct thought-currents toward us and cause it to
+be discovered - or perhaps let one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.
+
+
+
+
+"There are mighty cities on Yuggoth - great tiers of terraced towers built of black
+stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun
+shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other
+subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light
+even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black
+cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit
+Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad - yet I am going there. The black rivers
+of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean bridges - things built by
+some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from
+the ultimate voids - ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he
+can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.
+
+"But remember - that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn't
+really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed
+just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age. You
+know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and
+remember all about sunken R'lyeh when it was above the waters. They've been
+inside the earth, too - there are openings which human beings know nothing of -
+some of them in these very Vermont hills - and great worlds of unknown life
+down there; blue-litten K'n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N'kai. It's
+from N'kai that frightful Tsathoggua came - you know, the amorphous, toad-like
+god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and
+the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-
+Ton.
+
+"But we will talk of all this later on. It must be four or five o'clock by this time.
+Better bring the stuff from your bag, take a bite, and then come back for a
+comfortable chat."
+
+Very slowly I turned and began to obey my host; fetching my valise, extracting
+and depositing the desired articles, and finally ascending to the room designated
+as mine. With the memory of that roadside claw- print fresh in my mind,
+Akeley's whispered paragraphs had affected me queerly; and the hints of
+familiarity with this unknown world of fungous life - forbidden Yuggoth - made
+my flesh creep more than I cared to own. I was tremendously sorry about
+Akeley's illness, but had to confess that his hoarse whisper had a hateful as well
+as pitiful quality. If only he wouldn't gloat so about Yuggoth and its black
+secrets!
+
+My room proved a very pleasant and well-furnished one, devoid alike of the
+musty odour and disturbing sense of vibration; and after leaving my valise there
+I descended again to greet Akeley and take the lunch he had set out for me. The
+dining-room was just beyond the study, and I saw that a kitchen ell extended
+
+
+
+
+still farther in the same direction. On the dining-table an ample array of
+sandwiches, cake, and cheese awaited me, and a Thermos-bottle beside a cup
+and saucer testified that hot coffee had not been forgotten. After a well-relished
+meal I poured myself a liberal cup of coffee, but found that the culinary standard
+had suffered a lapse in this one detail. My first spoonful revealed a faintly
+unpleasant acrid taste, so that I did not take more. Throughout the lunch I
+thought of Akeley sitting silently in the great chair in the darkened next room.
+
+Once I went in to beg him to share the repast, but he whispered that he could eat
+nothing as yet. Later on, just before he slept, he would take some malted milk -
+all he ought to have that day.
+
+After lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them in the
+kitchen sink - incidentally emptying the coffee which I had not been able to
+appreciate. Then returning to the darkened study I drew up a chair near my
+host's corner and prepared for such conversation as he might feel inclined to
+conduct. The letters, pictures, and record were still on the large centre-table, but
+for the nonce we did not have to draw upon them. Before long I forgot even the
+bizarre odour and curious suggestions of vibration.
+
+I have said that there were things in some of Akeley's letters - especially the
+second and most voluminous one - which I would not dare to quote or even form
+into words on paper. This hesitancy applies with still greater force to the things I
+heard whispered that evening in the darkened room among the lonely hills. Of
+the extent of the cosmic horrors unfolded by that raucous voice I cannot even
+hint. He had known hideous things before, but what he had learned since
+making his pact with the Outside Things was almost too much for sanity to bear.
+Even now I absolutely refused to believe what he implied about the constitution
+of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the frightful position of
+our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-
+atoms which makes up the immediate super- cosmos of curves, angles, and
+material and semi-material electronic organisation.
+
+Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity -
+never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that
+transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence Cthulhu first came,
+and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guessed -
+from hints which made even my informant pause timidly - the secret behind the
+Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the
+immemorial allegory of Tao. The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I
+was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The
+legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started
+with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space
+
+
+
+
+which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. It
+was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of secret myth cleared up in
+concrete terms whose stark, morbid hatefulness exceeded the boldest hints of
+ancient and mediaeval mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe that the first
+whisperers of these accursed tales must have had discourse with Akeley's Outer
+Ones, and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms as Akeley now proposed
+visiting them.
+
+I was told of the Black Stone and what it implied, and was glad that it had not
+reached me. My guesses about those hieroglyphics had been all too correct! And
+yet Akeley now seemed reconciled to the whole fiendish system he had stumbled
+upon; reconciled and eager to probe farther into the monstrous abyss. I
+wondered what beings he had talked with since his last letter to me, and whether
+many of them had been as human as that first emissary he had mentioned. The
+tension in my head grew insufferable, and I built up all sorts of wild theories
+about that queer, persistent odour and those insidious hints of vibration in the
+darkened room.
+
+Night was falling now, and as I recalled what Akeley had written me about those
+earlier nights I shuddered to think there would be no moon. Nor did I like the
+way the farmhouse nestled in the lee of that colossal forested slope leading up to
+Dark Mountain's unvisited crest. With Akeley's permission I lighted a small oil
+lamp, turned it low, and set it on a distant bookcase beside the ghostly bust of
+Milton; but afterward I was sorry I had done so, for it made my host's strained,
+immobile face and listless hands look damnably abnormal and corpselike. He
+seemed half-incapable of motion, though I saw him nod stiffly once in awhile.
+
+After what he had told, I could scarcely imagine what profounder secrets he was
+saving for the morrow; but at last it developed that his trip to Yuggoth and
+beyond - and my own possible participation in it - was to be the next day's topic.
+He must have been amused by the start of horror I gave at hearing a cosmic
+voyage on my part proposed, for his head wabbled violently when I showed my
+fear. Subsequently he spoke very gently of how human beings might accomplish
+- and several times had accomplished - the seemingly impossible flight across the
+interstellar void. It seemed that complete human bodies did not indeed make the
+trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of
+the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains without their
+concomitant physical structure.
+
+There was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the organic
+residue alive during its absence. The bare, compact cerebral matter was then
+immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid within an ether-tight cylinder of a
+metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes reaching through and connecting at
+
+
+
+
+will with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of
+sight, hearing, and speech. For the winged fungus-beings to carry the brain-
+cylinders intact through space was an easy matter. Then, on every planet covered
+by their civilisation, they would find plenty of adjustable faculty- instruments
+capable of being connected with the encased brains; so that after a little fitting
+these travelling intelligences could be given a full sensory and articulate life -
+albeit a bodiless and mechanical one - at each stage of their journeying through
+and beyond the space-time continuum. It was as simple as carrying a
+phonograph record about and playing it wherever a phonograph of
+corresponding make exists. Of its success there could be no question. Akeley was
+not afraid. Had it not been brilliantly accomplished again and again?
+
+For the first time one of the inert, wasted hands raised itself and pointed stiffly to
+a high shelf on the farther side of the room. There, in a neat row, stood more than
+a dozen cylinders of a metal I had never seen before - cylinders about a foot high
+and somewhat less in diameter, with three curious sockets set in an isosceles
+triangle over the front convex surface of each. One of them was linked at two of
+the sockets to a pair of singular-looking machines that stood in the background.
+Of their purport I did not need to be told, and I shivered as with ague. Then I
+saw the hand point to a much nearer corner where some intricate instruments
+with attached cords and plugs, several of them much like the two devices on the
+shelf behind the cylinders, were huddled together.
+
+"There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth," whispered the voice.
+"Four kinds - three faculties each - makes twelve pieces in all. You see there are
+four different sorts of beings represented in those cylinders up there. Three
+humans, six fungoid beings who can't navigate space corporeally, two beings
+from Neptune (God! if you could see the body this type has on its own planet!),
+and the rest entities from the central caverns of an especially interesting dark star
+beyond the galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill you'll now and
+then find more cylinders and machines - cylinders of extra-cosmic brains with
+different senses from any we know - allies and explorers from the uttermost
+Outside - and special machines for giving them impressions and expression in
+the several ways suited at once to them and to the comprehensions of different
+types of listeners. Round Hill, like most of the beings' main outposts all through
+the various universes, is a very cosmopolitan place. Of course, only the more
+common types have been lent to me for experiment.
+
+"Here - take the three machines I point to and set them on the table. That tall one
+with the two glass lenses in front - then the box with the vacuum tubes and
+sounding-board - and now the one with the metal disc on top. Now for the
+cylinder with the label 'B-67' pasted on it. Just stand in that Windsor chair to
+reach the shelf. Heavy? Never mind! Be sure of the number - B-67. Don't bother
+
+
+
+
+that fresh, shiny cyHnder joined to the two testing instruments - the one with my
+name on it. Set B-67 on the table near where you've put the machines - and see
+that the dial switch on all three machines is jammed over to the extreme left.
+
+"Now connect the cord of the lens machine with the upper socket on the cylinder
+
+- there! Join the tube machine to the lower left-hand socket, and the disc
+apparatus to the outer socket. Now move all the dial switches on the machine
+over to the extreme right - first the lens one, then the disc one, and then the tube
+one. That's right. I might as well tell you that this is a human being - just like any
+of us. I'll give you a taste of some of the others tomorrow."
+
+To this day I do not know why I obeyed those whispers so slavishly, or whether I
+thought Akeley was mad or sane. After what had gone before, I ought to have
+been prepared for anything; but this mechanical mummery seemed so like the
+typical vagaries of crazed inventors and scientists that it struck a chord of doubt
+which even the preceding discourse had not excited. What the whisperer implied
+was beyond all human belief - yet were not the other things still farther beyond,
+and less preposterous only because of their remoteness from tangible concrete
+proof?
+
+As my mind reeled amidst this chaos, I became conscious of a mixed grating and
+whirring from all three of the machines lately linked to the cylinder - a grating
+and whirring which soon subsided into a virtual noiselessness. What was about
+to happen? Was I to hear a voice? And if so, what proof would I have that it was
+not some cleverly concocted radio device talked into by a concealed but closely
+watched speaker?
+
+Even now I am unwilling to swear just what I heard, or just what phenomenon
+really took place before me. But something certainly seemed to take place.
+
+To be brief and plain, the machine with the tubes and sound-box began to speak,
+and with a point and intelligence which left no doubt that the speaker was
+actually present and observing us. The voice was loud, metallic, lifeless, and
+plainly mechanical in every detail of its production. It was incapable of inflection
+or expressiveness, but scraped and rattled on with a deadly precision and
+deliberation.
+
+"Mr. Wilmarth," it said, "I hope I do not startle you. I am a human being like
+yourself, though my body is now resting safely under proper vitalising treatment
+inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half east of here. I myself am here with you
+
+- my brain is in that cylinder and I see, hear, and speak through these electronic
+vibrators. In a week I am going across the void as I have been many times before,
+and I expect to have the pleasure of Mr. Akeley's company. I wish I might have
+
+
+
+
+yours as well; for I know you by sight and reputation, and have kept close track
+of your correspondence with our friend. I am, of course, one of the men who
+have become allied with the outside beings visiting our planet. I met them first in
+the Himalayas, and have helped them in various ways. In return they have given
+me experiences such as few men have ever had.
+
+"Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different
+celestial bodies - planets, dark stars, and less definable objects - including eight
+outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All
+this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body
+by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery. The
+visiting beings have methods which make these extractions easy and almost
+normal - and one's body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may
+add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited
+nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.
+
+"Altogether, I hope most heartily that you will decide to come with Mr. Akeley
+and me. The visitors are eager to know men of knowledge like yourself, and to
+show them the great abysses that most of us have had to dream about in fanciful
+ignorance. It may seem strange at first to meet them, but I know you will be
+above minding that. I think Mr. Noyes will go along, too - the man who
+doubtless brought you up here in his car. He has been one of us for years - I
+suppose you recognised his voice as one of those on the record Mr. Akeley sent
+you."
+
+At my violent start the speaker paused a moment before concluding. "So Mr.
+Wilmarth, I will leave the matter to you; merely adding that a man with your
+love of strangeness and folklore ought never to miss such a chance as this. There
+is nothing to fear. All transitions are painless; and there is much to enjoy in a
+wholly mechanised state of sensation. When the electrodes are disconnected, one
+merely drops off into a sleep of especially vivid and fantastic dreams.
+
+"And now, if you don't mind, we might adjourn our session till tomorrow. Good
+night - just turn all the switches back to the left; never mind the exact order,
+though you might let the lens machine be last. Good night, Mr. Akeley - treat our
+guest well! Ready now with those switches?"
+
+That was all. I obeyed mechanically and shut off all three switches, though dazed
+with doubt of everything that had occurred. My head was still reeling as I heard
+Akeley's whispering voice telling me that I might leave all the apparatus on the
+table just as it was. He did not essay any comment on what had happened, and
+indeed no comment could have conveyed much to my burdened faculties. I
+heard him telling me I could take the lamp to use in my room, and deduced that
+
+
+
+
+he wished to rest alone in the dark. It was surely time he rested, for his discourse
+of the afternoon and evening had been such as to exhaust even a vigorous man.
+Still dazed, I bade my host good night and went upstairs with the lamp, although
+I had an excellent pocket flashlight with me.
+
+I was glad to be out of that downstairs study with the queer odour and vague
+suggestions of vibration, yet could not of course escape a hideous sense of dread
+and peril and cosmic abnormality as I thought of the place I was in and the forces
+I was meeting. The wild, lonely region, the black, mysteriously forested slope
+towering so close behind the house; the footprint in the road, the sick, motionless
+whisperer in the dark, the hellish cylinders and machines, and above all the
+invitations to strange surgery and stranger voyagings - these things, all so new
+and in such sudden succession, rushed in on me with a cumulative force which
+sapped my will and almost undermined my physical strength.
+
+To discover that my guide Noyes was the human celebrant in that monstrous
+bygone Sabbat-ritual on the phonograph record was a particular shock, though I
+had previously sensed a dim, repellent familiarity in his voice. Another special
+shock came from my own attitude toward my host whenever I paused to analyse
+it; for much as I had instinctively liked Akeley as revealed in his correspondence,
+I now found that he filled me with a distinct repulsion. His illness ought to have
+excited my pity; but instead, it gave me a kind of shudder. He was so rigid and
+inert and corpselike - and that incessant whispering was so hateful and
+unhuman!
+
+It occurred to me that this whispering was different from anything else of the
+kind I had ever heard; that, despite the curious motionlessness of the speaker's
+moustache-screened lips, it had a latent strength and carrying-power remarkable
+for the wheezing of an asthmatic. I had been able to understand the speaker
+when wholly across the room, and once or twice it had seemed to me that the
+faint but penetrant sounds represented not so much weakness as deliberate
+repression - for what reason I could not guess. From the first I had felt a
+disturbing quality in their timbre. Now, when I tried to weigh the matter, I
+thought I could trace this impression to a kind of subconscious familiarity like
+that which had made Noyes's voice so hazily ominous. But when or where I had
+encountered the thing it hinted at, was more than I could tell.
+
+One thing was certain - I would not spend another night here. My scientific zeal
+had vanished amidst fear and loathing, and I felt nothing now but a wish to
+escape from this net of morbidity and unnatural revelation. I knew enough now.
+It must indeed be true that strange cosmic linkages do exist - but such things are
+surely not meant for normal human beings to meddle with.
+
+
+
+
+Blasphemous influences seemed to surround me and press chokingly upon my
+senses. Sleep, I decided, would be out of the question; so I merely extinguished
+the lamp and threw myself on the bed fully dressed. No doubt it was absurd, but
+I kept ready for some unknown emergency; gripping in my right hand the
+revolver I had brought along, and holding the pocket flashlight in my left. Not a
+sound came from below, and I could imagine how my host was sitting there with
+cadaverous stiffness in the dark.
+
+Somewhere I heard a clock ticking, and was vaguely grateful for the normality of
+the sound. It reminded me, though, of another thing about the region which
+disturbed me - the total absence of animal life. There were certainly no farm
+beasts about, and now I realised that even the accustomed night-noises of wild
+living things were absent. Except for the sinister trickle of distant unseen waters,
+that stillness was anomalous - interplanetary - and I wondered what star-
+spawned, intangible blight could be hanging over the region. I recalled from old
+legends that dogs and other beasts had always hated the Outer Ones, and
+thought of what those tracks in the road might mean.
+
+
+Do not ask me how long my unexpected lapse into slumber lasted, or how much
+of what ensued was sheer dream. If I tell you that I awakened at a certain time,
+and heard and saw certain things, you will merely answer that I did not wake
+then; and that everything was a dream until the moment when I rushed out of
+the house, stumbled to the shed where I had seen the old Ford, and seized that
+ancient vehicle for a mad, aimless race over the haunted hills which at last
+landed me - after hours of jolting and winding through forest-threatened
+labyrinths - in a village which turned out to be Townshend.
+
+You will also, of course, discount everything else in my report; and declare that
+all the pictures, record- sounds, cylinder-and-machine sounds, and kindred
+evidences were bits of pure deception practiced on me by the missing Henry
+Akeley. You will even hint that he conspired with other eccentrics to carry out a
+silly and elaborate hoax - that he had the express shipment removed at Keene,
+and that he had Noyes make that terrifying wax record. It is odd, though, that
+Noyes has not ever yet' been identified; that he was unknown at any of the
+villages near Akeley's place, though he must have been frequently in the region.
+I wish I had stopped to memorize the license-number of his car - or perhaps it is
+better after all that I did not. For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I
+sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside influences must be
+lurking there in the half-unknown hills - and that, those influences have spies
+and emissaries in the world of men. To keep as far as possible from such
+influences and such emissaries is all that I ask of life in future.
+
+
+
+
+When my frantic story sent a sheriff's posse out to the farmhouse, Akeley was
+gone without leaving a trace. His loose dressing gown, yellow scarf, and foot-
+bandages lay on the study floor near his corner, easy-chair, and it could not be
+decided whether any of his other apparel had vanished with him. The dogs and
+livestock were indeed missing, and there were some curious bullet-holes both on
+the house's exterior and on some of the walls within; but beyond this nothing
+unusual could be detected. No cylinders or machines, none of the evidences I
+had brought in my valise, no queer odour or vibration-sense, no foot- prints in
+the road, and none of the problematical things I glimpsed at the very last.
+
+I stayed a week in Brattleboro after my escape, making inquiries among people
+of every kind who had known Akeley; and the results convince me that the
+matter is no figment of dream or delusion.' Akeley's queer purchase of dogs and
+ammunition and chemicals, and the cutting of his telephone wires, are matters of
+record; while all who knew him - including his son in California - concede that
+his occasional remarks on strange studies had a certain consistency. Solid citizens
+believe he was mad, and unhesitatingly pronounce all reported evidences mere
+hoaxes devised with insane cunning and perhaps abetted by eccentric associates;
+but the lowlier country folk sustain his statements in every detail. He had
+showed some of these rustics his photographs and black stone, and had played
+the hideous record for them; and they all said the footprints and buzzing voice
+were like those described in ancestral legends.
+
+They said, too, that suspicious sights and sounds had been noticed increasingly
+around Akeley's house after he found the black stone, and that the place was
+now avoided by everybody except the mail man and other casual, tough-minded
+people. Dark Mountain and Round Hill were both notoriously haunted spots,
+and I could find no one who had ever closely explored either. Occasional
+disappearances of natives throughout the district's history were well attested,
+and these now included the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom Akeley's
+letters had mentioned. I even came upon one farmer who thought he had
+personally glimpsed one of the queer bodies at flood-time in the swollen West
+River, but his tale was too confused to be really valuable.
+
+When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and I feel quite
+certain I shall keep my resolution. Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a
+frightful cosmic race - as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth planet
+has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be
+glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have
+named this thing "Pluto." I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than
+nighted Yuggoth - and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its
+monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly
+
+
+
+
+try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are not gradually leading up
+to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants.
+
+But I have still to tell of the ending of that terrible night in the farmhouse. As I
+have said, I did finally drop into a troubled doze; a doze filled with bits of dream
+which involved monstrous landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me I cannot
+yet say, but that I did indeed awake at this given point I feel very certain. My
+first confused impression was of stealthily creaking floor-boards in the hall
+outside my door, and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at the latch. This, however,
+ceased almost at once; so that my really clear impressions begin with the voices
+heard from the study below. There seemed to be several speakers, and I judged
+that they were controversially engaged.
+
+By the time I had listened a few seconds I was broad awake, for the nature of the
+voices was such as to make all thought of sleep ridiculous. The tones were
+curiously varied, and no one who had listened to that accursed phonograph
+record could harbour any doubts about the nature of at least two of them.
+Hideous though the idea was, I knew that I was under the same roof with
+nameless things from abysmal space; for those two voices were unmistakably the
+blasphemous buzzings which the Outside Beings used in their communication
+with men. The two were individually different - different in pitch, accent, and
+tempo - but they were both of the same damnable general kind.
+
+A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine connected
+with one of the detached brains in the cylinders. There was as little doubt about
+that as about the buzzings; for the loud, metallic, lifeless voice of the previous
+evening, with its inflectionless, expressionless scraping and rattling, and its
+impersonal precision and deliberation, had been utterly unforgettable. For a time
+I did not pause to question whether the intelligence behind the scraping was the
+identical one which had formerly talked to me; but shortly afterward I reflected
+that any brain would emit vocal sounds of the same quality if linked to the same
+mechanical speech-producer; the only possible differences being in language,
+rhythm, speed, and pronunciation. To complete the eldritch colloquy there were
+two actually human voices - one the crude speech of an unknown and evidently
+rustic man, and the other the suave Bostonian tones of my erstwhile guide
+Noyes.
+
+As I tried to catch the words which the stoutly-fashioned floor so bafflingly
+intercepted, I was also conscious of a great deal of stirring and scratching and
+shuffling in the room below; so that I could not escape the impression that it was
+full of living beings - many more than the few whose speech I could single out.
+The exact nature of this stirring is extremely hard to describe, for very few good
+bases of comparison exist. Objects seemed now and then to move across the
+
+
+
+
+room like conscious entities; the sound of their footfalls having something about
+it like a loose, hard-surfaced clattering - as of the contact of ill-coordinated
+surfaces of horn or hard rubber. It was, to use a more concrete but less accurate
+comparison, as if people with loose, splintery wooden shoes were shambling and
+rattling about on the polished board floor. Of the nature and appearance of those
+responsible for the sounds, I did not care to speculate.
+
+Before long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any connected
+discourse. Isolated words - including the names of Akeley and myself - now and
+then floated up, especially when uttered by the mechanical speech-producer; but
+their true significance was lost for want of continuous context. Today I refuse to
+form any definite deductions from them, and even their frightful effect on me
+was one of suggestion rather than of revelation. A terrible and abnormal
+conclave, I felt certain, was assembled below me; but for what shocking
+deliberations I could not tell. It was curious how this unquestioned sense of the
+malign and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley's assurances of the
+Outsider's friendliness.
+
+With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices, even though
+I could not grasp much of what any of the voices said. I seemed to catch certain
+typical emotions behind some of the speakers. One of the buzzing voices, for
+example, held an unmistakable note of authority; whilst the mechanical voice,
+notwithstanding its artificial loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position
+of subordination and pleading. Noyes's tones exuded a kind of conciliatory
+atmosphere. The others I could make no attempt to interpret. I did not hear the
+familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that such a sound could never
+penetrate the solid flooring of my room.
+
+I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other sounds I
+caught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know how. It was from the
+speech-machine that I first picked up a few recognisable phrases.
+
+(The Speech-Machine)
+
+"...brought it on myself... sent back the letters and the record... end on it...
+taken in... seeing and hearing... damn you... impersonal force, after all... fresh,
+shiny cylinder. . . great God. . ."
+
+(First Buzzing Voice)
+
+" . . .time we stopped. . . small and human. . . Akeley. . . brain. . . saying. . ."
+
+(Second Buzzing Voice)
+
+
+
+
+"Nyarlathotep... Wilmarth... records and letters... cheap imposture..."
+
+(Noyes)
+
+"...(an unpronounceable word or name, possibly N'gah-Kthun) harmless...
+peace. . . couple of weeks. . . theatrical. . . told you that before. . ."
+
+(First Buzzing Voice)
+
+"...no reason... original plan... effects... Noyes can watch Round Hill... fresh
+cylinder... Noyes's car..."
+
+(Noyes)
+
+"...well... all yours... down here... rest... place..."
+
+(Several Voices at Once in Indistinguishable Speech)
+
+(Many Footsteps, Including the Peculiar Loose Stirring or Clattering)
+
+(A Curious Sort of Flapping Sound)
+
+(The Sound of an Automobile Starting and Receding)
+
+(Silence)
+
+That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon that strange
+upstairs bed in the haunted farmhouse among the daemoniac hills - lay there
+fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right hand and a pocket flashlight
+gripped in my left. I became, as I have said, broad awake; but a kind of obscure
+paralysis nevertheless kept me inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds
+had died away. I heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the ancient Connecticut
+clock somewhere far below, and at last made out the irregular snoring of a
+sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange session, and I could well
+believe that he needed to do so.
+
+Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide After all, what had
+I heard beyond things which previous information might have led me to expect?
+Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were now freely admitted to the
+farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been surprised by an unexpected visit from
+them. Yet something in that fragmentary discourse had chilled me
+immeasurably, raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me
+wish fervently that I might wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my
+subconscious mind must have caught something which my consciousness has
+
+
+
+
+not yet recognised. But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and would he not
+have protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed
+to cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears.
+
+Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to draw
+me into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph record? Did those
+beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction because we had come to
+know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness and unnaturalness of that
+change in the situation which must have occurred between Akeley's penultimate
+and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was not
+as it seemed. That acrid coffee which I refused - had there not been an attempt by
+some hidden, unknown entity to drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and
+restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised him with their promises of
+cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to reason. We. must get out of this
+before it would be too late. If he lacked the will power to make the break for
+liberty. I would supply it. Or if I could not persuade him to go, I could at least go
+myself. Surely he would let me take his Ford and leave it in a garage in
+Brattleboro. I had noticed it in the shed - the door being left unlocked and open
+now that peril was deemed past - and I believed there was a good chance of its
+being ready for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had felt
+during and after the evening's conversation was all gone now. He was in a
+position much like my own, and we must stick together. Knowing his indisposed
+condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I knew that I must. I could
+not stay in this place till morning as matters stood.
+
+At last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to regain command of
+my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive than deliberate, I found and
+donned my hat, took my valise, and started downstairs with the flashlight's aid.
+In my nervousness I kept the revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to
+take care of both valise and flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these
+precautions I do not really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the
+only other occupant of the house.
+
+As I half-tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could hear the
+sleeper more plainly, and noticed that he must be in the room on my left - the
+living-room I had not entered. On my right was the gaping blackness of the
+study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing open the unlatched door of the
+living-room I traced a path with the flashlight toward the source of the snoring,
+and finally turned the beams on the sleeper's face. But in the next second I hastily
+turned them away and commenced a catlike retreat to the hall, my caution this
+time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on the couch
+was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.
+
+
+
+
+Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense told me
+that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible before arousing
+anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door
+after me; thereby lessening the chances of awakening Noyes. I now cautiously
+entered the dark study, where I expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or
+awake, in the great corner chair which was evidently his favorite resting-place.
+As I advanced, the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre- table,
+revealing one of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached,
+and with a speech machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any
+moment. This, I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard talking during
+the frightful conference; and for a second I had a perverse impulse to attach the
+speech machine and see what it would say.
+
+It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and
+hearing attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the
+faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare meddle
+with the thing. I idly saw that it was the fresh shiny cylinder with Akeley's name
+on it, which I had noticed on the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host
+had told me not to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only regret my
+timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows
+what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of identity it might have
+cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.
+
+From the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought Akeley was,
+but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was empty of any human
+occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor there trailed voluminously
+the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the yellow scarf and
+the huge foot-bandages I had thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to
+conjecture where Akeley might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his
+necessary sick-room garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of
+vibration were no longer in the room. What had been their cause? Curiously it
+occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley's vicinity. They had been
+strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or just
+outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the flashlight wander about the
+dark study and racking my brain for explanations of the turn affairs had taken.
+
+Would to Heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that light to rest
+again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not leave quietly; but with a
+muffled shriek which must have disturbed, though it did not quite awake, the
+sleeping sentinel across the hall. That shriek, and Noyes's still-unbroken snore,
+are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the
+black-wooded crest of haunted mountain - that focus of transcosmic horror
+amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.
+
+
+
+
+It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wild
+scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually managed to get out
+of that room and that house without making any further noise, to drag myself
+and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic
+vehicle in motion toward some unknown point of safety in the black, moonless
+night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or
+the drawings of Dore, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is
+still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially
+since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.
+
+As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its
+circuit of the room; then noticing for the first time the presence of certain objects
+in the seat, made inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the empty
+dressing-gown. These are the objects, three in number, which the investigators
+did not find when they came later on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing
+of actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one to infer.
+Even now I have my moments of half-doubt - moments in which I half-accept the
+scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience to dream and nerves and
+delusion.
+
+The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were
+furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic
+developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hope - devoutly hope-
+that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my inmost
+fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour and
+vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider.. . that hideous repressed
+buzzing. . . and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf. . . poor devil
+. . . "Prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill.. .
+
+For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic
+resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.
+
+
+
+
+The White Ship
+
+
+
+Written November 1919
+
+Published November 1919 in The United Amateur, Vol. 19, No. 2, p. 30-33.
+
+I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather
+kept before me. Far from the shore stands the gray lighthouse, above sunken
+slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high.
+Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas.
+In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so
+many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though
+I were the last man on our planet.
+
+From far shores came those white-sailed argosies of old; from far Eastern shores
+where warm suns shine and sweet odors linger about strange gardens and gay
+temples. The old captains of the sea came often to my grandfather and told him
+of these things which in turn he told to my father, and my father told to me in the
+long autumn evenings when the wind howled eerily from the East. And I have
+read more of these things, and of many things besides, in the books men gave me
+when I was young and filled with wonder.
+
+But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret
+lore of ocean. Blue, green, gray, white or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous;
+that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I
+know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and
+near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of
+things more strange and more distant in space and time. Sometimes at twilight
+the gray vapors of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways
+beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and
+phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses
+have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the
+ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with
+the memories and the dreams of Time.
+
+Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was
+full and high in the heavens. Out of the South it would glide very smoothly and
+silently over the sea. And whether the sea was rough or calm, and whether the
+wind was friendly or adverse, it would always glide smoothly and silently, its
+sails distant and its long strange tiers of oars moving rhythmically. One night I
+espied upon the deck a man, bearded and robed, and he seemed to beckon me to
+
+
+
+
+embark for far unknown shores. Many times afterward I saw him under the full
+moon, and never did he beckon me.
+
+Very brightly did the moon shine on the night I answered the call, and I walked
+out over the waters to the White Ship on a bridge of moonbeams. The man who
+had beckoned now spoke a welcome to me in a soft language I seemed to know
+well, and the hours were filled with soft songs of the oarsmen as we glided away
+into a mysterious South, golden with the glow of that full, mellow moon.
+
+And when the day dawned, rosy and effulgent, I beheld the green shore of far
+lands, bright and beautiful, and to me unknown. Up from the sea rose lordly
+terraces of verdure, tree-studded, and shewing here and there the gleaming
+white roofs and colonnades of strange temples. As we drew nearer the green
+shore the bearded man told me of that land, the land of Zar, where dwell all the
+dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten.
+And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for
+among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists
+beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of ocean. There too were
+forms and fantasies more splendid than any I had ever known; the visions of
+young poets who died in want before the world could learn of what they had
+seen and dreamed. But we did not set foot upon the sloping meadows of Zar, for
+it is told that he who treads them may nevermore return to his native shore.
+
+As the White Ship sailed silently away from the templed terraces of Zar, we
+beheld on the distant horizon ahead the spires of a mighty city; and the bearded
+man said to me, "This is Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, wherein
+reside all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to fathom." And I looked
+again, at closer range, and saw that the city was greater than any city I had
+known or dreamed of before. Into the sky the spires of its temples reached, so
+that no man might behold their peaks; and far back beyond the horizon stretched
+the grim, gray walls, over which one might spy only a few roofs, weird and
+ominous, yet adorned with rich friezes and alluring sculptures. I yearned
+mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and besought the bearded
+man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently
+denied my wish, saying, "Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many
+have passed but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad things that
+are no longer men, and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those
+who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city." So the White
+Ship sailed on past the walls of Thalarion, and followed for many days a
+southward-flying bird, whose glossy plumage matched the sky out of which it
+had appeared.
+
+
+
+
+Then came we to a pleasant coast gay with blossoms of every hue, where as far
+inland as we could see basked lovely groves and radiant arbors beneath a
+meridian sun. From bowers beyond our view came bursts of song and snatches
+of lyric harmony, interspersed with faint laughter so delicious that I urged the
+rowers onward in my eagerness to reach the scene. And the bearded man spoke
+no word, but watched me as we approached the lily-lined shore. Suddenly a
+wind blowing from over the flowery meadows and leafy woods brought a scent
+at which I trembled. The wind grew stronger, and the air was filled with the
+lethal, charnel odor of plague-stricken towns and uncovered cemeteries. And as
+we sailed madly away from that damnable coast the bearded man spoke at last,
+saying, "This is Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained."
+
+So once more the White Ship followed the bird of heaven, over warm blessed
+seas fanned by caressing, aromatic breezes. Day after day and night after night
+did we sail, and when the moon was full we would listen to soft songs of the
+oarsmen, sweet as on that distant night when we sailed away from my far native
+land. And it was by moonlight that we anchored at last in the harbor of Sona-
+Nyl, which is guarded by twin headlands of crystal that rise from the sea and
+meet in a resplendent arch. This is the Land of Fancy, and we walked to the
+verdant shore upon a golden bridge of moonbeams.
+
+In the Land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor
+death; and there I dwelt for many aeons. Green are the groves and pastures,
+bright and fragrant the flowers, blue and musical the streams, clear and cool the
+fountains, and stately and gorgeous the temples, castles, and cities of Sona- Nyl.
+Of that land there is no bound, for beyond each vista of beauty rises another
+more beautiful. Over the countryside and amidst the splendor of cities can move
+at will the happy folk, of whom all are gifted with unmarred grace and
+unalloyed happiness. For the aeons that I dwelt there I wandered blissfully
+through gardens where quaint pagodas peep from pleasing clumps of bushes,
+and where the white walks are bordered with delicate blossoms. I climbed gentle
+hills from whose summits I could see entrancing panoramas of loveliness, with
+steepled towns nestling in verdant valleys, and with the golden domes of
+gigantic cities glittering on the infinitely distant horizon. And I viewed by
+moonlight the sparkling sea, the crystal headlands, and the placid harbor
+wherein lay anchored the White Ship.
+
+It was against the full moon one night in the immemorial year of Tharp that I
+saw outlined the beckoning form of the celestial bird, and felt the first stirrings of
+unrest. Then I spoke with the bearded man, and told him of my new yearnings to
+depart for remote Cathuria, which no man hath seen, but which all believe to lie
+beyond the basalt pillars of the West. It is the Land of Hope, and in it shine the
+perfect ideals of all that we know elsewhere; or at least so men relate. But the
+
+
+
+
+bearded man said to me, "Beware of those perilous seas wherein men say
+Cathuria Hes. In Sona-Nyl there is no pain or death, but who can tell what lies
+beyond the basalt pillars of the West?" Natheless at the next full moon I boarded
+the White Ship, and with the reluctant bearded man left the happy harbor for
+untraveled seas.
+
+And the bird of heaven flew before, and led us toward the basalt pillars of the
+West, but this time the oarsmen sang no soft songs under the full moon. In my
+mind I would often picture the unknown Land of Cathuria with its splendid
+groves and palaces, and would wonder what new delights there awaited me.
+"Cathuria," I would say to myself, "is the abode of gods and the land of
+unnumbered cities of gold. Its forests are of aloe and sandalwood, even as the
+fragrant groves of Camorin, and among the trees flutter gay birds sweet with
+song. On the green and flowery mountains of Cathuria stand temples of pink
+marble, rich with carven and painted glories, and having in their courtyards cool
+fountains of silver, where purr with ravishing music the scented waters that
+come from the grotto-born river Narg. And the cities of Cathuria are cinctured
+with golden walls, and their pavements also are of gold. In the gardens of these
+cities are strange orchids, and perfumed lakes whose beds are of coral and
+amber. At night the streets and the gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned
+from the three-colored shell of the tortoise, and here resound the soft notes of the
+singer and the lutanist. And the houses of the cities of Cathuria are all palaces,
+each built over a fragrant canal bearing the waters of the sacred Narg. Of marble
+and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold that reflects the
+rays of the sun and enhances the splendor of the cities as blissful gods view them
+from the distant peaks. Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb,
+whom some say to be a demi-god and others a god. High is the palace of Dorieb,
+and many are the turrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls many
+multitudes assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the roof is of
+pure gold, set upon tall pillars of ruby and azure, and having such carven figures
+of gods and heroes that he who looks up to those heights seems to gaze upon the
+living Olympus. And the floor of the palace is of glass, under which flow the
+cunningly lighted waters of the Narg, gay with gaudy fish not known beyond the
+bounds of lovely Cathuria."
+
+Thus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but ever would the bearded man warn
+me to turn back to the happy shore of Sona-Nyl; for Sona-Nyl is known of men,
+while none hath ever beheld Cathuria.
+
+And on the thirty-first day that we followed the bird, we beheld the basalt pillars
+of the West. Shrouded in mist they were, so that no man might peer beyond
+them or see their summits — which indeed some say reach even to the heavens.
+And the bearded man again implored me to turn back, but I heeded him not; for
+
+
+
+
+from the mists beyond the basah pillars I fancied there came the notes of singers
+and lutanists; sweeter than the sweetest songs of Sona-Nyl, and sounding mine
+own praises; the praises of me, who had voyaged far from the full moon and
+dwelt in the Land of Fancy. So to the sound of melody the White Ship sailed into
+the mist betwixt the basalt pillars of the West. And when the music ceased and
+the mist lifted, we beheld not the Land of Cathuria, but a swift-rushing resistless
+sea, over which our helpless barque was borne toward some unknown goal.
+Soon to our ears came the distant thunder of falling waters, and to our eyes
+appeared on the far horizon ahead the titanic spray of a monstrous cataract,
+wherein the oceans of the world drop down to abysmal nothingness. Then did
+the bearded man say to me, with tears on his cheek, "We have rejected the
+beautiful Land of Sona-Nyl, which we may never behold again. The gods are
+greater than men, and they have conquered." And I closed my eyes before the
+crash that I knew would come, shutting out the sight of the celestial bird which
+flapped its mocking blue wings over the brink of the torrent.
+
+Out of that crash came darkness, and I heard the shrieking of men and of things
+which were not men. From the East tempestuous winds arose, and chilled me as
+I crouched on the slab of damp stone which had risen beneath my feet. Then as I
+heard another crash I opened my eyes and beheld myself upon the platform of
+that lighthouse whence I had sailed so many aeons ago. In the darkness below
+there loomed the vast blurred outlines of a vessel breaking up on the cruel rocks,
+and as I glanced out over the waste I saw that the light had failed for the first
+time since my grandfather had assumed its care.
+
+And in the later watches of the night, when I went within the tower, I saw on the
+wall a calendar which still remained as when I had left it at the hour I sailed
+away. With the dawn I descended the tower and looked for wreckage upon the
+rocks, but what I found was only this: a strange dead bird whose hue was as of
+the azure sky, and a single shattered spar, of a whiteness greater than that of the
+wave-tips or of the mountain snow.
+
+And thereafter the ocean told me its secrets no more; and though many times
+since has the moon shone full and high in the heavens, the White Ship from the
+South came never again.
+
+
+
+
+What the Moon Brings
+
+Written 5 June 1922
+
+Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. 5, page 9
+
+I hate the moon - I am afraid of it - for when it shines on certain scenes familiar
+and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.
+
+It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden
+where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of
+foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the
+shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if
+those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that
+are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed
+waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white
+lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped
+despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven
+bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.
+
+And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and
+maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I
+saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls
+were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs,
+stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy
+banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-
+faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the
+stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches
+of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea.
+
+Upon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird
+perfumes breeded. And as I saw therein the lotos-faces vanish, I longed for nets
+that I might capture them and learn from them the secrets which the moon had
+brought upon the night. But when that moon went over to the west and the still
+tide ebbed from the sullen shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves
+almost uncovered, and white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. And
+knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not
+wish again to speak with the lotos-faces.
+
+Yet when I saw afar out in the sea a black condor descend from the sky to seek
+rest on a vast reef, I would fain have questioned him, and asked him of those
+whom I had known when they were alive. This I would have asked him had he
+
+
+
+
+not been so far away, but he was very far, and could not be seen at all when he
+drew nigh that gigantic reef.
+
+So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the
+spires, the towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched,
+my nostrils tried to close against the perfume- conquering stench of the world's
+dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the
+churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon.
+
+Over these horrors the evil moon now hung very low, but the puffy worms of the
+sea need no moon to feed by. And as I watched the ripples that told of the
+writhing of worms beneath, I felt a new chill from afar out whither the condor
+had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it.
+
+Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that
+the waters had ebbed very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had
+seen before. And when I saw that the reef was but the black basalt crown of a
+shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shown in the dim moonlight and
+whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and
+shrieked lest the hidden face rise above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look
+at me after the slinking away of that leering and treacherous yellow moon.
+
+And to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitantly into the
+stinking shallows where amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms
+feast upon the world's dead.
+
+
+
+
+Medusa's Coil - with Zealia Bishop
+
+Written May 1930
+
+Published January 1939 in Weird Tales, 33, No. 1, 26-53.
+
+The drive toward Cape Girardeau had been through unfamiliar country; and as
+the late afternoon light grew golden and half-dreamlike I realized that I must
+have directions if I expected to reach the town before night. I did not care to be
+wandering about these bleak southern Missouri lowlands after dark, for roads
+were poor and the November cold rather formidable in an open roadster. Black
+clouds, too, were massing on the horizon; so I looked about among the long, grey
+and blue shadows that streaked the flat, brownish fields, hoping to glimpse some
+house where I might get the needed information.
+
+It was a lonely and deserted country, but at last I spied a roof among a clump of
+trees near the small river on my right; perhaps a full half-mile from the road, and
+probably reachable by some path or drive which I would presently come upon.
+In the absence of any nearer dwelling, I resolved to try my luck there; and was
+glad when the bushes by the roadside revealed the ruin of a carved stone
+gateway, covered with dry, dead vines and choked with undergrowth which
+explained why I had not been able to trace the path across the fields in my first
+distant view. I saw that I could not drive the car in, so I parked it very carefully
+near the gate - where a thick evergreen would shield it in case of rain - and got
+out for the long walk to the house.
+
+Traversing that brush-growth path in the gathering twilight I was conscious of a
+distinct sense of foreboding, probably induced by the air of sinister decay
+hovering about the gate and the former driveway. From the carvings on the old
+stone pillars I inferred that this place was once an estate of manorial dignity; and
+I could clearly see that the driveway had originally boasted guardian lines of
+linden trees, some of which had died, while others had lost their special identity
+among the wild scrub growths of the region.
+
+As I ploughed onward, cockleburs and stickers clung to my clothes, and I began
+to wonder whether the place could be inhabited after all. Was I tramping on a
+vain errand? For a moment I was tempted to go back and try some farm farther
+along the road, when a view of the house ahead aroused my curiosity and
+stimulated my venturesome spirit.
+
+There was something provocatively fascinating in the tree-girt, decrepit pile
+before me, for it spoke of the graces and spaciousness of a bygone era and a far
+
+
+
+
+more southerly environment. It was a typical wooden plantation house of the
+classic, early nineteenth-century pattern, with two and a half stories and a great
+Ionic portico whose pillars reached up as far as the attic and supported a
+triangular pediment. Its state of decay was extreme and obvious; one of the vast
+columns having rotted and fallen to the ground, while the upper piazza or
+balcony had sagged dangerously low. Other buildings, I judged, had formerly
+stood near it.
+
+As I mounted the broad stone steps to the low porch and the carved and
+fanlighted doorway I felt distinctly nervous, and started to light a cigarette -
+desisting when I saw how dry and inflammable everything about me was.
+Though now convinced that the house was deserted, I nevertheless hesitated to
+violate its dignity without knocking; so tugged at the rusty iron knocker until I
+could get it to move, and finally set up a cautious rapping which seemed to make
+the whole place shake and rattle. There was no response, yet once more I plied
+the cumbrous, creaking device - as much to dispel the sense of unholy silence
+and solitude as to arouse any possible occupant of the ruin.
+
+Somewhere near the river I heard the mournful not of a dove, and it seemed as if
+the coursing water itself were faintly audible. Half in a dream, I seized and
+rattled the ancient latch, and finally gave the great six- panelled door a frank
+trying. It was unlocked, as I could see in a moment; and though it stuck and
+grated on its hinges I began to push it open, stepping through it into a vast
+shadowy hall as I did so.
+
+But the moment I took this step I regretted it. It was not that a legion of specters
+confronted me in that dim and dusty hall with the ghostly Empire furniture; but
+that I knew all at once that the place was not deserted at all. There was a creaking
+on the great curved staircase, and the sound of faltering footsteps slowly
+descending. Then I saw a tall, bent figure silhouetted for an instant against the
+great Palladian window on the landing.
+
+My first start of terror was soon over, and as the figure descended the final flight
+I was ready to greet the householder whose privacy I had invaded. In the semi-
+darkness I could see him reach in his pocket for a match. There came a flare as he
+lighted a small kerosene lamp which stood on a rickety console table near the
+foot of the stairs. In the feeble glow was revealed the stooping figure of a very
+tall, emaciated old man; disordered as to dress and unshaved as to face, yet for
+all that with the bearing and expression of a gentleman.
+
+I did not wait for him to speak, but at once began to explain my presence.
+
+
+
+
+"You'll pardon my coining in like this, but when my knocking didn't raise
+anybody I concluded that no one lived here. What I wanted originally was to
+know the right road to Cape Girardeau - the shortest road, that is. I wanted to get
+there before dark, but now, of course - "
+
+As I paused, the man spoke; in exactly the cultivated tone I had expected, and
+with a mellow accent as unmistakably Southern as the house he inhabited.
+
+"Rather, you must pardon me for not answering your knock more promptly. I
+live in a very retired way, and am not usually expecting visitors. At first I
+thought you were a mere curiosity-seeker. Then when you knocked again I
+started to answer, but I am not well and have to move very slowly. Spinal
+neuritis - very troublesome case.
+
+"But as for your getting to town before dark - it's plain you can't do that. The
+road you are one - for I suppose you came from the gate - isn't the best or
+shortest way. What you must do is to take your first left after you leave the gate -
+that is, the first real road to your left. There are three or four cart paths you can
+ignore, but you can't mistake the real road because of the extra large willow tree
+on the right just opposite it. Then when you've turned, keep on past two roads
+and turn to the right along the third. After that - "
+
+"Please wait a moment! How can I follow all these clues in pitch darkness,
+without ever having been near here before, and with only an indifferent pair of
+headlights to tell me what is and what isn't a road? Besides, I think it's going to
+storm pretty soon, and my car is an open one. It looks as if I were in a bad fix if I
+want to get to Cape Girardeau tonight. The fact is, I don't think I'd better try to
+make it. I don't like to impose burdens, or anything like that - but in view of the
+circumstances, do you suppose you could put me up for the night? I won't be
+any trouble - no meals or anything. Just let me have a corner to sleep in till
+daylight, and I'm all right. I can leave the car in the road where it is - a bit of wet
+weather won't hurt it if worst comes to worst."
+
+As I made my sudden request I could see the old man's face lose its former
+expression of quiet resignation and take on an odd, surprised look.
+
+"Sleep - here?"
+
+He seemed so astonished at my request that I repeated it.
+
+"Yes, why not? I assure you I won't be any trouble. What else can I do? I'm a
+stranger hereabouts, these roads are a labyrinth in the dark, and I'll wager it'll be
+raining torrents outside of an hour - "
+
+
+
+
+This time it my host's turn to interrupt, and as he did so I could feel a peculiar
+quality in his deep, musical voice.
+
+"A stranger - of course you must be, else you wouldn't think of sleeping here,
+wouldn't think of coming here at all. People don't come here nowadays."
+
+He paused, and my desire to stay was increased a thousandfold by the sense of
+mystery his laconic words seemed to evoke. There was surely something
+alluringly queer about this place, and the pervasive musty smell seemed to cloak
+a thousand secrets. Again I noticed the extreme decrepitude of everything about
+me; manifest even in the feeble rays of the single small lamp. I felt woefully
+chilly, and saw with regret that no heating was provided, and yet so great was
+my curiosity that I still wished most ardently to stay and learn something of the
+recluse and his dismal abode.
+
+"Let that be as it may," I replied. "I can't help about other people. But I surely
+would like to have a spot to stop till daylight. Still - if people don't relish this
+place, mayn't it be because it's getting so run-down? Of course I suppose it a take
+a fortune to keep such an estate up, but if the burden's too great why don't you
+look for smaller quarters? Why try to stick it out here in this way - with all the
+hardships and discomforts?"
+
+The man did not seem offended, but answered me very gravely.
+
+"Surely you may stay if you really wish to - you can come to no harm that I
+know of. But others claim there are certain peculiarly undesirable influences
+here. As for me - 1 stay here because I have to. There is something I feel it a duty
+to guard - something that holds me. I wish I had the money and health and
+ambition to take decent care of the house and grounds."
+
+With my curiosity still more heightened, I prepared to take my host at his word;
+and followed him slowly upstairs when he motioned me to do so. It was very
+dark now, and a faint pattering outside told me that the threatened rain had
+come. I would have been glad of any shelter, but this was doubly welcome
+because of the hints of mystery about the place and its master. For an incurable
+lover of the grotesque, no more fitting haven could have been provided.
+
+
+There was a second-floor corner room in less unkempt shape than the rest of the
+house, and into this my host led me, setting down his small lamp and lighting a
+somewhat larger one. From the cleanliness and contents of the room, and from
+the books ranged along the walls, I could see that I had not guessed amiss in
+
+
+
+
+thinking the man a gentleman of taste of breeding. He was a hermit and
+eccentric, no doubt, but he still had standards and intellectual interests. As he
+waved me to a seat I began a conversation on general topics, and was pleased to
+find him not at all taciturn. If anything, he seemed glad of someone to talk, and
+did not even attempt to swerve the discussion from personal topics.
+
+He was, I learned, one Antoine de Russy, of an ancient, powerful, and cultivated
+line of Louisiana planters. More than a century ago his grandfather, a younger
+so, had migrated to southern Missouri and founded a new estate in the lavish
+ancestral manner; building this pillared mansion and surrounding it with all the
+accessories of a great plantation. There had been, at one time, as many as 200
+negroes in the cabins which stood on the flat ground in the rear - ground that the
+river had now invaded - and to hear them singing and laughing and playing the
+banjo at night was to know the fullest charm of a civilization and social order
+now sadly extinct. In front of the house, where the great guardian oaks and
+willows stood, there had been a lawn like a broad green carpet, always watered
+and trimmed and with flagstoned, flower-bordered walks curving through it.
+"Riverside" - for such the place was called - had been a lovely and idyllic
+homestead in its day; and my host could recall it when many traces of its best
+period.
+
+It was raining hard now, with dense sheets of water beating against the insecure
+roof, walls, and windows, and sending in drops through a thousand chinks and
+crevices. Moisture trickled down to the floor from unsuspected places, and the
+mounting wind rattled the rotting, loose-hinged shutters outside. But I minded
+none of this, for I saw that a story was coming. Incited to reminiscence, my host
+made a move to shew me to sleeping-quarters; but kept on recalling the older,
+better days. Soon, I saw, I would receive an inkling of why he lived alone in that
+ancient place, and why his neighbours thought it full of undesirable influences.
+His voice was very musical as he spoke on, and his tale soon took a turn which
+left me no chance to grow drowsy.
+
+"Yes - Riverside was built in 1816, and my father was born in 1828. He'd be over
+a century old now if he were alive, but he died young - so young I can just barely
+remember him. In '64 that was - he was killed in the war. Seventh Louisiana
+Infantry C.S.A., for he went back to the old home to enlist. My grandfather was
+too old to fight, yet he lived on to be ninety-five, and helped my mother bring me
+up. A good bringing-up, too - I'll give them credit. We always had strong
+traditions - high notions of honor - and my grandfather saw to it that I grew up
+the way de Russys have grown up, generation after generation, ever since the
+Crusades. We weren't quite wiped out financially, but managed to get on very
+comfortable after the war. I went to a good school in Louisiana, and later to
+
+
+
+
+Princeton. Later on I was able to get the plantation on a fairly profitable basis -
+though you see what it's come to now.
+
+"My mother died when I was twenty, and my grandfather two years later. It was
+rather lonely after that; and in '85 I married a distant cousin in New Orleans.
+Things might have bee different if she'd lived, but she died when my son Denis
+was born. Then I had only Denis. I didn't try marriage again, but gave all my
+time to the boy. He was like me - like all the de Russys - darkish and tall and
+thin, and with the devil of a temper. I gave him the same training my
+grandfather had give me, but he didn't need much training when it came to
+points of honor. It was in him, I reckon. Never saw such high spirit - all I could
+do to keep him from running away to the Spanish War when he was eleven!
+Romantic young devil, too - full of high notions - you'd call 'em Victorian, now -
+no trouble at all to make him let the nigger wenches alone. I sent him to the same
+school I'd gone to, and to Princeton, too. He was Class of 1909.
+
+"In the end he decided to be a doctor, and went a year to the Harvard Medical
+School. Then he hit on the idea of keeping to the old French tradition of the
+family, and argued me into sending him across to the Sorbonne. I did - and
+proudly enough, though I knew I'd be how lonely I'd be with him so far off.
+Would to God I hadn't! I thought he was the safest kind of boy to be in Paris. He
+had a room in the Rue St. Jacques - that's near the University in the 'Latin
+Quarter' - but according to his letters and his friends he didn't cut up with the
+gayer dogs at all. The people he knew were mostly young fellows from home -
+serious students and artists who thought more of their work than of striking
+attitudes and painting the town red.
+
+"But of course there were lots of fellows who were on a sort of dividing line
+between serious studies and the devil. The aesthetes - the decadents, you know.
+Experiments in life and sensation - the Baudelaire kind of a chap. Naturally
+Denis ran up against a good many of these, and saw a good deal of their life.
+They had all sorts of crazy circles and cults - imitation devil-worship, fake Black
+Masses, and the like. Doubt if it did them much harm on the whole - probably
+most of 'em forgot all about it in a year or two. One of the deepest in this queer
+stuff was a fellow Denis had known at school - for that matter, whose father I'd
+known myself. Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of Lafcadio Hearn and
+Gauguin and Van Gogh - regular epitome of the yellow 'nineties. Poor devil - he
+had the makings of a great artist, at that.
+
+"Marsh was the oldest friend Denis had in Paris, so as a matter of course they
+saw a good deal of each other - to talk over old times at St. Clair academy, and all
+that. The boy wrote me a good deal about him, and I didn't see any especial
+harm when he spoke of the group of mystics Marsh ran with. It seems there was
+
+
+
+
+some cult of prehistoric Egyptian and Carthaginian magic having a rage among
+the Bohemian element on the left bank - some nonsensical thing that pretended
+to reach back to forgotten sources of hidden truth in lost African civilisations -
+the great Zimbabwe, the dead Atlantean cities in the Haggar region of the Sahara
+- and they had a lot of gibberish concerned with snakes and human hair. At least,
+I called it gibberish, then. Denis used to quote Marsh as saying odd things about
+the veiled facts behind the legend of Medusa's snaky locks - and behind the later
+Ptolemaic myth of Berenice, who offered up her hair to save her husband-
+brother, and had it set in the sky as the constellation Coma Berenices.
+
+"I don't think this business made much impression on Denis until the night of
+the queer ritual at Marsh's rooms when he met the priestess. Most of the
+devotees of the cult were young fellows, but the head of it was a young woman
+who called herself 'Tanit-Isis' - letting it be known that her real name - her name
+in this latest incarnation, as she put it - was Marceline Bedard. She claimed to be
+the left-handed daughter of Marquis de Chameaux, and seemed to have been
+both a petty artist and an artist's model before adopting this more lucrative
+magical game. Someone said she had lived for a time in the West Indies -
+Martinique, I think - but she was very reticent about herself. Part of her pose was
+a great show of austerity and holiness, but I don't think the more experienced
+students took that very seriously.
+
+"Denis, though, was far from experienced, and wrote me fully ten pages of slush
+about the goddess he had discovered. If I'd only realised his simplicity I might
+have done something, but I never thought a puppy infatuation like could mean
+much. I felt absurdly sure that Denis' touchy personal honour and family pride
+would always keep him out of the most serious complications.
+
+"As time went, though, his letters began to make me nervous. He mentioned this
+Marceline more and more, and his friends less and les, and began talking about
+the 'cruel and silly way' they declined to introduce her to their mothers and
+sisters. He seems to have asked her no questions about herself, and I don't doubt
+but that she filled him full of romantic legendry concerning her origin and divine
+revelations and the way people slighted her. At length I could see that Denis was
+altogether cutting his own crowd and spending the bulk of his time with his
+alluring priestess. At her especial request he never told the old crowd of their
+continual meetings; so nobody over there tried to break the affair up.
+
+"I suppose she thought he was fabulously rich; for he had the air of a patrician,
+and people of a certain class think all aristocratic Americans are wealthy. In any
+case, she probably thought this a rare chance to contract a genuine right-handed
+alliance with a really eligible young man. By the time my nervousness burst into
+open advice, it was too late. The boy had lawfully married her, and wrote that he
+
+
+
+
+was dropping his studies and bringing the woman home to Riverside. He said
+she had made a great sacrifice and resigned her leadership of the magical cult,
+and that henceforward she would be merely a private gentlewoman - the future
+mistress of Riverside, and mother of de Russys to come.
+
+"Well, sir, I took it the best way I could. I knew that sophisticated Continentals
+have different standards from our old American ones - and anyway, I really
+knew nothing against the woman. A charlatan, perhaps, but why necessarily any
+worse? I suppose I tried to keep as naive as possible about such things in those
+days, for the boy's sake. Clearly, there was nothing for a man of sense to do but
+let Denis alone so long as his new wife conformed to de Russy ways. Let her
+have a chance to prove herself - perhaps she wouldn't hurt the family as much as
+some might fear. So I didn't raise any objections or ask any penitence. The thing
+was done, and I stood ready to welcome the boy back, whatever he brought with
+him.
+
+"They got here three weeks after the telegram telling of marriage. Marceline was
+beautiful - there was no denying that - and I could see how the boy might very
+well get foolish about her. She did have an air of breeding, and I think to this day
+she must have had some strains of good blood in her. She was apparently not
+much over twenty; of medium size, fairly slim, and as graceful as a tigress in
+posture and motion. Her complexion was a deep olive - like old ivory - and her
+eyes were large and very dark. She had small, classically regular features -
+though not quite clean-cut enough to suit my taste - and the most singular braid
+of jet black hair that I ever saw.
+
+"I didn't wonder that she had dragged the subject of hair into her magical cult,
+for with that heavy profusion of it the idea must have occurred to her naturally.
+Coiled up, it made her look like some Oriental princess in a drawing of Aubrey
+Beardsley's. Hanging down her back, it came well below her knees and shone in
+the light as if it had possessed some separate, unholy vitality of its own. I would
+almost have thought of Medusa or Berenice myself - without having such things
+suggested to me - upon seeing and studying that hair.
+
+"Sometimes I thought it moved slightly of itself, and tended to arrange itself in
+distinct ropes or strands, but this may have been sheer illusion. She braided it
+incessantly, and seemed to use some sort of preparation on it. I got the notion
+once - a curious, whimsical notion - that it was a living being which she had to
+feed in some strange way. All nonsense - but it added to my feeling of constraint
+about her and her hair.
+
+"For I can't deny that I failed to like her wholly, no matter how hard I tried. I
+couldn't tell what the trouble was, but it was there. Something about her repelled
+
+
+
+
+me very subtly, and I could not help weaving morbid and macabre associations
+about everything connected with her. Her complexion called up thoughts of
+Babylon, Atlantis, Lemuria, and the terrible forgotten dominations of an elder
+world; her eyes struck me sometimes as the eyes of some unholy forest creature
+or animal goddess too immeasurably ancient to be fully human; and her hair -
+that dense, exotic, overnourished growth of oily inkiness - made one shiver as a
+great black python might have done. There was no doubt but that she realised
+my involuntary attitude - though I tried to hide it, and she tried to hide the fact
+that she noticed it.
+
+"Yet the boy's infatuation lasted. He positively fawned on her, and overdid all
+the little gallantries of daily life to a sickening degree. She appeared to return the
+feeling, though I could see it took a conscious effort to make her duplicate his
+enthusiasms and extravagances. For one thing, I think she was piqued to learn
+we weren't as wealthy as she had expected.
+
+"It was a bad business all told. I could see that sad undercurrents were arising.
+Denis was half-hypnotised with puppy-love, and began to grow away from as he
+felt my shrinking from his wife. This kind of thing went on for months, and I saw
+that I was losing my only son - the boy who had formed the centre of all my
+thoughts and acts for the past quarter century. I'll own that I felt bitter about it -
+what father wouldn't? And yet I could do nothing.
+
+"Marceline seemed to be a good wife enough in those early months, and our
+friends received her without any quibbling or questioning. I was always nervous,
+though, about what some of the young fellows in Paris might write home to their
+relatives after the news of the marriage spread around. Despite the woman's love
+of secrecy, it couldn't remain hidden forever - indeed, Denis had written a few of
+his closest friends, in strict confidence, as soon as he was settled with her at
+Riverside.
+
+"I got to staying alone in my room more and more, with my failing health as an
+excuse. It was bout that time that my present spinal neuritis began to develop -
+which made the excuse a pretty good one. Denis didn't seem to notice the
+trouble, or take any interest in me and my habits and affairs; and it hurt me to
+see how callous he was getting. I began to get sleepless, and often racked my
+brain in the night to try to find out what made my new daughter-in-law so
+repulsive and even dimly horrible to me. It surely wasn't her old mystical
+nonsense, for she had left all the past behind her and never mentioned it once.
+She didn't even do any painting, although I understood that she had once
+dabbled in art.
+
+
+
+
+"Oddly, the only ones who seemed to share my uneasiness were the servants.
+The darkies around the house seemed very sullen in their attitude toward her,
+and in a few weeks all save the few who were strongly attached to our family
+had left. These few - old Scipio and his wife Sarah, the cook Delilah, and Mary,
+Scipio's daughter - were as civil as possible; but plainly revealed that their new
+mistress commanded their duty rather than their affection. They stayed in their
+own remote part of the house as much as possible. McCabe, our white chauffeur,
+was insolently admiring rather than hostile; and another exception was a very
+old Zulu woman, said to have been a sort of leader in her small cabin as a kind of
+family pensioner. Old Sophonisba always shewed reverence whenever Marceline
+came near her, and one time I saw her kiss the ground where her mistress had
+walked. Blacks are superstitious animals, and I wondered whether Marceline
+had been talking any of her mystical nonsense to our hands in order to overcome
+their evident dislike."
+
+
+"Well, that's how we went on for nearly half a year. Then, in the summer of 1916,
+things began to happen. Toward the middle of June Denis got a note from his old
+friend Frank Marsh, telling of a sort of nervous breakdown which made him
+want to take a rest in the country. It was postmarked New Orleans - for Marsh
+had gone home from Paris when he felt the collapse coming on - and seemed a
+very plain though polite bid for an invitation from us. Marsh, of course, knew
+that Marceline was here; and asked very courteously after her. Denis was sorry
+to hear of his trouble and told him at once to come along for an indefinite visit.
+
+"Marsh came - and I was shocked to notice how he had changed since I had seen
+him in his earlier days. He was a smallish, lightish fellow, with blue eyes and an
+undecided chin; and now I could see the effects of drink and I don't know what
+else in his puffy eyelids, enlarged nose-pores, and heavy lines around the mouth.
+I reckon he had taken his dose of decadence pretty seriously, and set out to be as
+much of a Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or Lautreamont as he could. And yet he was
+delightful to talk to - for like all decadents he was exquisitely sensitive to the
+color and atmosphere and names of things; admirably, thoroughly alive, and
+with whole records of conscious experience in obscure, shadowy fields of living
+and feeling which most of us pass over without knowing they exist. Poor young
+devil - if only his father had lived longer and taken him in hand! There was great
+stuff in the boy!
+
+"I was glad of the visit, for I felt it would help to set up a normal atmosphere in
+the house again. And that's what it really seemed to do at first; for as I said.
+Marsh was a delight to have around. He was as sincere and profound an artist as
+I ever saw in my life, and I certainly believe that nothing on earth mattered to
+
+
+
+
+him except the perception and expression of beauty. When he saw an exquisite
+thing, or was creating one, his eyes would dilate until the light irises were nearly
+out of sight - leaving two mystical black pits in that weak, delicate, chalk-like
+face; black pits opening on strange worlds which none of us could guess about.
+
+"When he reached here, though, he didn't have many chances to shew this
+tendency; for he had, as he told Denis, gone quite stale. It seems he had been
+very successful as an artist of a bizarre kind - like Fuseli or Goya or Sime or Clark
+Ashton Smith - but had suddenly become played out. The world of ordinary
+things around him had ceased to hold anything he could recognize as beauty -
+beauty, that is, of enough force and poignancy to arouse his creative faculty. He
+had often been this way before - all decadents are - but this time he could not
+invent any new, strange, or outre sensation or experience which would supply
+the needed illusion of fresh beauty or stimulatingly adventurous expectancy. He
+was like a Durtal or a des Esseintes at the most jaded point of his curious orbit.
+
+"Marceline was away when Marsh arrived. She hadn't been enthusiastic about
+his coming, and had refused to decline an invitation from some of our friends in
+St. Louis which came about that time for her and Denis. Denis, of course, stayed
+to receive his guest; but Marceline had gone on alone. It was the first time they
+had ever been separated, and I hoped the interval would help to dispel the daze
+that was making such a fool of the boy. Marceline shewed no hurry to get back,
+but seemed to me to prolong her absence as much as she could. Denis stood it
+better than one would have expected from such a doting husband, and seemed
+more like his old self as he talked over other days with Marsh and tried to cheer
+the listless aesthete up.
+
+"It was Marsh who seemed most impatient to see the woman; perhaps because
+he thought her strange beauty, or some phase of the mysticism which had gone
+into her one-time magical cult, might help to reawaken his interest in things and
+give him another start toward artistic creation. That there was no baser reason, I
+was absolutely certain from what I knew of Marsh's character. With all his
+weaknesses, he was a gentleman - and it had indeed relieved me when I first
+learned that he wanted to come here because his willingness to accept Denis'
+hospitality proved that there was no reason why he shouldn't.
+
+"When, at last, Marceline did return, I could see that Marsh was tremendously
+affected. He did not attempt to make her talk of the bizarre thing which she had
+so definitely abandoned, but was unable to hide a powerful admiration which
+kept his eyes - now dilated in that curious way for the first time during his visit -
+riveted to her every moment she was in the room. She, however, seemed uneasy
+rather than pleased by his steady scrutiny - that is, she seemed so at first, though
+this feeling of hers wore away in a few days, and left the two on a basis of the
+
+
+
+
+most cordial and voluble congeniality. I could see Marsh studying her constantly
+when he thought no one was watching; and I wondered how long it would be
+that only the artist, and not the primitive man, would be aroused by her
+mysterious graces.
+
+"Denis naturally felt some irritation at this turn of affairs; though he realised that
+his guest was a man of honour and that, as kindred mystics and aesthetes,
+Marceline and Marsh would naturally have things and interests to discuss in
+which a more or less conventional person could have no part. He didn't hold
+anything against anybody, but merely regretted that his own imagination was
+too limited and traditional to let him talk with Marceline as Marsh talked. At this
+stage of things I began to see more of the boy. With his wife otherwise busy, he
+had time to remember that he had a father - and a father who was ready to help
+him in any sort of perplexity or difficulty.
+
+"We often sat together on the veranda watching Marsh and Marceline as they
+rode up or down the drive on horseback, or played tennis on the court that used
+to stretch south of the house. They talked mostly in French, which Marsh, though
+he hadn't more than a quarter-portion of French blood, handled more glibly than
+either Denis or I could speak it. Marceline's English, always academically correct,
+was rapidly improving in accent; but it was plain that she relished dropping back
+into her mother-tongue. As we looked at the congenial couple they made, I could
+see the boy's cheek and throat muscles tighten - though he wasn't a whit less
+ideal a host to Marsh, or a whit less considerate husband to Marceline.
+
+"All this was generally in the afternoon; for Marceline rose very late, had
+breakfast in bed, and took an immense amount of time preparing to come
+downstairs. I never knew of anyone so wrapped up in cosmetics, beauty
+exercises, hair-oils, unguents, and everything of that kind. It was in these
+morning hours that Denis and Marsh did their real visiting, and exchanged the
+close confidences which kept their friendship up despite the strain that jealousy
+imposed.
+
+"Well, it was in one of those morning talks on the veranda that marsh made the
+proposition which brought on the end. I was laid up with some of my neuritis,
+but had managed to get downstairs and stretch out on the front parlour sofa near
+the long window. Denis and Marsh were just outside; so I couldn't help hearing
+all they said. They had been talking about art, and the curious, capricious
+elements needed to jolt an artist into producing the real article, when Marsh
+suddenly swerved from abstractions to the personal application he must have
+had in mind from the start.
+
+
+
+
+'"I suppose/ he was saying, 'that nobody can tell just what it is in some scenes or
+objects that makes them aesthetic stimuli for certain individuals. Basically, of
+course, it must have some reference to each man's background of stored-up
+mental associations, for no two people have the same scale of sensitiveness and
+responses. We decadents are artists for whom all ordinary things have ceased to
+have any emotional or imaginative significance, but no one of us responds in the
+same way to exactly the same extraordinary. Now take me, for instance...'"
+
+"He paused and resumed.
+
+"'I know, Denny, that I can say these things to you because you such a
+preternaturally unspoiled mind - clean, fine, direct, objective, and all that. You
+won't misunderstand as an oversubtilised, effete man of the world might.'"
+
+"He paused once more.
+
+"'The fact is, I think I know what's needed to set my imagination working again.
+I've had a dim idea of it ever since we were in Paris, but I'm sure now. It's
+Marceline, old chap - that face and that hair, and the train of shadowy images
+they bring up. Not merely visible beauty - though God knows there's enough of
+that - but something peculiar and individualised, that can't exactly be explained.
+Do you know, in the last few days I've felt the existence of such a stimulus so
+keenly that I honestly think I could outdo myself - break into the real masterpiece
+class if I could get ahold of paint and canvas at just the time when her face and
+hair set my fancy stirring and weaving. There's something weird and other-
+worldly about it - something joined up with the dim ancient thing Marceline
+represents. I don't know how much she's told you about that side of her, but I
+can assure you there's plenty of it. She has some marvellous links with the
+outside...'
+
+"Some change in Denis' expression must have halted the speaker here, for there
+was a considerable spell of silence before the words went on. I was utterly taken
+aback, for I'd expected no such overt development like this; and I wondered
+what my son could be thinking. My heart began to pound violently, and I
+strained my ears in the frankest of intentional eavesdropping. Then Marsh
+resumed.
+
+"'Of course you're jealous - I know how a speech like mine must sound - but I
+can swear to you that you needn't be.'
+
+"Denis did not answer, and Marsh went on.
+
+
+
+
+"' To tell the truth, I could never be in love with Marceline - 1 couldn't even be a
+cordial friend of hers in the warmest sense. Why, damn it all, I felt like a
+hypocrite talking with her these days as I've been doing.
+
+"'The case simply is, that one of her phase of her half hyponotises me in a certain
+way - a very strange, fantastic, and dimly terrible way - just as another phase half
+hypnotises you in a much more normal way. I see something in her - or to be
+psychologically exact, something through her or beyond her - that you didn't see
+at all. Something that brings up a vast pageantry of shapes from forgotten
+abysses, and makes me want to paint incredible things whose outlines vanish the
+instant I try to envisage them clearly. Don't mistake, Denny, your wife is a
+magnificent being, a splendid focus of cosmic forces who has a right to be called
+divine if anything on earth has!'
+
+"I felt a clearing of the situation at this point, for the abstract strangeness of
+Marsh's statement, plus the flattery he was now heaping on Marceline, could not
+fail to disarm and mollify one as fondly proud of his consort as Denis always
+was. Marsh evidently caught the change himself, for there was more confidence
+in his tone as he continued.
+
+'"I must paint her, Denny - must paint that hair - and you won't regret. There's
+something more than mortal about that hair - something more than beautiful - '
+
+"He paused, and I wondered what Denis could be thinking. I wondered, indeed,
+what I was really thinking myself. Was Marsh's interest actually that of the artist
+alone, or was he merely infatuated as Denis had been? I had thought, in their
+schooldays, that he had envied my boy; and I dimly felt that it might be the same
+now. On the other hand, something in that talk of artistic stimulus had rung
+amazingly true; so that the more I pondered, the more I was inclined to take the
+stuff at face value. Denis seemed to do so, too, for although I could not catch his
+low-spoken reply, I could tell by the effect it produced that it must have been
+affirmative.
+
+"There was a sound of someone slapping another on the back, and then a
+grateful speech from Marsh that I was long to remember.
+
+"'That's great, Denny, and just as I told you, you'll never regret it. In a sense, I'm
+half doing it for you. You'll be a different man when you see it. I'll put you back
+where you used to be - give you a waking-up and a sort of salvation - but you
+can't see what I mean as yet. Just remember old friendship, and don't get the
+idea that I'm not the same old bird!'
+
+
+
+
+"I rose perplexedly as I saw the two stroll off across the lawn, arm in arm, and
+smoking in unison. What could Marsh have meant by his strange and almost
+ominous reassurance? The more my fears were quieted in one direction, the
+more they were aroused in another. Look at it any way I could, it seemed to be a
+rather bad business.
+
+"But matters got started just the same. Denis fixed up an attic room with
+skylights, and Marsh sent for all sorts of painting equipment. Everyone was
+rather excited about the new venture, and I was at least glad that something was
+on foot to break the brooding tension. Soon the sittings began, and we all took
+them quite seriously - for we could see that Marsh regarded them as important
+artistic events. Denny and I used to go quietly about the house as though
+something sacred were occurring, and we knew that it was sacred as far as marsh
+was concerned.
+
+"With Marceline, though, it was a different matter, as I began to see at once.
+Whatever Marsh's reactions to the sittings may have been, hers were painfully
+obvious. Every possible way she betrayed a frank and commonplace infatuation
+for the artist, and would repulse Denis' marks of affection whenever she dared.
+Oddly, I noticed this more vividly than Denis himself, and tried to devise some
+plan for keeping the boy's mind easy until the matter could be straightened out.
+There was no use in having him excited about it if it could be helped.
+
+"In the end I decided that Denis had better be away while the disagreeable
+situation existed. I could represent his interests well enough at this end, and
+sooner or later Marsh would finish the picture and go. My view of Marsh's
+honour was such that I did not look for any worse developments. When the
+matter had blown over, and Marceline had forgotten about her new infatuation,
+it would be time enough to have Denis on hand again.
+
+"So I wrote a long letter to my marketing and financial agent in New York, and
+cooked up a plan to have the boy summoned there for an indefinite time. I had
+the agent write him that our affairs absolutely required one of us to go East, and
+of course my illness made it clear that I could not be the one. It was arranged that
+when Denis got to New York he would find enough plausible matters to keep
+him busy as long as I thought he ought to be away.
+
+"The plan worked perfectly, and Denis started for New York without the least
+suspicion; Marceline and Marsh going with him in the car to Cape Girardeau,
+where he caught the afternoon train to St. Louis. They returned after dark, and as
+McCabe drove the car back to the stables I could hear them talking on the
+veranda - in those same chairs near the long parlour window where Marsh and
+Denis had sat when I overheard them talk about the portrait. This time I resolved
+
+
+
+
+to do some intentional eavesdropping, so quietly went down to the front parlour
+and stretched out on the sofa near the window.
+
+"At first I could not hear anything but very shortly there came the sound of a
+chair being shifted, followed by a short, sharp breath and a sort of inarticulately
+hurt exclamation from Marceline. Then I heard Marsh speaking in a strained,
+almost formal voice.
+
+"'I'd enjoy working tonight if you aren't too tired.'
+
+"Marceline's reply was in the same hurt tone which had marked her exclamation.
+She used English as he had done.
+
+"'Oh, Frank, is that really all you care about? Forever working! Can't we just sit
+out here in this glorious moonlight?'
+
+"He answered impatiently, his voice shewing a certain contempt beneath the
+dominant quality of artistic enthusiasm.
+
+"'Moonlight! Good God, what cheap sentimentality! For a supposedly
+sophisticated person you surely do hang on to some of the crudest claptrap that
+ever escaped from the dime novels! With art at your elbow, you have to think of
+the moon - cheap as a spotlight at the varieties! Or perhaps it makes you think of
+the Roodmas dance around the stone pillars at Auteiul. Hell, how you used to
+make those goggle-eyed yaps stare! But not - I suppose you've dropped all that
+now. No more Atlantean magic or hair-snake rites for Madame de Russy! I'm the
+only one to remember the old things - the things that came down through the
+temples of Tanit and echoed on the ramparts of Zimbabwe. But I won't be
+cheated of that remembrance - all that is weaving itself into the thing on my
+canvas - the thing that is going to capture wonder and crystallise the secrets of
+75,000 years...'
+
+"Marceline interrupted in a voice full of mixed emotions.
+
+"'It's you who are cheaply sentimental now! You know well that the old things
+had better be let alone. All of you had better watch out if ever I chant the old rites
+or try to call up what lies hidden in Yuggoth, Zimbabwe, and R'lyeh. I thought
+you had more sense!'
+
+"'You lack logic. You want me to be interested in this precious painting of yours,
+yet you never let me see what you're doing. Always that black cloth over it! It's
+of me - I shouldn't think it would matter if I saw it. . .'
+
+"Marsh was interrupting this time, his voice curiously hard and strained.
+
+
+"'No. Not now. You'll see it in due course of time. You say it's of you - yes, it's
+that, but it's more. If you knew, you mightn't be so impatient. Poor Denis! My
+God, it's a shame!'
+
+'"My throat was suddenly dry as the words rose to an almost febrile pitch. What
+could Marsh mean? Suddenly I saw that he had stopped and was entering the
+house alone. I heard the front door slam, and listened as his footsteps ascended
+the stairs. Outside on the veranda I could still hear Marceline's heavy, angry
+breathing. I crept away sick at heart, feeling that there were grave things to ferret
+out before I could safely let Denis come back.
+
+"After that evening the tension around the place was even worse than before.
+Marceline had always lived on flattery and fawning and the shock of those few
+blunt words from Marsh was too much for her temperament. There was no
+living in the house with her anymore, for with poor Denis gone she took out her
+abusiveness on everybody. When she could find no one indoors to quarrel with
+she would go out to Sophonisba's cabin and spend hours talking with the queer
+old Zulu woman. Aunt Sophy was the only person who would fawn abjectly
+enough to suit her, and when I tried once to overhear their conversation I found
+Marceline whispering about 'elder secrets' and 'unknown Kadath' while the
+negress rocked to and fro in her chair, making inarticulate sounds of reverence
+and admiration every now and then.
+
+"But nothing could break her dog-like infatuation for Marsh. She would talk
+bitterly and sullenly to him, yet was getting more and more obedient to his
+wishes. It was very convenient for him, since he now became able to make her
+pose for the picture whenever he felt like painting. He tried to shew gratitude for
+this willingness, but I thought I could detect a kind of contempt or even loathing
+beneath his careful politeness. For my part, I frankly hated Marceline! There was
+no use in calling my attitude anything as mild as dislike these days. Certainly, I
+was glad Denis was away. His letters, not nearly so frequent as I wished, shewed
+signs of strain and worry.
+
+"As the middle of August went by I gathered from Marsh's remarks that the
+portrait was nearly done. His mood seemed increasingly sardonic, though
+Marceline's temper improved a bit as the prospect of seeing the thing tickled her
+vanity. I can still recall the day when Marsh said he'd have everything finished
+within a week. Marceline brightened up perceptibly, though not without a
+venomous look at me. It seemed as if her coiled hair visibly tightened around her
+head.
+
+"'I'm to be the first to see it!' she snapped. Then, smiling at Marsh, she said, 'And
+if I don't like it I shall slash it to pieces!'
+
+
+
+
+"Marsh's face took on the most curious look I have ever seen it wear as he
+answered her.
+
+'"I can't vouch for your taste, Marcehne, but I swear it will be magnificent! Not
+that I want to take much credit - art creates itself - and this thing had to be done.
+Just wait!'
+
+"During the next few days I felt a queer sense of foreboding, as if the completion
+of the picture meant a kind of catastrophe instead of a relief. Denis, too, had not
+written me, and my agent in New York said he was planning some trip to the
+country. I wondered what the outcome of the whole thing would be. What a
+queer mixture of elements - Marsh and Marceline, Denis and I! How would all
+these ultimately react on one another? When my fears grew too great I tried to
+lay them all to my infirmity, but that explanation never quite satisfied me."
+
+
+"Well, the thing exploded on Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August. I had risen at
+my usual time and had breakfast, but was not good for much because of the pain
+in my spine. It had been troubling me badly of late, and forcing me to take
+opiates when it got too unbearable; nobody else was downstairs except the
+servants, though I could hear Marceline moving about in her room. Marsh slept
+in the attic next his studio, and had begun to keep such late hours that he was
+seldom up till noon. About ten o'clock the pain got the better of me, so that I took
+a double dose of my opiate and lay down on the parlour sofa. The last I heard
+was Marceline's pacing overhead. Poor creature - if I had known! She must have
+been walking before the long mirror admiring herself. That was like her. Vain
+from start to finish - revelling in her own beauty, just as she revelled in all the
+little luxuries Denis was able to give her.
+
+"I didn't wake up till near sunset, and knew instantly how long I had slept from
+the golden light and long shadows outside the long window. Nobody was about,
+and a sort of unnatural stillness seemed to be hovering over everything. From
+afar, though, I thought I could sense a faint howling, wild and intermittent,
+whose quality had a slight but baffling familiarity about it. I'm not much for
+psychic premonitions, but I was frightfully uneasy from the start. There had been
+dreams - even worse than the ones I had been dreaming in the weeks before -
+and this time they seemed hideously linked to some black and festering reality.
+The whole place had a poisonous air. Afterward I reflected that certain sounds
+must have filtered through into my unconscious brain during those hours of
+drugged sleep. My pain, though, was very much eased; and I rose and walked
+without difficulty.
+
+
+
+
+"Soon enough I began to see that something was wrong. Marsh and Marcehne
+might have been riding, but someone ought to have been getting dinner in the
+kitchen. Instead, there was only silence, except for that faint, distant howl or
+wail; and nobody answered when I pulled the old-fashioned bell-cord to
+summon Scipio. Then, chancing to look up, I saw the spreading stain on the
+ceiling - the bright re stain, that must have come through the floor of Marceline's
+room.
+
+"In an instant I forgot my crippled back and hurried upstairs to find out the
+worst. Everything under the sun raced through my mind as I struggled with the
+dampness-warped door of that silent chamber, and most hideous of all was a
+terrible sense of malign fulfilment and fatal expectedness. I had, it struck me,
+known all along that nameless horrors were gathering; that something
+profoundly and cosmically evil had gained a foot-hold under my roof from
+which only blood and tragedy could result.
+
+"The door gave at last, and I stumbled into the large room beyond - all dim from
+the branches of the great trees outside the windows. For a moment I could do
+nothing but flinch at the faint evil odour that immediately struck my nostrils.
+Then, turning on the electric light and glancing around, I glimpsed a nameless
+blasphemy on the yellow and blue rug.
+
+"It lay face down in a great pool of dark, thickened blood, and had the gory print
+of a shod human foot in the middle of its naked back. Blood was spattered
+everywhere - on the walls, furniture, and floor. My knees gave way as I took in
+the sight, so that I had to stumble to a chair and slump down. The thing had
+obviously been a human being, though its identity was not easy to establish at
+first; since it was without clothes, and had most of its hair hacked and torn from
+the scalp in a very crude way. It was of a deep ivory colour, and I knew that it
+must have been Marceline. The shoe-print on the back made the thing seem all
+the more hellish. I could not even picture the strange, loathsome tragedy which
+must have taken place while I slept in the room below. When I raised my hand to
+wipe my dripping forehead I saw that my fingers were sticky with blood. I
+shuddered, then realised that it must have come from the knob of the door which
+the unknown murderer had forced shut behind him as he left. He had taken his
+weapon with him, it seemed, for no instrument of death was visible here.
+
+"As I studied the floor I saw that a line of sticky footprints like the one on the
+body led away from the horror to the door. There was another blood-trail, too,
+and of a less easily explainable kind; a broadish, continuous line, as if marking
+the path of some huge snake. At first I concluded it must be due to something the
+murderer had dragged after him. Then, noting the way some of the footprints
+seemed to be superimposed on it, I was forced to believe that it could have been
+
+
+
+
+there when the murderer left. But what crawHng entity could have been in that
+room with the victim and her assassin, leaving before the killer when the deed
+was done? As I asked myself this question I thought I heard fresh bursts of that
+faint, distant wailing.
+
+"Finally, rousing myself from a lethargy of horror, I got on my feet again and
+began following the footprints. Who the murderer was, I could not even faintly
+guess, nor could I try to explain the absence of the servants. I vaguely felt that I
+ought to go up to Marsh's attic quarters, but before I had fully formulated the
+idea I saw that the bloody trail was indeed taking me there. Was he himself the
+murderer? Had he gone mad under the strain of the morbid situation and
+suddenly run amok?
+
+"In the attic corridor the trail became faint, the prints almost ceasing as they
+merged with the dark carpet. I could still, however, discern the strange single
+path of the entity who had gone first; and this led straight to the closed door of
+Marsh's studio, disappearing beneath it at a point about half way from side to
+side. Evidently it had crossed the threshold at a time when the door was wide
+open.
+
+"Sick at heart, I tried the knob and found the door unlocked. Opening it, I
+paused in the waning north light to see what fresh nightmare might be awaiting
+me. There was certainly something human on the floor, and I reached for the
+switch to turn on the chandelier.
+
+"But as the light flashed up my gaze left the floor and its horror - that was Marsh,
+poor devil - to fix itself frantically and incredulously upon the living thing that
+cowered and stared in the open doorway leading to Marsh's bedroom. It was a
+tousled, wild-eyed thing, crusted with dried blood and carrying in its hand a
+wicked machete which had been one of the ornaments of the studio wall. Yet
+even in that awful moment I recognised it as one whom I had thought more than
+a thousand miles away. It was my own boy Denis - or the maddened wreck
+which had once been Denis.
+
+"The sight of me seemed to bring back a trifle of sanity - or at least of memory -
+in the poor boy. He straightened up and began to toss his head about as if trying
+to shake free from some enveloping influence. I could not speak a word, but
+moved my lips in an effort to get back my voice. My eyes wandered for a
+moment to the figure on the floor in front of the heavily draped easel - the figure
+toward which the strange blood-trail led, and which seemed to be tangled in the
+coils of some dark, ropy object. The shifting of my glance apparently produced
+some impression in the twisted brain of the boy, for suddenly he began to mutter
+in a hoarse whisper whose purport I was soon able to catch.
+
+
+
+
+'"I had to exterminate her - she was the devil - the summit and high-priestess of
+all evil - the spawn of the pit - Marsh knew, and tried to warn me. Good old
+Frank - I didn't kill him, though I was ready to before I realised. But I went down
+there and killed her - then that cursed hair - '
+
+"I listened in horror as Denis choked, paused, and began again.
+
+"'You didn't know - her letters got queer and I knew she was in love with Marsh.
+Then she nearly stopped writing. He never mentioned her - I felt something was
+wrong, and thought I ought to come back and find out. Couldn't tell you - your
+manner would have given it away. Wanted to surprise them. Got here about
+noon today - came in a cab and sent the house-servants all off - let the field hands
+alone, for their cabins are all out of earshot. Told McCabe to get me some things
+in Cape Girardeau and not bother to come back until tomorrow. Had all the
+niggers take the old car and let Mary drive them to Bend Village for a vacation -
+told 'em we were all going on some sort of outing and wouldn't need help. Said
+they'd better stay all night with Uncle Scip's cousin, who keeps that nigger
+boarding house.'
+
+"Denis was getting very incoherent now, and I strained my ears to grasp every
+word. Again I thought I heard that wild, far-off wail, but the story had first place
+for the present.
+
+"'Saw you sleeping in the parlour, and took a chance you wouldn't wake up.
+Then went upstairs on the quiet to hunt up Marsh and. . .that woman!'
+
+"The boy shuddered as he avoided pronouncing Marceline's name. At the same
+time I saw his eyes dilate in unison with a bursting of the distant crying, whose
+vague familiarity had now become very great.
+
+"'She was not in her room, so I went up to the studio. Door was shut, and I could
+hear voices inside. Didn't knock - just burst in and found her posing for the
+picture. Nude, but with the hellish hair all draped around her. And making all
+sorts of sheep's eyes at Marsh. He had the easel turned half away from the door,
+so I couldn't see the picture. Both of them were pretty well jolted when I shewed
+up, and Marsh dropped his brush. I was in a rage and told him he'd have to
+shew me the portrait, but he got calmer every minute. Told me it wasn't quite
+done, but would be in a day or two - said I could see it then - she - hadn't seen it.
+
+"'But that didn't go with me. I stepped up, and he dropped a velvet curtain over
+the thing before I could see it. He was ready to fight before letting me see it, but
+that - that - she - stepped up and sided with me. Said we ought to see it. Frank
+got horrible worked up, and gave me a punch when I tried to get at the punch
+
+
+
+
+when I tried to get at the curtain. I punched back and seemed to have knocked
+him out. Then I was almost knocked out myself by the shriek that - that creature -
+gave. She'd drawn aside the hangings herself, and caught a look at what Marsh
+had been painting. I wheeled around and saw her rushing like mad out of the
+room - then I saw the picture.'
+
+"Madness flared up in the boy's eyes again as he got to this place, and I thought
+for a minute he was going to spring at me with his machete. But after a pause he
+partly steadied himself.
+
+"'Oh, God - that thing! Don't ever look at it! Burn it with the hangings around it
+and throw the ashes into the river! Marsh knew - and was warning me. He knew
+what it was - what that woman - that leopardess, or gorgon, or lamia, or
+whatever she was - actually represented. He'd tried to hint to me ever since I met
+her in his Paris studio, but it couldn't be told in words. I thought they all
+wronged her when they whispered horrors about her - she had me hypnotised so
+that I couldn't believe the plain facts - but this picture has caught the whole
+secret - the whole monstrous background!
+
+"'God, but Frank is an artist! That thing is the greatest piece any living soul has
+produced since Rembrandt! It's a crime to burn it - but it would be a greater
+crime to let it exist - just as it would have been an abhorrent sin to let - that she-
+daemon - exist any longer. The minute I saw it I understood what - she - was,
+and what part she played in the frightful secret that has come down from the
+days of Cthulhu and the Elder Ones - the secret that was nearly wiped out when
+Atlantis sank, but that kept half alive in hidden traditions and allegorical myths
+and furtive, midnight cult-practices. For you know she was the real thing. It
+wasn't any fake. It would have been merciful if it had been a fake. It was the old,
+hideous shadow that philosophers never dared mention - the thing hinted at in
+the Necronomicon and symbolised in the Easter Island colossi.
+
+"'She thought we couldn't see through - that the false front would hold till we
+had bartered away our immortal souls. And she was half right - she'd have got
+me in the end. She was only - waiting. But Frank - good old Frank - was too
+much for me. He knew what it all meant, and painted it. I don't wonder she
+shrieked and ran off when she saw it. It wasn't quite done, but God knows
+enough was there.
+
+"'Then I knew I'd got to kill her - kill her, and everything connected with her. It
+was a taint that wholesome human blood couldn't bear. There was something
+else, too - but you'll never know that if you burn the picture without looking. I
+staggered down to her room with this machete that I got off the wall here.
+
+
+
+
+leaving Frank still knocked out. He was breathing, though, and I knew and
+thanked heaven I hadn't killed him.
+
+'"I found her in front of the mirror braiding that accursed hair. She turned on me
+like a wild beast, and began spitting out her hatred of Marsh. The fact that she'd
+been in love with him - and I knew she had - only made it worse. For a minute I
+couldn't move, and she came within an ace of completely hypnotising me. Then I
+thought of the picture, and the spell broke. She saw the breaking in my eyes, and
+must have noticed the machete, too. I never saw anything give such a wild jungle
+beast look as she did then. She sprang for me with claws out like a leopard's, but
+I was too quick. I swung the machete, and it was all over.'
+
+"Denis had to stop again, and I saw the perspiration running down his forehead
+through the spattered blood. But in a moment he hoarsely resumed.
+
+'"I said it was all over - but God! some of it had only just begun! I felt I had
+fought the legions of Satan, and put my foot on the back of the thing I had
+annihilated. Then I saw that blasphemous braid of coarse black hair begin to
+twist and squirm of itself.
+
+'"I might have known it. It was all in the old tales. That damnable hair had a life
+of its own, that couldn't be ended by killing the creature itself. I knew I'd have to
+burn it, so I started to hack it off with the machete. God, but it was devilish work!
+Tough - like iron wires - but I managed to do it. And it was loathsome the way
+the big braid writhed and struggled in my grasp.
+
+"'About the time I had the last strand cut or pulled off I heard that eldritch
+wailing from behind the house. You know - it's still going off and on. I don't
+know what it is, but it must be something springing from this hellish business. It
+half seems like something I ought to know but can't quite place. It got my nerves
+the first time I heard it, and I dropped the severed braid in my fright. Then, I got
+a worse fright - for in another second the braid had turned on me and began to
+strike venomously with one of its ends which had knotted itself up like a sort of
+grotesque head. I struck out with the machete, and it turned away. Then, when I
+had my breath again, I saw that the monstrous thing was crawling along the
+floor by itself like a great black snake. I couldn't do anything for a while, but
+when it vanished through the door I managed to pull myself together and
+stumble after it. I could follow the broad, bloody trail, and I saw it led upstairs. It
+brought me here - and may heaven curse me if I didn't see it through the
+doorway, striking at poor dazed Marsh like a maddened rattler as it had struck
+at me, finally coiling around him as a python would. He had begun to come to,
+but that abominable serpent got him before he was on his feet. I knew that all of
+the woman's hatred was behind it, but I hadn't the power to pull it off. I tried.
+
+
+
+
+but it was too much for me. Even the machete was no good - I couldn't swing it
+freely or it would have slashed Frank to pieces. So I saw those monstrous coils
+tighten - saw poor Frank crushed to death before my eyes - and all the time that
+awful faint howling came from somewhere beyond the fields.
+
+"'That's all. I pulled the velvet cloth over the picture and hope it'll never be
+lifted. The thing must be burnt. I couldn't pry the coils off poor, dead Frank -
+they cling to him like a leach, and seem to have lost their motion altogether. It's
+as if that snaky rope of hair has a kind of perverse fondness for the man it killed -
+it's clinging to him - embracing him. You'll have to burn poor Frank with it - but
+for God's sake don't forget to see it in ashes. That and the picture. They must
+both go. The safety of the world demands that they go.
+
+"Denis might have whispered more, but a fresh burst of distant wailing cut us
+short. For the first time we knew what it was, for a westerly veering wind
+brought articulate words at last. We ought to have known long before, since
+sounds much like it had often come from the same source. It was wrinkled
+Sophonisba, the ancient Zulu witch-woman who had fawned on Marceline,
+keening from her cabin in a way which crowned the horrors of this nightmare
+tragedy. We could both hear some of the things she howled, and knew that secret
+and primordial bonds linked this savage sorceress with that other inheritor of
+elder secrets who had just been extirpated. Some of the words she used betrayed
+her closeness to daemonic and palaeogean traditions.
+
+"'la! la! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R'lyeh! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! Ya, yo, poor
+Missy Tanit, poor Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen de water an' git yo
+chile - she done daid! She done daid! De hair ain' got no missus no mo', Marse
+Clooloo. or Sophy, she know! OF Sophy, she done got de black stone outen Big
+Zimbabwe in ol' Affriky! Ol' Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun' de
+crocodile-stone befo' de N'bangus cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No mo'
+Tanit! No mo' Isis! No mo' witch-woman to keep de fire a-goin' in de big stone
+place! Ya, yo! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! la! Shub-Niggurath! She daid! OF
+Sophy know!'
+
+"That wasn't the end of the wailing, but it was all I could pay attention to. The
+expression on my boy's face shewed that it had reminded him of something
+frightful, and the tightening of his hand on the machete boded no good. I knew
+he was desperate, and sprang to disarm him before he could do anything more.
+
+"But I was too late. An old man with a bad spine doesn't count for much
+physically. There was a terrible struggle, but he had done for himself before
+many seconds were over. I'm not sure yet but that he tried to kill me, too. His last
+
+
+
+
+panting words were something about the need of wiping out everything that had
+been connected with Marcehne, either by blood or marriage."
+
+
+"I wonder to this day that I didn't go stark mad in that instant - or in the
+moments and hours afterward. In front of me was the slain body of my boy - the
+only human being I had to cherish - and ten feet away, in front of that shrouded
+easel, was the body of his best friend, with a nameless coil of horror wound
+around it. Below was the scalped corpse of that she-monster, about whom I was
+half-ready to believe anything. I was too dazed to analyse the probability of the
+hair story - and even if I had not been, that dismal howling coming from Aunt
+Sophy's cabin would have been enough to quiet doubt for the nonce.
+
+"If I'd been wise, I'd have done just what poor Denis told me to - burned the
+picture and the body-grasping hair at once and without curiosity - but I was too
+shaken to be wise. I suppose I muttered foolish things over my boy - and then I
+remembered that the night was wearing on and that the servants would be back
+in the morning. It was plain that a matter like this could never be explained, and
+I knew that I must cover things up and invent a story.
+
+"That coil of hair around Marsh was a monstrous thing. As I poked at it with a
+sword which I took from the wall I almost thought I felt it tighten its grip on the
+dead man. I didn't dare touch it - and the longer I looked at it the more horrible
+things I noticed about it. One thing gave me a start. I won't mention it - but it
+partly explained the need for feeding the hair with queer oils as Marceline had
+always done.
+
+"In the end I decided to bury all three bodies in the cellar - with quicklime, which
+I knew we had in the storehouse. It was a night of hellish work. I dug three
+graves - my boy's a long way from the other two, for I didn't want him to be near
+either the woman's body or her hair. I was sorry I couldn't get the coil from
+around poor marsh. It was terrible work getting them all down to the cellar. I
+used blankets in carting the woman and the poor devil with the coil around him.
+Then I had to get two barrels of lime from the storehouse. God must have given
+me strength, for I not only moved them but filled all three graves without a hitch.
+
+"Some of the lime I made into whitewash. I had to take a stepladder and fix over
+the parlour ceiling where the blood had oozed through. And I burned nearly
+everything in Marceline's room, scrubbing the walls and floor and heavy
+furniture. I washed up the attic studio, too, and the trail and footprints that led
+there. And all the time I could hear old Sophy's wailing in the distance. The devil
+must have been in that creature to let her voice go on like that. But she always
+
+
+
+
+was howling queer things. That's why the field niggers didn't get scared or
+curious that night. I locked the studio door and took the key to my room. Then I
+burned all my stained clothes in the fireplace. By dawn the whole house looked
+quite normal so far as any casual eye could tell. I hadn't dared touch the covered
+easel, but meant to attend to that later.
+
+"Well, the servants came back the next day, and I told them all the young folks
+had gone to St. Louis. None of the field hands seemed to have seen or heard
+anything, and old Sophonisba's wailing had stopped at the instant of sunrise.
+She was like a sphinx after that, and never let out a word of what had been on
+her brooding brain the day and night before.
+
+"Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone back to
+Paris and had a certain discreet agency mail me letters from there - letters I had
+fixed up in forged handwriting. It took a good deal of deceit and reticence in
+several things to various friends, and I knew people have secretly suspected me
+of holding something back. I had the deaths of Marsh and Denis reported during
+the war, and later said Marceline had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was
+an orphan whose eccentric ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana.
+Things might have been patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the
+sense to burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give up trying to manage things
+with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly has brought me to.
+Failing crops - hands discharged one by one - place falling apart to ruin - and
+myself a hermit and a target for dozens of queer countryside stories. Nobody will
+come around here after dark anymore - or any other time if it can be helped.
+That's why I knew you must be a stranger.
+
+"And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up too closely
+with things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't have been so, perhaps, if I
+hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to have done as poor Denis told me. I
+honestly meant to burn it when I went up to that locked studio a week after the
+horror, but I looked first - and that changed everything.
+
+"No - there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for yourself
+presently; though time and dampness have done their work. I don't think it can
+hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was different with me. I knew too
+much of what it all meant.
+
+"Denis had been right - it was the greatest triumph of human art since
+Rembrandt, even though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start, and knew
+that poor Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy. He was to painting what
+Baudelaire was to poetry - and Marceline was the key that had unlocked his
+inmost stronghold of genius.
+
+
+
+
+"The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings - stunned me
+before I half knew what the whole thing was. You know, it's only partly a
+portrait. Marsh had been pretty literal when he hinted that he wasn't painting
+Marceline alone, but what he saw through her and beyond her.
+
+"Of course she was in it - was the key to it, in a sense - but her figure only formed
+one point in a vast composition. She was nude except for that hideous web of
+hair spun around her, and was half-seated, half- reclining on a sort of bench or
+divan, carved in patterns unlike those of any known decorative tradition. There
+was a monstrously shaped goblet in one hand, from which was spilling fluid
+whose colour I haven't been able to place or classify to this day - I don't know
+where Marsh even got the pigments.
+
+"The figure and the divan were in the left-hand foreground of the strangest sort
+of scene I ever saw in my life. I think there was a faint suggestion of its all being a
+kind of emanation from the woman's brain, yet there was also a directly opposite
+suggestion - as if she were just an evil image or hallucination conjured up by the
+scene itself.
+
+"I can't tell you know whether it's an exterior or an interior - whether those
+hellish Cyclopean vaultings are seen from the outside or the inside, or whether
+they are indeed carven stone and not merely a morbid fungous arborescence. The
+geometry of the whole thing is crazy - one gets the acute and obtuse angles all
+mixed up.
+
+"And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual daemon
+twilight! The blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a Witches' Sabbat with that
+woman as a high-priestess! The black shaggy entities that are not quite goats -
+the crocodile-headed beast with three legs and a dorsal row of tentacles - and the
+flat-nosed aegipans dancing in a pattern that Egypt's priests knew and called
+accursed!
+
+"But the scene wasn't Egypt - it was behind Egypt; behind even Atlantis; behind
+fabled Mu, and myth- whispered Lemuria. It was the ultimate fountainhead of
+all horror on this earth, and the symbolism shewed only too clearly how integral
+a part of it Marceline was. I think it must be the unmentionable R'lyeh, that was
+not built by any creatures of this planet - the thing Marsh and Denis used to talk
+about in the shadows with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the whole
+scene is deep under water - though everybody seems to be breathing freely.
+
+"Well - I couldn't do anything but look and shudder, and finally I saw that
+Marceline was watching me craftily out of those monstrous, dilated eyes on the
+canvas. It was no mere superstition - Marsh had actually caught something of her
+
+
+
+
+horrible vitality in his symphonies of line and color, so that she still brooded and
+hated, just as if most of her weren't down in the cellar under quicklime. And it
+was worst of al when some of those Hecate-born snaky strands of hair began to
+lift themselves up from the surface and grope out into the room toward me.
+
+"Then it was that I knew the last final horror, and realised I was a guardian and a
+prisoner forever, she was the thing from which the first dim legends of Medusa
+and the Gorgons had sprung, and something in my shaken will had been
+captured and turned to stone at last. Never again would I be safe from those
+coiling snaky strands - the strands in the picture, and those that lay brooding
+under the lime near the wine casks. All too late I recalled the tales of the virtual
+indestructibility, even through centuries of burial, of the hair of the dead.
+
+"My life since has been nothing but horror and slavery. Always there had lurked
+the fear of what broods down in the cellar. In less than a month the niggers
+began whispering about the great black snake that crawled around near the wine
+casks after dark, and about the curious way its trail would lead to another spot
+six feet away. Finally I had to move everything to another part of the cellar, for
+not a darky could be induced to go near the place where the snake was seen.
+
+"Then the field hands began talking about the black snake that visited old
+Sophonisba's cabin every night after midnight. One of them shewed me its trail -
+and not long afterward I found out that Aunt Sophy herself had begun to pay
+strange visits to the cellar of the big house, lingering and muttering for hours in
+the very spot where none of the other blacks would go near. God, but I was glad
+when that old witch died! I honestly believe she had been a priestess of some
+ancient and terrible tradition back in Africa. She must have lived to be almost a
+hundred and fifty years old.
+
+"Sometimes I think I hear something gliding around the house at night. There
+will be a queer noise on the stairs, where the boards are loose, and the latch of
+my room will rattle as if with an inward pressure. I always keep my door locked,
+of course. Then there are certain mornings when I seem to catch a sickish musty
+odour in the corridors, and notice a faint, ropy trail through the dust of the
+floors. I know I must guard the hair in the picture, for if anything were to happen
+to it, there are entities in this house which would take a sure and terrible
+revenge. I don't even dare to die - for life and death are all one to those in the
+clutch of what came out of R'lyeh. Something would be on hand to punish my
+neglect. Medusa's coil has got me, and it will always be the same. Never mix up
+with secret and ultimate horror, young man, if you value your immortal soul."
+
+
+As the old man finished his story I saw that the small lamp had long since
+burned dry, and that the large one was nearly empty. It must, I knew, be near
+dawn, and my ears told me that the storm was over. The tale had held me in a
+half-daze, and I almost feared to glance at the door lest it reveal an inward
+pressure from some unnamable source. It would be hard to say which had the
+greatest hold on me - stark horror, incredulity, or a kind of morbid fantastic
+curiosity. I was wholly beyond speech and had to wait for my strange host to
+break the spell.
+
+"Do you want to see - the thing?"
+
+His voice was low and hesitant, and I saw he was tremendously in earnest. Of
+my various emotions, curiosity gained the upper hand; and I nodded silently. He
+rose, lighting a candle on a nearby table and holding it high before him as he
+opened the door.
+
+"Come with me - upstairs."
+
+I dreaded to brave those musty corridors again, but fascination downed all my
+qualms. The boards creaked beneath our feet, and I trembled once when I
+thought I saw a faint, rope-like line trace in the dust near the staircase.
+
+The steps of the attic were noisy and rickety, with several of the treads missing. I
+was just glad of the need of looking sharply to my footing, for it gave me an
+excuse not to glance about. The attic corridor was pitch-black and heavily
+cobwebbed, and inch-deep with dust except where a beaten trail led to a door on
+the left at the farther end. As I noticed the rotting remains of a thick carpet I
+thought of the other feet which had pressed it in bygone decades - of these, and
+of one thing which did not have feet.
+
+The old man took me straight to the door at the end of the beaten path, and
+fumbled a second with the rusty latch. I was acutely frightened know that I knew
+the picture was so close, yet dared not retreat at this stage. In another moment
+my host was ushering me into the deserted studio.
+
+The candle light was very faint, yet served to shew most of the principal features.
+I noticed the low, slanting roof, the huge enlarged dormer, the curios and
+trophies hung on the wall - and most of all, the great shrouded easel in the centre
+of the floor. To that easel de Russy now walked, drawing aside the dusty velvet
+hangings on the side turned away from me, and motioning me silently to
+approach. It took a good deal of courage to make me obey, especially when I saw
+how my guide's eyes dilated in the wavering candle light as he looked at the
+
+
+
+
+unveiled canvas. But again curiosity conquered everything, and I walked around
+to where de Russy stood. Then I saw the damnable thing.
+
+I did not faint - though no reader can possibly realise the effort it took to keep me
+from doing so. I did cry out, but stopped short when I saw the frightened look on
+the old man's face, as I had expected, the canvas was warped, mouldy, and
+scabrous from dampness and neglect; but for all that I could trace the monstrous
+hints of evil cosmic outsideness that lurked all through the nameless scene's
+morbid content and perverted geometry.
+
+It was as the old man had said - a vaulted, columned hell of mungled Black
+Masses and Witches' Sabbaths - and what perfect completion could have added
+to it was beyond my power to guess. Decay had only increased the utter
+hideousness of its wicked symbolism and diseased suggestion, for the parts most
+affected by time were just those parts of the picture which in Nature - or in the
+extra-cosmic realm that mocked Nature - would be apt to decay and disintegrate.
+
+The utmost horror of all, of course, was Marceline - and as I saw the bloated,
+discoloured flesh I formed the odd fancy that perhaps the figure on the canvas
+had some obscure, occult linkage with the figure which lay in quicklime under
+the cellar floor. Perhaps the lime had preserved the corpse instead of destroying
+it - but could it have preserved those black, malign eyes that glared and mocked
+at me from their painted hell?
+
+And there was something else about the creature which I could not fail to notice -
+something which de Russy had not been able to put into words, but which
+perhaps had something to do with Denis' wish to kill all those of his blood who
+had dwelt under the same roof with her. Whether Marsh knew, or whether the
+genius in him painted it without his knowing, none could say. But Denis and his
+father could not have known till they saw the picture.
+
+Surpassing all in horror was the streaming black hair - which covered the rotting
+body, but which was itself not even slightly decayed. All I had heard of it was
+amply verified. It was nothing human, this ropy, sinuous, half-oily, half-crinkly
+flood of serpent darkness. Vile, independent life proclaimed itself at every
+unnatural twist and convolution, and the suggestion of numberless reptilian
+heads at the out-turned ends was far too marked to be illusory or accidental.
+
+The blasphemous thing held me like a magnet. I was helpless, and did not
+wonder at the myth of the gorgon's glance which turned all beholders to stone.
+Then I thought I saw a change come over the thing. The leering features
+perceptibly moved, so that the rotting jaw fell, allowing the thick, beast-like lips
+to disclose a row of pointed yellow fangs. The pupils of the fiendish eyes dilated.
+
+
+
+
+and the eyes themselves seemed to bulge outward. And the hair - that accursed
+hair! It had begun to rustle and wave perceptibly, the snake-heads all turning
+toward de Russy and vibrating as if to strike!
+
+Reason deserted me altogether, and before I knew what I was doing I drew my
+automatic and sent a shower of twelve steel-jacketed bullets through the
+shocking canvas. The whole thing at once fell to pieces, even the frame toppling
+from the easel and clattering to the dust-covered floor. But though this horror
+was shattered, another had risen before me in the form of de Russy himself,
+whose maddened shrieks as he saw the picture vanish were almost as terrible as
+the picture itself had been.
+
+With a half-articulate scream of "God, now you've done it!" the frantic old man
+seized me violently by the arm and commenced to drag me out of the room and
+down the rickety stairs. He had dropped the candle in his panic; but dawn was
+near, and some faint grey light was filtering in through the dust-covered
+windows. I tripped and stumbled repeatedly, but never for a moment would my
+guide slacken his pace.
+
+"Run!" he shrieked, "run for your life! You don't know what you've done! I
+never told you the whole thing! There were things I had to do - the picture talked
+to me and told me. I had to guard and keep it - now the worst will happen! She
+and that hair will come up out of their graves, for God knows what purpose!
+
+"Hurry, man! For God's sake let's get out of here while there's time. If you have a
+car take me along to Cape Girardeau with you. It may well get me in the end,
+anywhere, but I'll give it a run for its money. Out of here - quick!"
+
+As we reached the ground floor I became aware of a slow, curious thumping
+from the rear of the house, followed by a sound of a door shutting. De Russy had
+not heard the thumping, but the other noise caught his ear and drew from him
+the most terrible shriek that ever sounded in human throat.
+
+"Oh, God - great God - that was the cellar door - she's coming - "
+
+By this time I was desperately wrestling with the rusty latch and sagging hinges
+of the great front door - almost as frantic as my host now that I heard the slow,
+thumping tread approaching from the unknown rear rooms of the accursed
+mansion. The night's rain had warped the oaken planks, and the heavy door
+stuck and resisted even more strongly than it had when I forced an entrance the
+evening before.
+
+
+
+
+Somewhere a plank creaked beneath the foot of whatever was walking, and the
+sound seemed to snap the last cord of sanity in the poor old man. With a roar like
+that of a maddened bull he released his grip on me and made a plunge to the
+right, through the open door of a room which I judged had been a parlour. A
+second later, just as I got the front door open and was making my own escape, I
+heard the tinkling clatter of broken glass and knew he had leapt through a
+window. And as I bounded off the sagging porch to commence my mad race
+down the long, weed-grown drive I thought I could catch the thud of dead,
+dogged footsteps which did not follow me, but which kept leadenly on through
+the door of the cobwebbed parlour.
+
+I looked backward only twice as I plunged heedlessly through the burrs and
+briers of that abandoned drive, past the dying lindens and grotesque scrub-oaks,
+in the grey pallor of a cloudy November dawn. The first time was when an acrid
+smell overtook me, and I thought of the candle de Russy had dropped in the attic
+studio. By then I was comfortably near the road, on the high place from which
+the roof of the distant house was clearly visible above its encircling trees; and just
+as I expected, thick clouds of smoke were billowing out of the attic dormers and
+curling upward into the leaden heavens. I thanked the powers of creation that an
+immemorial curse was about to be purged by fire and blotted from the earth.
+
+But in the next instant came that second backward look in which I glimpsed two
+other things - things that cancelled most of the relief and gave me a supreme
+shock from which I shall never recover. I have said that I was on a high part of
+the drive, from which much of the plantation behind me was visible. This vista
+included not only the house and its trees but some of the abandoned and partly
+flooded land beside the river, and several bends of the weed-choked drive I had
+been so hastily traversing. In both of these latter places 1 1 now beheld sights - or
+suspicions of sights - which I wish devoutly I could deny. It was a faint, distant
+scream which made me turn back again, and as I did so I caught a trace of
+motion on the dull grey marshy plain behind the house. At that human figures
+are very small, yet I thought the motion resolved itself into two of these - pursuer
+and pursued. I even thought I saw the dark-clothed leading figure overtaken,
+seized, and dragged violently in the direction of the now burning house.
+
+But I could not watch the outcome, for at once a nearer sight obtruded itself - a
+suggestion of motion among the underbrush at a point some distance back along
+the deserted drive. Unmistakably, the weeds and bushes and briers were
+swaying as no wind could sway them; swaying as if some large, swift serpent
+were wriggling purposefully along on the ground in pursuit of me.
+
+That was all I could stand. I scrambled along madly for the gate, heedless of torn
+clothing and bleeding scratches, and jumped into the roadster parked under the
+
+
+
+
+great evergreen tree. It was a bedraggled, rain- drenched sight; but the works
+were unharmed and I had no trouble in starting the thing. I went on blindly in
+the direction the car was headed for; nothing was in my mind but to get away
+from that frightful region of nightmares and cacodaemons - to get away as
+quickly and as far as gasoline could take me.
+
+About three or four miles along the road a farmer hailed me - a kindly, drawling
+fellow of middle age and considerable native intelligence. I was glad to slow
+down and ask directions, though I knew I must present a strange enough aspect.
+The man readily told me the way to Cape Girardeau, and inquired where I had
+come from in such a state at such an early hour. Thinking it best to say little, I
+merely mentioned that I had been caught in the night's rain and had taken
+shelter at a nearby farmhouse, afterward losing my way in the underbrush trying
+to find my car.
+
+"At a farmhouse, eh? Wonder whose it could'a been. Ain't nothin' standin' this
+side o' Jim Ferris' place acrost Barker's Crick, an' that's all o' twenty miles by the
+rud."
+
+I gave a start, and wondered what fresh mystery this portended. Then I asked
+my informant if he had overlooked the large ruined plantation house whose
+ancient gate bordered the road not far back.
+
+"Funny ye sh'd recoUeck that, stranger! Must a ben here afore some time. But
+that house ain't here now. Burnt down five or six years ago - and they did tell
+some queer stories about it."
+
+I shuddered.
+
+"You mean Riverside - ol' man de Russy's place. Queer goin's on there fifteen or
+twenty years ago. Ol' man's boy married a gal from abroad, and some folks
+thought she was a mighty odd sort. Didn't like the looks of her. then she and the
+boy went off sudden, and later on the ol' man said he was kilt in the war. But
+some o' the niggers hinted queer things. Got around at last that the ol' fellow fell
+in love with the gal himself and kilt her and the boy. That place was sure enough
+haunted by a black snake, mean that what it may.
+
+"Then five or six years ago the ol' man disappeared and the house burned down.
+Some do say he was burnt up in it. It was a mornin' after a rainy night just like
+this, when lots o' folks heard an awful yellin' across the fields in old de Russy's
+voice. When they stopped and looked, they see the house goin' up in smoke
+quick as a wink - that place was all like tinder anyhow, rain or no rain. Nobody
+
+
+
+
+never seen the ol' man again, but onct in a while they tell of the ghost of that big
+black snake glidin' aroun'.
+
+"What d'ye make of it, anyhow? You seem to hev knowed the place. Didn't ye
+ever hear tell of the de Russys? What d'ye reckon was the trouble with that gal
+young Denis married? She kinder made everybody shiver and feel hateful,
+though ye' couldn't never tell why."
+
+I was trying to think, but that process was almost beyond me now. The house
+burned down years ago? Then where, and under what conditions, had I passed
+the night? And why did I know what I knew of these things? Even as I pondered
+I saw a hair on my coat sleeve - the short, grey hair of an old man.
+
+In the end I drove on without telling anything. But did I hint that gossip was
+wronging the poor old planter who had suffered so much. I made it clear - as if
+from distant but authentic reports wafted among friends - that if anyone was to
+blame for the trouble at Riverside it was the woman, Marceline. She was not
+suited to Missouri ways, I said, and it was too bad that Denis had ever married
+her.
+
+More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished
+honour and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had
+borne enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a daemon of
+the pit - what a gorgon of the elder blasphemies - had come to flaunt their
+ancient and stainless name.
+
+Nor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my
+strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me - that horror which he
+must have learned, as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor
+Frank Marsh.
+
+It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside - the
+accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even
+now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-
+packed grave beneath a charred foundation - was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes
+of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers. No
+wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman - for, though in deceitfully
+slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.
+
+
+
+
+Out of the Aeons - with Hazel Heald
+
+Written 1933
+
+(Ms. found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D., curator of the
+Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass.)
+
+It is not likely that anyone in Boston - or any alert reader elsewhere - will ever
+forget the strange affair of the Cabot Museum. The newspaper publicity given to
+that hellish mummy, the antique and terrible rumours vaguely linked with it, the
+morbid wave of interest and cult activities during 1932, and the frightful fate of
+the two intruders on December 1st of that year, all combined to form one of those
+classic mysteries which go down for generations as folklore and become the
+nuclei of whole cycles of horrific speculation.
+
+Everyone seems to realise, too, that something very vital and unutterably
+hideous was suppressed in the public accounts of the culminant horrors. Those
+first disquieting hints as to the condition of one of the two bodies were dismissed
+and ignored too abruptly - nor were the singular modifications in the mummy
+given the following-up which their news value would normally prompt. It also
+struck people as queer that the mummy was never restored to its case. In these
+days of expert taxidermy the excuse that its disintegrating condition made
+exhibition impracticable seemed a peculiarly lame one.
+
+As curator of the museum I am in a position to reveal all the suppressed facts,
+but this I shall not do during my lifetime. There are things about the world and
+universe which it is better for the majority not to know, and I have not departed
+from the opinion in which all of us - museum staff, physicians, reporters, and
+police - concurred at the period of the horror itself. At the same time it seems
+proper that a matter of such overwhelming scientific and historic importance
+should not remain wholly unrecorded - hence this account which I have
+prepared for the benefit of serious students. I shall place it among various papers
+to be examined after my death, leaving its fate to the discretion of my executors.
+Certain threats and unusual events during the past weeks have led me to believe
+that my life - as well as that of other museum officials - is in some peril through
+the enmity of several widespread secret cults of Asiatics, Polynesians, and
+heterogeneous mystical devotees; hence it is possible that the work of the
+executors may not be long postponed. [Executor's note: Dr. Johnson died
+suddenly and rather mysteriously of heart-failure on April 22, 1933. Wentworth
+Moore, taxidermist of the museum, disappeared around the middle of the
+preceding month. On February 18 of the same year Dr. William Minot, who
+
+
+
+
+superintended a dissection connected with the case, was stabbed in the back,
+dying the following day.]
+
+The real beginning of the horror, I suppose, was in 1879 - long before my term as
+curator - when the museum acquired that ghastly, inexplicable mummy from the
+Orient Shipping Company. Its very discovery was monstrous and menacing, for
+it came from a crypt of unknown origin and fabulous antiquity on a bit of land
+suddenly upheaved from the Pacific's floor.
+
+On May 11, 1878, Capt. Charles Weatherbee of the freighter Eridanus, bound
+from Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, had sighted a new island
+unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin. It projected quite boldly
+out of the sea in the form of a truncated cone. A landing-party under Capt.
+Weatherbee noted evidences of long submersion on the rugged slopes which
+they climbed, while at the summit there were signs of recent destruction, as by
+an earthquake. Among the scattered rubble were massive stones of manifestly
+artificial shaping, and a little examination disclosed the presence of some of that
+prehistoric Cyclopean masonry found on certain Pacific islands and forming a
+perpetual archaeological puzzle.
+
+Finally the sailors entered a massive stone crypt - judged to have been part of a
+much larger edifice, and to have originally lain far underground - in one corner
+of which the frightful mummy crouched. After a short period of virtual panic,
+caused partly by certain carvings on the walls, the men were induced to move
+the mummy to the ship, though it was only with fear and loathing that they
+touched it. Close to the body, as if once thrust into its clothes, was a cylinder of
+an unknown metal containing a roll of thin, bluish- white membrane of equally
+unknown nature, inscribed with peculiar characters in a greyish, indeterminable
+pigment. In the centre of the vast stone floor was a suggestion of a trap-door, but
+the party lacked apparatus sufficiently powerful to move it.
+
+The Cabot Museum, then newly established, saw the meagre reports of the
+discovery and at once took steps to acquire the mummy and the cylinder.
+Curator Pickman made a personal trip to Valparaiso and outfitted a schooner to
+search for the crypt where the thing had been found, though meeting with failure
+in this matter. At the recorded position of the island nothing but the sea's
+unbroken expanse could be discerned, and the seekers realised that the same
+seismic forces which had suddenly thrust the island up had carried it down
+again to the watery darkness where it had brooded for untold aeons. The secret
+of that immovable trap-door would never be solved. The mummy and the
+cylinder, however, remained - and the former was placed on exhibition early in
+November, 1879, in the museum's hall of mummies.
+
+
+
+
+The Cabot Museum of Archaeology, which speciahses in such remnants of
+ancient and unknown civihsations as do not fall within the domain of art, is a
+small and scarcely famous institution, though one of high standing in scientific
+circles. It stands in the heart of Boston's exclusive Beacon Hill district - in Mt.
+Vernon Street, near Joy - housed in a former private mansion with an added
+wing in the rear, and was a source of pride to its austere neighbours until the
+recent terrible events brought it an undesirable notoriety. The hall of mummies
+on the western side of the original mansion (which was designed by Bulfinch
+and erected in 1819), on the second floor, is justly esteemed by historians and
+anthropologists as harbouring the greatest collection of its kind in America. Here
+may be found typical examples of Egyptian embalming from the earliest
+Sakkarah specimens to the last Coptic attempts of the eighth century; mummies
+of other cultures, including the prehistoric Indian specimens recently found in
+the Aleutian Islands; agonised Pompeian figures moulded in plaster from tragic
+hollows in the ruin choking ashes; naturally mummified bodies from mines and
+other excavations in all parts of the earth - some surprised by their terrible
+entombment in the grotesque postures caused by their last, tearing death-throes -
+everything, in short, which any collection of the sort could well be expected to
+contain. In 1879, of course, it was much less ample than it is now; yet even then it
+was remarkable. But that shocking thing from the primal Cyclopean crypt on an
+ephemeral sea-spawned island was always its chief attraction and most
+impenetrable mystery.
+
+The mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast in
+a peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw -like hands, had its
+under jaw thrust far forward, while the shrivelled features bore an expression of
+fright so hideous that few spectators could view them unmoved. The eyes were
+closed, with lids clamped down tightly over eyeballs apparently bulging and
+prominent. Bits of hair and beard remained, and the colour of the whole was a
+sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and half stony,
+forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who sought to ascertain how it was
+embalmed. In places bits of its substance were eaten away by time and decay.
+Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of unknown designs, still clung to
+the object.
+
+Just what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly say. For
+one thing, there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless antiquity and utter
+alienage which affected one like a view from the brink of a monstrous abyss of
+unplumbed blackness - but mostly it was the expression of crazed fear on the
+puckered, prognathous, half-shielded face. Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman,
+cosmic fright could not help communicating the emotion to the beholder amidst
+a disquieting cloud of mystery and vain conjecture.
+
+
+
+
+Among the discriminating few who frequented the Cabot Museum this reHc of
+an elder, forgotten world soon acquired an unholy fame, though the institution's
+seclusion and quiet policy prevented it from becoming a popular sensation of the
+"Cardiff Giant" sort. In the last century the art of vulgar ballyhoo had not
+invaded the field of scholarship to the extent it has now succeeded in doing.
+Naturally, savants of various kinds tried their best to classify the frightful object,
+though always without success. Theories of a bygone Pacific civilisation, of
+which the Easter Island images and the megalithic masonry of Ponape and Nan-
+Matol are conceivable vestiges, were freely circulated among students, and
+learned journals carried varied and often conflicting speculations on a possible
+former continent whose peaks survive as the myriad islands of Melanesia and
+Polynesia. The diversity in dates assigned to the hypothetical vanished culture -
+or continent - was at once bewildering and amusing; yet some surprisingly
+relevant allusions were found in certain myths of Tahiti and other islands.
+
+Meanwhile the strange cylinder and its baffling scroll of unknown hieroglyphs,
+carefully preserved in the museum library, received their due share of attention.
+No question could exist as to their association with the mummy; hence all
+realised that in the unravelling of their mystery the mystery of the shrivelled
+horror would in all probability be unravelled as well. The cylinder, about four
+inches long by seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, was of a queerly iridescent
+metal utterly defying chemical analysis and seemingly impervious to all
+reagents. It was tightly fitted with a cap of the same substance, and bore
+engraved figurings of an evidently decorative and possibly symbolic nature -
+conventional designs which seemed to follow a peculiarly alien, paradoxical, and
+doubtfully describable system of geometry.
+
+Not less mysterious was the scroll it contained - a neat roll of some thin, bluish-
+white, unanalysable membrane, coiled round a slim rod of metal like that of the
+cylinder, and unwinding to a length of some two feet. The large, bold
+hieroglyphs, extending in a narrow line down the centre of the scroll and penned
+or painted with a grey pigment defying analysts, resembled nothing known to
+linguists and palaeographers, and could not be deciphered despite the
+transmission of photographic copies to every living expert in the given field.
+
+It is true that a few scholars, unusually versed in the literature of occultism and
+magic, found vague resemblances between some of the hieroglyphs and certain
+primal symbols described or cited in two or three very ancient, obscure, and
+esoteric texts such as the Book of Eibon, reputed to descend from forgotten
+Hyperborea; the Pnakotic fragments, alleged to be pre-human; and the
+monstrous and forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
+None of these resemblances, however, was beyond dispute; and because of the
+prevailing low estimation of occult studies, no effort was made to circulate
+
+
+
+
+copies of the hieroglyphs among mystical specialists. Had such circulation
+occurred at this early date, the later history of the case might have been very
+different; indeed, a glance at the hieroglyphs by any reader of von Junzt's
+horrible Nameless Cults would have established a linkage of unmistakable
+significance. At this period, however, the readers of that monstrous blasphemy
+were exceedingly few; copies having been incredibly scarce in the interval
+between the suppression of the original Dusseldorf edition (1839) and of the
+Bridewell translation (1845) and the publication of the expurgated reprint by the
+Golden Goblin Press in 1909. Practically speaking, no occultist or student of the
+primal past's esoteric lore had his attention called to the strange scroll until the
+recent outburst of sensational journalism which precipitated the horrible climax.
+
+II.
+
+Thus matters glided along for a half-century following the installation of the
+frightful mummy at the museum. The gruesome object had a local celebrity
+among cultivated Bostonians, but no more than that; while the very existence of
+the cylinder and scroll - after a decade of futile research - was virtually forgotten.
+So quiet and conservative was the Cabot Museum that no reporter or feature
+writer ever thought of invading its uneventful precincts for rabble-tickling
+material.
+
+The invasion of ballyhoo commenced in the spring of 1931, when a purchase of
+somewhat spectacular nature - that of the strange objects and inexplicably
+preserved bodies found in crypts beneath the almost vanished and evilly famous
+ruins of Chateau Faussesflammes, in Averoigne, France - brought the museum
+prominently into the news columns. True to its "hustling" policy, the Boston
+Pillar sent a Sunday feature writer to cover the incident and pad it with an
+exaggerated general account of the institution itself; and this young man - Stuart
+Reynolds by name - hit upon the nameless mummy as a potential sensation far
+surpassing the recent acquisitions nominally forming his chief assignment. A
+smattering of theosophical lore, and a fondness for the speculations of such
+writers as Colonel Churchward and Lewis Spence concerning lost continents and
+primal forgotten civilisations, made Reynolds especially alert toward any
+aeonian relic like the unknown mummy.
+
+At the museum the reporter made himself a nuisance through constant and not
+always intelligent questionings and endless demands for the movement of
+encased objects to permit photographs from unusual angles. In the basement
+library room he pored endlessly over the strange metal cylinder and its
+membraneous scroll, photographing them from every angle and securing
+pictures of every bit of the weird hieroglyphed text. He likewise asked to see all
+books with any bearing whatever on the subject of primal cultures and sunken
+
+
+
+
+continents - sitting for three hours taking notes, and leaving only in order to
+hasten to Cambridge for a sight (if permission were granted) of the abhorred and
+forbidden Necronomicon at the Widener Library.
+
+On April 5th the article appeared in the Sunday Pillar, smothered in photographs
+of mummy, cylinder, and hieroglyphed scroll, and couched in the peculiarly
+simpering, infantile style which the Pillar affects for the benefit of its vast and
+mentally immature clientele. Full of inaccuracies, exaggerations, and
+sensationalism, it was precisely the sort of thing to stir the brainless and fickle
+interest of the herd - and as a result the once quiet museum began to be swarmed
+with chattering and vacuously staring throngs such as its stately corridors had
+never known before.
+
+There were scholarly and intelligent visitors, too, despite the puerility of the
+article - the pictures had spoken for themselves - and many persons of mature
+attainments sometimes see the Pillar by accident. I recall one very strange
+character who appeared during November - a dark, turbaned, and bushily
+bearded man with a laboured, unnatural voice, curiously expressionless face,
+clumsy hands covered with absurd white mittens, who gave a squalid West End
+address and called himself "Swami Chandraputra". This fellow was
+unbelievably erudite in occult lore and seemed profoundly and solemnly moved
+by the resemblance of the hieroglyphs on the scroll to certain signs and symbols
+of a forgotten elder world about which he professed vast intuitive knowledge.
+
+By June, the fame of the mummy and scroll had leaked far beyond Boston, and
+the museum had inquiries and requests for photographs from occultists and
+students of arcana all over the world. This was not altogether pleasing to our
+staff, since we are a scientific institution without sympathy for fantastic
+dreamers; yet we answered all questions with civility. One result of these
+catechisms was a highly learned article in The Occult Review by the famous New
+Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, in which was asserted the complete
+identity of some of the odd geometrical designs on the iridescent cylinder, and of
+several of the hieroglyphs on the membraneous scroll, with certain ideographs of
+horrible significance (transcribed from primal monoliths or from the secret
+rituals of hidden bands of esoteric students and devotees) reproduced in the
+hellish and suppressed Black Book or Nameless Cults of von Junzt.
+
+De Marigny recalled the frightful death of von Junzt in 1840, a year after the
+publication of his terrible volume at Dusseldorf, and commented on his blood-
+curdling and partly suspected sources of information. Above all, he emphasised
+the enormous relevance of the tales with which von Junzt linked most of the
+monstrous ideographs he had reproduced. That these tales, in which a cylinder
+and scroll were expressly mentioned, held a remarkable suggestion of
+
+
+
+
+relationship to the things at the museum, no one could deny; yet they were of
+such breath-taking extravagance - involving such unbelievable sweeps of time
+and such fantastic anomalies of a forgotten elder world - that one could much
+more easily admire than believe them.
+
+Admire them the public certainly did, for copying in the press was universal.
+Illustrated articles sprang up everywhere, telling or purporting to tell the legends
+in the Black Book, expatiating on the horror of the mummy, comparing the
+cylinder's designs and the scroll's hieroglyphs with the figures reproduced by
+von Junzt, and indulging in the wildest, most sensational, and most irrational
+theories and speculations. Attendance at the museum was trebled, and the
+widespread nature of the interest was attested by the plethora of mail on the
+subject - most of it inane and superfluous - received at the museum. Apparently
+the mummy and its origin formed - for imaginative people - a close rival to the
+depression as chief topic of 1931 and 1932. For my own part, the principal effect
+of the furore was to make me read von Junzt's monstrous volume in the Golden
+Goblin edition - a perusal which left me dizzy and nauseated, yet thankful that I
+had not seen the utter infamy of the unexpurgated text.
+
+III.
+
+The archaic whispers reflected in the Black Book, and linked with designs and
+symbols so closely akin to what the mysterious scroll and cylinder bore, were
+indeed of a character to hold one spellbound and not a little awestruck. Leaping
+an incredible gulf of time - behind all the civilisations, races, and lands we know
+- they clustered round a vanished nation and a vanished continent of the misty,
+fabulous dawn-years . . . that to which legend has given the name of Mu, and
+which old tablets in the primal Naacal tongue speak of as flourishing 200,000
+years ago, when Europe harboured only hybrid entities, and lost Hyperborea
+knew the nameless worship of black amorphous Tsathoggua.
+
+There was mention of a kingdom or province called K'naa in a very ancient land
+where the first human people had found monstrous ruins left by those who had
+dwelt there before - vague waves of unknown entities which had filtered down
+from the stars and lived out their aeons on a forgotten, nascent world. K'naa was
+a sacred place, since from its midst the bleak basalt cliffs of Mount Yaddith-Gho
+soared starkly into the sky, topped by a gigantic fortress of Cyclopean stone,
+infinitely older than mankind and built by the alien spawn of the dark planet
+Yuggoth, which had colonised the earth before the birth of terrestrial life.
+
+The spawn of Yuggoth had perished aeons before, but had left behind them one
+monstrous and terrible living thing which could never die - their hellish god or
+patron daemon Ghatanothoa, which glowered and brooded eternally though
+
+
+
+
+unseen in the crypts beneath that fortress on Yaddith-Gho. No human creature
+had ever cHmbed Yaddith-Gho or seen that blasphemous fortress except as a
+distant and geometrically abnormal outline against the sky; yet most agreed that
+Ghatanothoa was still there, wallowing and burrowing in unsuspected abysses
+beneath the megalithic walls. There were always those who believed that
+sacrifices must be made to Ghatanothoa, lest it crawl out of its hidden abysses
+and waddle horribly through the world of men as it had once waddled through
+the primal world of the Yuggoth-spawn.
+
+People said that if no victims were offered, Ghatanothoa would ooze up to the
+light of day and lumber down the basalt cliffs of Yaddith-Gho bringing doom to
+all it might encounter. For no living thing could behold Ghatanothoa, or even a
+perfect graven image of Ghatanothoa, however small, without suffering a change
+more horrible than death itself. Sight of the god, or its image, as all the legends of
+the Yuggoth- spawn agreed, meant paralysis and petrifaction of a singularly
+shocking sort, in which the victim was turned to stone and leather on the outside,
+while the brain within remained perpetually alive - horribly fixed and prisoned
+through the ages, and maddeningly conscious of the passage of interminable
+epochs of helpless inaction till chance and time might complete the decay of the
+petrified shell and leave it exposed to die. Most brains, of course, would go mad
+long before this aeon-deferred release could arrive. No human eyes, it was said,
+had ever glimpsed Ghatanothoa, though the danger was as great now as it had
+been for the Yuggoth-spawn.
+
+And so there was a cult in K'naa which worshipped Ghatanothoa and each year
+sacrificed to it twelve young warriors and twelve young maidens. These victims
+were offered up on flaming altars in the marble temple near the mountain's base,
+for none dared climb Yaddith-Gho's basalt cliffs or draw near to the Cyclopean
+prehuman stronghold on its crest. Vast was the power of the priests of
+Ghatanothoa, since upon them alone depended the preservation of K'naa and of
+all the land of Mu from the petrifying emergence of Ghatanothoa out of its
+unknown burrows.
+
+There were in the land an hundred priests of the Dark God, under Imash-Mo the
+High-Priest, who walked before King Thabon at the Nath-feast, and stood
+proudly whilst the King knelt at the Dhoric shrine. Each priest had a marble
+house, a chest of gold, two hundred slaves, and an hundred concubines, besides
+immunity from civil law and the power of life and death over all in K'naa save
+the priests of the King. Yet in spite of these defenders there was ever a fear in the
+land lest Ghatanothoa slither up from the depths and lurch viciously down the
+mountain to bring horror and petrification to mankind. In the latter years the
+priests forbade men even to guess or imagine what its frightful aspect might be.
+
+
+
+
+It was in the Year of the Red Moon (estimated as B.C. 173,148 by von Junzt) that a
+human being first dared to breathe defiance against Ghatanothoa and its
+nameless menace. This bold heretic was T'yog, High-Priest of Shub-Niggurath
+and guardian of the copper temple of the Goat with a Thousand Young. T'yog
+had thought long on the powers of the various gods, and had had strange
+dreams and revelations touching the life of this and earlier worlds. In the end he
+felt sure that the gods friendly to man could be arrayed against the hostile gods,
+and believed that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig the Serpent-god,
+were ready to take sides with man against the tyranny and presumption of
+Ghatanothoa.
+
+Inspired by the Mother Goddess, T'yog wrote down a strange formula in the
+hieratic Naacal of his order, which he believed would keep the possessor
+immune from the Dark God's petrifying power. With this protection, he
+reflected, it might be possible for a bold man to climb the dreaded basalt cliffs
+and - first of all human beings - enter the Cyclopean fortress beneath which
+Ghatanothoa reputedly brooded. Face to face with the god, and with the power
+of Shub-Niggurath and her sons on his side, T'yog believed that he might be able
+to bring it to terms and at last deliver mankind from its brooding menace. With
+humanity freed through his efforts, there would be no limits to the honours he
+might claim. All the honours of the priests of Ghatanothoa would perforce be
+transferred to him; and even kingship or godhood might conceivably be within
+his reach.
+
+So T'yog wrote his protective formula on a scroll of pthagon membrane
+(according to von Junzt, the inner skin of the extinct ya-kith-lizard) and enclosed
+it in a carven cylinder of lagh metal - the metal brought by the Elder Ones from
+Yuggoth, and found in no mine of earth. This charm, carried in his robe, would
+make him proof against the menace of Ghatanothoa - it would even restore the
+Dark God's petrified victims if that monstrous entity should ever emerge and
+begin its devastations. Thus he proposed to go up the shunned and man-
+untrodden mountain, invade the alien-angled citadel of Cyclopean stone, and
+confront the shocking devil-entity in its lair. Of what would follow, he could not
+even guess; but the hope of being mankind's saviour lent strength to his will.
+
+He had, however, reckoned without the jealousy and self-interest of
+Ghatanothoa's pampered priests. No sooner did they hear of his plan than -
+fearful for their prestige and privilege in case the Daemon-God should be
+dethroned - they set up a frantic clamour against the so-called sacrilege, crying
+that no man might prevail against Ghatanothoa, and that any effort to seek it out
+would merely provoke it to a hellish onslaught against mankind which no spell
+or priestcraft could hope to avert. With those cries they hoped to turn the public
+mind against T'yog; yet such was the people's yearning for freedom from
+
+
+
+
+Ghatanothoa, and such their confidence in the skill and zeal of T'yog, that all the
+protestations came to naught. Even the King, usually a puppet of the priests,
+refused to forbid T'yog's daring pilgrimage.
+
+It was then that the priests of Ghatanothoa did by stealth what they could not do
+openly. One night Imash- Mo, the High-Priest, stole to T'yog in his temple
+chamber and took from his sleeping form the metal cylinder; silently drawing
+out the potent scroll and putting in its place another scroll of great similitude, yet
+varied enough to have no power against any god or daemon. When the cylinder
+was slipped back into the sleeper's cloak Imash-Mo was content, for he knew
+T'yog was little likely to study that cylinder's contents again. Thinking himself
+protected by the true scroll, the heretic would march up the forbidden mountain
+and into the Evil Presence - and Ghatanothoa, unchecked by any magic, would
+take care of the rest.
+
+It would no longer be needful for Ghatanothoa's priests to preach against the
+defiance. Let T'yog go his way and meet his doom. And secretly, the priests
+would always cherish the stolen scroll - the true and potent charm - handing it
+down from one High-Priest to another for use in any dim future when it might
+be needful to contravene the Devil-God's will. So the rest of the night Imash-Mo
+slept in great peace, with the true scroll in a new cylinder fashioned for its
+harbourage.
+
+It was dawn on the Day of the Sky-Flames (nomenclature undefined by von
+Junzt) that T'yog, amidst the prayers and chanting of the people and with King
+Thabon's blessing on his head, started up the dreaded mountain with a staff of
+tlath-wood in his right hand. Within his robe was the cylinder holding what he
+thought to be the true charm - for he had indeed failed to find out the imposture.
+Nor did he see any irony in the prayers which Imash-Mo and the other priests of
+Ghatanothoa intoned for his safety and success.
+
+All that morning the people stood and watched as T'yog's dwindling form
+struggled up the shunned basalt slope hitherto alien to men's footsteps, and
+many stayed watching long after he had vanished where a perilous ledge led
+round to the mountain's hidden side. That night a few sensitive dreamers
+thought they heard a faint tremor convulsing the hated peak; though most
+ridiculed them for the statement. Next day vast crowds watched the mountain
+and prayed, and wondered how soon T'yog would return. And so the next day,
+and the next. For weeks they hoped and waited, and then they wept. Nor did
+anyone ever see T'yog, who would have saved mankind from fears, again.
+
+Thereafter men shuddered at T'yog's presumption, and tried not to think of the
+punishment his impiety had met. And the priests of Ghatanothoa smiled to those
+
+
+
+
+who might resent the god's will or challenge its right to the sacrifices. In later
+years the ruse of Imash-Mo became known to the people; yet the knowledge
+availed not to change the general feeling that Ghatanothoa were better left alone.
+None ever dared to defy it again. And so the ages rolled on, and King succeeded
+King, and High-Priest succeeded High-Priest, and nations rose and decayed, and
+lands rose above the sea and returned into the sea. And with many millennia
+decay fell upon K'naa - till at last on a hideous day of storm and thunder, terrific
+rumbling, and mountain-high waves, all the land of Mu sank into the sea forever.
+
+Yet down the later aeons thin streams of ancient secrets trickled. In distant lands
+there met together grey- faced fugitives who had survived the sea-fiend's rage,
+and strange skies drank the smoke of altars reared to vanished gods and
+daemons. Though none knew to what bottomless deep the sacred peak and
+Cyclopean fortress of dreaded Ghatanothoa had sunk, there were still those who
+mumbled its name and offered to it nameless sacrifices lest it bubble up through
+leagues of ocean and shamble among men spreading horror and petrifaction.
+
+Around the scattered priests grew the rudiments of a dark and secret cult - secret
+because the people of the new lands had other gods and devils, and thought only
+evil of elder and alien ones - and within that cult many hideous things were
+done, and many strange objects cherished. It was whispered that a certain line of
+elusive priests still harboured the true charm against Ghatanothoa which Imash-
+Mo stole from the sleeping T'yog; though none remained who could read or
+understand the cryptic syllables, or who could even guess in what part of the
+world the lost K'naa, the dreaded peak of Yaddith-Gho, and the titan fortress of
+the Devil-God had lain.
+
+Though it flourished chiefly in those Pacific regions around which Mu itself had
+once stretched, there were rumours of the hidden and detested cult of
+Ghatanothoa in ill-fated Atlantis, and on the abhorred plateau of Leng. Von Junzt
+implied its presence in the fabled subterrene kingdom of K'n-yan, and gave clear
+evidence that it had penetrated Egypt, Chaldaea, Persia, China, the forgotten
+Semite empires of Africa, and Mexico and Peru in the New World. That it had a
+strong connexion with the witchcraft movement in Europe, against which the
+bulls of popes were vainly directed, he more than strongly hinted. The West,
+however, was never favourable to its growth; and public indignation - aroused
+by glimpses of hideous rites and nameless sacrifices - wholly stamped out many
+of its branches. In the end it became a hunted, doubly furtive underground affair
+- yet never could its nucleus be quite exterminated. It always survived somehow,
+chiefly in the Far East and on the Pacific Islands, where its teachings became
+merged into the esoteric lore of the Polynesian Areoi.
+
+
+
+
+Von Junzt gave subtle and disquieting hints of actual contact with the cult; so
+that as I read I shuddered at what was rumoured about his death. He spoke of
+the growth of certain ideas regarding the appearance of the Devil-God - a
+creature which no human being (unless it were the too-daring T'yog, who had
+never returned) had ever seen - and contrasted this habit of speculation with the
+taboo prevailing in ancient Mu against any attempt to imagine what the horror
+looked like. There was a peculiar tearfulness about the devotees' awed and
+fascinated whispers on this subject - whispers heavy with morbid curiosity
+concerning the precise nature of what T'yog might have confronted in that
+frightful pre-human edifice on the dreaded and now-sunken mountains before
+the end (if it was an end) finally came - and I felt oddly disturbed by the German
+scholar's oblique and insidious references to this topic.
+
+Scarcely less disturbing were von Junzt's conjectures on the whereabouts of the
+stolen scroll of cantrips against Ghatanothoa, and on the ultimate uses to which
+this scroll might be put. Despite all my assurance that the whole matter was
+purely mythical, I could not help shivering at the notion of a latter-day
+emergence of the monstrous god, and at the picture of an humanity turned
+suddenly to a race of abnormal statues, each encasing a living brain doomed to
+inert and helpless consciousness for untold aeons of futurity. The old Dusseldorf
+savant had a poisonous way of suggesting more than he stated, and I could
+understand why his damnable book was suppressed in so many countries as
+blasphemous, dangerous, and unclean.
+
+I writhed with repulsion, yet the thing exerted an unholy fascination; and I could
+not lay it down till I had finished it. The alleged reproductions of designs and
+ideographs from Mu were marvellously and startlingly like the markings on the
+strange cylinder and the characters on the scroll, and the whole account teemed
+with details having vague, irritating suggestions of resemblance to things
+connected with the hideous mummy. The cylinder and scroll - the Pacific setting
+- the persistent notion of old Capt. Weatherbee that the Cyclopean crypt where
+the mummy was found had once lain under a vast building . . . somehow I was
+vaguely glad that the volcanic island had sunk before that massive suggestion of
+a trapdoor could be opened.
+
+IV.
+
+What I read in the Black Book formed a fiendishly apt preparation for the news
+items and closer events which began to force themselves upon me in the spring
+of 1932. I can scarcely recall just when the increasingly frequent reports of police
+action against the odd and fantastical religious cults in the Orient and elsewhere
+commenced to impress me; but by May or June I realised that there was, all over
+the world, a surprising and unwonted burst of activity on the part of bizarre.
+
+
+
+
+furtive, and esoteric mystical organisations ordinarily quiescent and seldom
+heard from.
+
+It is not likely that I would have connected these reports with either the hints of
+von Junzt or the popular furore over the mummy and cylinder in the museum,
+but for certain significant syllables and persistent resemblances - sensationally
+dwelt upon by the press - in the rites and speeches of the various secret
+celebrants brought to public attention. As it was, I could not help remarking with
+disquiet the frequent recurrence of a name - in various corrupt forms - which
+seemed to constitute a focal point of all the cult worship, and which was
+obviously regarded with a singular mixture of reverence and terror. Some of the
+forms quoted were G'tanta, Tanotah, Than-Tha, Gatan, and Ktan-Tah - and it did
+not require the suggestions of my now numerous occultist correspondents to
+make me see in these variants a hideous and suggestive kinship to the monstrous
+name rendered by von Junzt as Ghatanothoa.
+
+There were other disquieting features, too. Again and again the reports cited
+vague, awestruck references to a "true scroll" - something on which tremendous
+consequences seemed to hinge, and which was mentioned as being in the
+custody of a certain "Nagob", whoever and whatever he might be. Likewise,
+there was an insistent repetition of a name which sounded like Tog, Tiok, Yog,
+Zob, or Yob, and which my more and more excited consciousness involuntarily
+linked with the name of the hapless heretic T'yog as given in the Black Book.
+This name was usually uttered in connexion with such cryptical phrases as "It is
+none other than he", "He had looked upon its face", "He knows all, though he
+can neither see nor feel", "He has brought the memory down through the aeons",
+"The true scroll will release him", "Nagob has the true scroll", "He can tell where
+to find it".
+
+Something very queer was undoubtedly in the air, and I did not wonder when
+my occultist correspondents, as well as the sensational Sunday papers, began to
+connect the new abnormal stirrings with the legends of Mu on the one hand, and
+with the frightful mummy's recent exploitation on the other hand. The
+widespread articles in the first wave of press publicity, with their insistent
+linkage of the mummy, cylinder, and scroll with the tale in the Black Book, and
+their crazily fantastic speculations about the whole matter, might very well have
+roused the latent fanaticism in hundreds of those furtive groups of exotic
+devotees with which our complex world abounds. Nor did the papers cease
+adding fuel to the flames - for the stories on the cult-stirrings were even wilder
+than the earlier series of yarns.
+
+As the summer drew on, attendants noticed a curious new element among the
+throngs of visitors which - after a lull following the first burst of publicity - were
+
+
+
+
+again drawn to the museum by the second furore. More and more frequently
+there were persons of strange and exotic aspect - swarthy Asiatics, long-haired
+nondescripts, and bearded brown men who seemed unused to European clothes
+- who would invariably inquire for the hall of mummies and would
+subsequently be found staring at the hideous Pacific specimen in a veritable
+ecstasy of fascination. Some quiet, sinister undercurrent in this flood of eccentric
+foreigners seemed to impress all the guards, and I myself was far from
+undisturbed. I could not help thinking of the prevailing cult-stirrings among just
+such exotics as these - and the connexion of those stirrings with myths all too
+close to the frightful mummy and its cylinder scroll.
+
+At times I was half tempted to withdraw the mummy from exhibition -
+especially when an attendant told me that he had several times glimpsed
+strangers making odd obeisances before it, and had overheard sing- song
+mutterings which sounded like chants or rituals addressed to it at hours when
+the visiting throngs were somewhat thinned. One of the guards acquired a queer
+nervous hallucination about the petrified horror in the lone glass case, alleging
+that he could see from day to day certain vague, subtle, and infinitely slight
+changes in the frantic flexion of the bony claws, and in the fear-crazed expression
+of the leathery face. He could not get rid of the loathsome idea that those
+horrible, bulging eyes were about to pop suddenly open.
+
+It was early in September, when the curious crowds had lessened and the hall of
+mummies was sometimes vacant, that the attempt to get at the mummy by
+cutting the glass of its case was made. The culprit, a swarthy Polynesian, was
+spied in time by a guard, and was overpowered before any damage occurred.
+Upon investigation the fellow turned out to be an Hawaiian notorious for his
+activity in certain underground religious cults, and having a considerable police
+record in connexion with abnormal and inhuman rites and sacrifices. Some of the
+papers found in his room were highly puzzling and disturbing, including many
+sheets covered with hieroglyphs closely resembling those on the scroll at the
+museum and in the Black Book of von Junzt; but regarding these things he could
+not be prevailed upon to speak.
+
+Scarcely a week after this incident, another attempt to get at the mummy - this
+time by tampering with the lock of his case - resulted in a second arrest. The
+offender, a Cingalese, had as long and unsavoury a record of loathsome cult
+activities as the Hawaiian had possessed, and displayed a kindred unwillingness
+to talk to the police. What made this case doubly and darkly interesting was that
+a guard had noticed this man several times before, and had heard him
+addressing to the mummy a peculiar chant containing unmistakable repetitions
+of the word "T'yog". As a result of this affair I doubled the guards in the hall of
+
+
+
+
+mummies, and ordered them never to leave the now notorious specimen out of
+sight, even for a moment.
+
+As may well be imagined, the press made much of these two incidents,
+reviewing its talk of primal and fabulous Mu, and claiming boldly that the
+hideous mummy was none other than the daring heretic T'yog, petrified by
+something he had seen in the pre-human citadel he had invaded, and preserved
+intact through 175,000 years of our planet's turbulent history. That the strange
+devotees represented cults descended from Mu, and that they were worshipping
+the mummy - or perhaps even seeking to awaken it to life by spells and
+incantations - was emphasised and reiterated in the most sensational fashion.
+
+Writers exploited the insistence of the old legends that the brain of
+Ghatanothoa's petrified victims remained conscious and unaffected - a point
+which served as a basis for the wildest and most improbable speculations. The
+mention of a "true scroll" also received due attention - it being the prevailing
+popular theory that T'yog's stolen charm against Ghatanothoa was somewhere
+in existence, and that cult-members were trying to bring it into contact with
+T'yog himself for some purpose of their own. One result of this exploitation was
+that a third wave of gaping visitors began flooding the museum and staring at
+the hellish mummy which served as a nucleus for the whole strange and
+disturbing affair.
+
+It was among this wave of spectators - many of whom made repeated visits - that
+talk of the mummy's vaguely changing aspect first began to be widespread. I
+suppose - despite the disturbing notion of the nervous guard some months
+before - that the museum's personnel was too well used to the constant sight of
+odd shapes to pay close attention to details; in any case, it was the excited
+whispers of visitors which at length aroused the guards to the subtle mutation
+which was apparently in progress. Almost simultaneously the press got hold of it
+- with blatant results which can well be imagined.
+
+Naturally, I gave the matter my most careful observation, and by the middle of
+October decided that a definite disintegration of the mummy was under way.
+Through some chemical or physical influence in the air, the half-stony, half-
+leathery fibres seemed to be gradually relaxing, causing distinct variations in the
+angles of the limbs and in certain details of the fear-twisted facial expression.
+After a half-century of perfect preservation this was a highly disconcerting
+development, and I had the museum's taxidermist. Dr. Moore, go carefully over
+the gruesome object several times. He reported a general relaxation and
+softening, and gave the thing two or three astringent sprayings, but did not dare
+to attempt anything drastic lest there be a sudden crumbling and accelerated
+decay.
+
+
+
+
+The effect of all this upon the gaping crowds was curious. Heretofore each new
+sensation sprung by the press had brought fresh waves of staring and
+whispering visitors, but now - though the papers blathered endlessly about the
+mummy's changes - the public seemed to have acquired a definite sense of fear
+which outranked even its morbid curiosity. People seemed to feel that a sinister
+aura hovered over the museum, and from a high peak the attendance fell to a
+level distinctly below normal. This lessened attendance gave added prominence
+to the stream of freakish foreigners who continued to infest the place, and whose
+numbers seemed in no way diminished.
+
+On November 18th a Peruvian of Indian blood suffered a strange hysterical or
+epileptic seizure in front of the mummy, afterward shrieking from his hospital
+cot, "It tried to open its eyes! - T'yog tried to open his eyes and stare at me!" I
+was by this time on the point of removing the object from exhibition, but
+permitted myself to be overruled at a meeting of our very conservative directors.
+However, I could see that the museum was beginning to acquire an unholy
+reputation in its austere and quiet neighbourhood. After this incident I gave
+instructions that no one be allowed to pause before the monstrous Pacific relic for
+more than a few minutes at a time.
+
+It was on November 24th, after the museum's five o'clock closing, that one of the
+guards noticed a minute opening of the mummy's eyes. The phenomenon was
+very slight - nothing but a thin crescent of cornea being visible in either eye - but
+it was none the less of the highest interest. Dr. Moore, having been summoned
+hastily, was about to study the exposed bits of eyeball with a magnifier when his
+handling of the mummy caused the leathery lids to fall tightly shut again. All
+gentle efforts to open them failed, and the taxidermist did not dare to apply
+drastic measures. When he notified me of all this by telephone I felt a sense of
+mounting dread hard to reconcile with the apparently simple event concerned.
+For a moment I could share the popular impression that some evil, amorphous
+blight from unplumbed deeps of time and space hung murkily and menacingly
+over the museum.
+
+Two nights later a sullen Filipino was trying to secrete himself in the museum at
+closing time. Arrested and taken to the station, he refused even to give his name,
+and was detained as a suspicious person. Meanwhile the strict surveillance of the
+mummy seemed to discourage the odd hordes of foreigners from haunting it. At
+least, the number of exotic visitors distinctly fell off after the enforcement of the
+"move along" order.
+
+It was during the early morning hours of Thursday, December 1st, that a terrible
+climax developed. At about one o'clock horrible screams of mortal fright and
+agony were heard issuing from the museum, and a series of frantic telephone
+
+
+
+
+calls from neighbours brought to the scene quickly and simultaneously a squad
+of police and several museum officials, including myself. Some of the policemen
+surrounded the building while others, with the officials, cautiously entered. In
+the main corridor we found the night watchman strangled to death - a bit of East
+Indian hemp still knotted around his neck - and realised that despite all
+precautions some darkly evil intruder or intruders had gained access to the
+place. Now, however, a tomb- like silence enfolded everything and we almost
+feared to advance upstairs to the fateful wing where we knew the core of the
+trouble must lurk. We felt a bit more steadied after flooding the building with
+light from the central switches in the corridor, and finally crept reluctantly up the
+curving staircase and through a lofty archway to the hall of mummies.
+
+V.
+
+It is from this point onward that reports of the hideous case have been censored -
+for we have all agreed that no good can be accomplished by a public knowledge
+of those terrestrial conditions implied by the further developments. I have said
+that we flooded the whole building with light before our ascent. Now beneath
+the beams that beat down on the glistening cases and their gruesome contents,
+we saw outspread a mute horror whose baffling details testified to happenings
+utterly beyond our comprehension. There were two intruders - who we
+afterward agreed must have hidden in the building before closing time - but they
+would never be executed for the watchman's murder. They had already paid the
+penalty.
+
+One was a Burmese and the other a Fiji-Islander - both known to the police for
+their share in frightful and repulsive cult activities. They were dead, and the
+more we examined them the more utterly monstrous and unnamable we felt
+their manner of death to be. On both faces was a more wholly frantic and
+inhuman look of fright than even the oldest policeman had ever seen before; yet
+in the state of the two bodies there were vast and significant differences.
+
+The Burmese lay collapsed close to the nameless mummy's case, from which a
+square of glass had been neatly cut. In his right hand was a scroll of bluish
+membrane which I at once saw was covered with greyish hieroglyphs - almost a
+duplicate of the scroll in the strange cylinder in the library downstairs, though
+later study brought out subtle differences. There was no mark of violence on the
+body, and in view of the desperate, agonised expression on the twisted face we
+could only conclude that the man died of sheer fright.
+
+It was the closely adjacent Fijian, though, that gave us the profoundest shock.
+One of the policemen was the first to feel of him, and the cry of fright he emitted
+added another shudder to that neighbourhood's night of terror. We ought to
+
+
+
+
+have known from the lethal greyness of the once-black, fear-twisted face, and of
+the bony hands - one of which still clutched an electric torch - that something
+was hideously wrong; yet every one of us was unprepared for what that officer's
+hesitant touch disclosed. Even now I can think of it only with a paroxysm of
+dread and repulsion. To be brief - the hapless invader, who less than an hour
+before had been a sturdy living Melanesian bent on unknown evils, was now a
+rigid, ash-grey figure of stony, leathery petrification, in every respect identical
+with the crouching, aeon-old blasphemy in the violated glass case.
+
+Yet that was not the worst. Crowning all other horrors, and indeed seizing our
+shocked attention before we turned to the bodies on the floor, was the state of the
+frightful mummy. No longer could its changes be called vague and subtle, for it
+had now made radical shifts of posture. It had sagged and slumped with a
+curious loss of rigidity; its bony claws had sunk until they no longer even partly
+covered its leathery, fear- crazed face; and - God help us! - its hellish bulging
+eyes had popped wide open, and seemed to be staring directly at the two
+intruders who had died of fright or worse.
+
+That ghastly, dead-fish stare was hideously mesmerising, and it haunted us all
+the time we were examining the bodies of the invaders. Its effect on our nerves
+was damnably queer, for we somehow felt a curious rigidity creeping over us
+and hampering our simplest motions - a rigidity which later vanished very oddly
+when we passed the hieroglyphed scroll around for inspection. Every now and
+then I felt my gaze drawn irresistibly toward those horrible bulging eyes in the
+case, and when I returned to study them after viewing the bodies I thought I
+detected something very singular about the glassy surface of the dark and
+marvellously well-preserved pupils. The more I looked, the more fascinated I
+became; and at last I went down to the office - despite that strange stiffness in my
+limbs - and brought up a strong multiple magnifying glass. With this I
+commenced a very close and careful survey of the fishy pupils, while the others
+crowded expectantly around.
+
+I had always been rather sceptical of the theory that scenes and objects become
+photographed on the retina of the eye in cases of death or coma; yet no sooner
+did I look through the lens than I realised the presence of some sort of image
+other than the room's reflection in the glassy, bulging optics of this nameless
+spawn of the aeons. Certainly, there was a dimly outlined scene on the age-old
+retinal surface, and I could not doubt that it formed the last thing on which those
+eyes had looked in life - countless millennia ago. It seemed to be steadily fading,
+and I fumbled with the magnifier in order to shift another lens into place. Yet it
+must have been accurate and clear-cut; even if infinitesimally small, when - in
+response to some evil spell or act connected with their visit - it had confronted
+those intruders who were frightened to death. With the extra lens I could make
+
+
+
+
+out many details formerly invisible, and the awed group around me hung on the
+flood of words with which I tried to tell what I saw.
+
+For here, in the year 1932, a man in the city of Boston was looking on something
+which belonged to an unknown and utterly alien world - a world that vanished
+from existence and normal memory aeons ago. There was a vast room - a
+chamber of Cyclopean masonry - and I seemed to be viewing it from one of its
+corners. On the walls were carvings so hideous that even in this imperfect image
+their stark blasphemousness and bestiality sickened me. I could not believe that
+the carvers of these things were human, or that they had ever seen human beings
+when they shaped the frightful outlines which leered at the beholder. In the
+centre of the chamber was a colossal trap-door of stone, pushed upward to
+permit the emergence of some object from below. The object should have been
+clearly visible - indeed, must have been when the eyes first opened before the
+fear-stricken intruders - though under my lenses it was merely a monstrous blur.
+
+As it happened, I was studying the right eye only when I brought the extra
+magnification into play. A moment later I wished fervently that my search had
+ended there. As it was, however, the zeal of discovery and revelation was upon
+me, and I shifted my powerful lenses to the mummy's left eye in the hope of
+finding the image less faded on that retina. My hands, trembling with excitement
+and unnaturally stiff from some obscure influence, were slow in bringing the
+magnifier into focus, but a moment later I realised that the image was less faded
+than in the other eye. I saw in a morbid flash of half-distinctness the insufferable
+thing which was welling up through the prodigious trap-door in that Cyclopean,
+immemorially archaic crypt of a lost world - and fell fainting with an inarticulate
+shriek of which I am not even ashamed.
+
+By the time I revived there was no distinct image of anything in either eye of the
+monstrous mummy. Sergeant Keefe of the police looked with my glass, for I
+could not bring myself to face that abnormal entity again. And I thanked all the
+powers of the cosmos that I had not looked earlier than I did. It took all my
+resolution, and a great deal of solicitation, to make me relate what I had
+glimpsed in the hideous moment of revelation. Indeed, I could not speak till we
+had all adjourned to the office below, out of sight of that daemoniac thing which
+could not be. For I had begun to harbour the most terrible and fantastic notions
+about the mummy and its glassy, bulging eyes - that it had a kind of hellish
+consciousness, seeing all that occurred before it and trying vainly to
+communicate some frightful message from the gulfs of time. That meant
+madness - but at last I thought I might be better off if I told what I had half seen.
+
+After all, it was not a long thing to tell. Oozing and surging up out of that
+yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable
+
+
+
+
+behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of its original to kill
+with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my
+command. I might call it gigantic - tentacled - proboscidian - octopus-eyed -
+semi-amorphous - plastic - partly squamous and partly rugose - ugh! But nothing
+I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-
+galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of
+black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental
+image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I told of the sight to the
+men around me in the office, I had to fight to preserve the consciousness I had
+regained.
+
+Nor were my hearers much less moved. Not a man spoke above a whisper for a
+full quarter-hour, and there were awed, half-furtive references to the frightful
+lore in the Black Book, to the recent newspaper tales of cult-stirrings, and to the
+sinister events in the museum. Ghatanothoa . . . Even its smallest perfect image
+could petrify - T'yog - the false scroll - he never came back - the true scroll which
+could fully or partly undo the petrification - did it survive? - the hellish cults -
+the phrases overheard - "It is none other than he" - "He had looked upon its
+face" - "He knows all, though he can neither see nor feel" - "He had brought the
+memory down through the aeons" - "The true scroll will release him" - "Nagob
+has the true scroll" - "He can tell where to find it." Only the healing greyness of
+the dawn brought us back to sanity; a sanity which made of that glimpse of mine
+a closed topic - something not to be explained or thought of again.
+
+We gave out only partial reports to the press, and later on cooperated with the
+papers in making other suppressions. For example, when the autopsy shewed
+the brain and several other internal organs of the petrified Fijian to be fresh and
+unpetrified, though hermetically sealed by the petrification of the exterior flesh -
+an anomaly about which physicians are still guardedly and bewilderedly
+debating - we did not wish a furore to be started. We knew too well what the
+yellow journals, remembering what was said of the intact-brained and still-
+conscious state of Ghatanothoa's stony-leathery victims, would make of this
+detail.
+
+As matters stood, they pointed out that the man who had held the hieroglyphed
+scroll - and who had evidently thrust it at the mummy through the opening in
+the case - was not petrified, while the man who had not held it was. When they
+demanded that we make certain experiments - applying the scroll both to the
+stony-leathery body of the Fijian and to the mummy itself - we indignantly
+refused to abet such superstitious notions. Of course, the mummy was
+withdrawn from public view and transferred to the museum laboratory awaiting
+a really scientific examination before some suitable medical authority.
+Remembering past events, we kept it under a strict guard; but even so, an
+
+
+
+
+attempt was made to enter the museum at 2:25 a.m. on December 5th. Prompt
+working of the burglar alarm frustrated the design, though unfortunately the
+criminal or criminals escaped.
+
+That no hint of anything further ever reached the public, I am profoundly
+thankful. I wish devoutly that there were nothing more to tell. There will, of
+course, be leaks, and if anything happens to me I do not know what my
+executors will do with this manuscript; but at least the case will not be painfully
+fresh in the multitude's memory when the revelation comes. Besides, no one will
+believe the facts when they are finally told. That is the curious thing about the
+multitude. When their yellow press makes hints, they are ready to swallow
+anything; but when a stupendous and abnormal revelation is actually made, they
+laugh it aside as a lie. For the sake of general sanity it is probably better so.
+
+I have said that a scientific examination of the frightful mummy was planned.
+This took place on December 8th, exactly a week after the hideous culmination of
+events, and was conducted by the eminent Dr. William Minot, in conjunction
+with Wentworth Moore, Sc.D., taxidermist of the museum. Dr. Minot had
+witnessed the autopsy of the oddly petrified Fijian the week before. There were
+also present Messrs. Lawrence Cabot and Dudley Saltonstall of the museum's
+trustees, Drs. Mason, Wells, and Carver of the museum staff, two representatives
+of the press, and myself. During the week the condition of the hideous specimen
+had not visibly changed, though some relaxation of its fibres caused the position
+of the glassy, open eyes to shift slightly from time to time. All of the staff
+dreaded to look at the thing - for its suggestion of quiet, conscious watching had
+become intolerable - and it was only with an effort that I could bring myself to
+attend the examination.
+
+Dr. Minot arrived shortly after 1:00 p.m., and within a few minutes began his
+survey of the mummy. Considerable disintegration took place under his hands,
+and in view of this - and of what we told him concerning the gradual relaxation
+of the specimen since the first of October - he decided that a thorough dissection
+ought to be made before the substance was further impaired. The proper
+instruments being present in the laboratory equipment, he began at once;
+exclaiming aloud at the odd, fibrous nature of the grey, mummified substance.
+
+But his exclamation was still louder when he made the first deep incision, for out
+of that cut there slowly trickled a thick crimson stream whose nature - despite
+the infinite ages dividing this hellish mummy's lifetime from the present - was
+utterly unmistakable. A few more deft strokes revealed various organs in
+astonishing degrees of non-petrified preservation - all, indeed, being intact
+except where injuries to the petrified exterior had brought about malformation or
+destruction. The resemblance of this condition to that found in the fright-killed
+
+
+
+
+Fiji-Islander was so strong that the eminent physician gasped in bewilderment.
+The perfection of those ghastly bulging eyes was uncanny, and their exact state
+with respect to petrification was very difficult to determine.
+
+At 3:30 p.m. the brain-case was opened - and ten minutes later our stunned
+group took an oath of secrecy which only such guarded documents as this
+manuscript will ever modify. Even the two reporters were glad to confirm the
+silence. For the opening had revealed a pulsing, living brain.
+
+
+
+
+Poetry and the Gods - with Anna
+Helen Crofts
+
+Written 1920
+
+Published September 1920 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 1-4.
+
+A damp gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great War,
+when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and wishes, unheard-of
+yearnings which floated out of the spacious twentieth- century drawing room,
+up the deeps of the air, and eastward to olive groves in distant Arcady which she
+had seen only in her dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off
+the glaring chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp
+which shed over the reading table a green glow as soothing as moonlight when it
+issued through the foliage about an antique shrine.
+
+Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a
+typical product of modern civilization; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf
+that separated her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because of the
+strange home in which she lived, that abode of coldness where relations were
+always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or
+was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in time and space, whereby
+she had been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit
+ever to harmonize with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel
+the mood which was engulfing her more and more deeply each moment, she
+took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of poetry.
+Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else, though
+many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over parts
+of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapor of sterile ugliness and restraint,
+like dust on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent sunset.
+
+Listlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive treasure,
+she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An observer
+could have read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some image or
+dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or dream
+she had seen before. It was only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful compromise of the
+poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers; but it
+had in it all the unstudied music of a bard who lives and feels, who gropes
+ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet had the harmony of
+winged, spontaneous words, a harmony missing from the formal, convention-
+bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually faded.
+
+
+
+
+and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple, star-strewn
+mists beyond time, where only Gods and dreamers walk.
+
+
+
+Moon
+White
+Where
+
+
+
+the
+
+
+
+over
+butterfly
+heavy-lidded
+
+
+
+To the sound of the cuckoo's call.
+
+
+
+Buddhas
+
+
+
+Japan,
+moon!
+dream
+
+
+
+The white wings of moon butterflies
+
+Flicker down the streets of the city.
+
+Blushing into silence the useless wicks of sound-lanterns in the hands of girls
+
+
+
+over
+
+
+
+the
+
+
+
+Moon
+
+A white-curved
+
+Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven
+
+
+
+The air is full
+
+And languorous warm
+
+A flute drones its insect music
+
+Below the curving moon-petal of the heavens.
+
+
+
+of
+
+
+
+to
+
+
+
+tropics,
+bud
+
+
+
+odours
+
+sounds...
+
+the night
+
+
+
+Moon over China,
+
+Weary moon on the river of the sky.
+
+The stir of light in the willows is like the flashing of a thousand silver minnows
+Through dark shoals;
+
+The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples.
+The sky is flecked with clouds like the scales of a dragon.
+
+Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars, of her delight at
+the coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half closing her eyes, she
+repeated words whose melody lay hidden like crystals at the bottom of a stream
+before dawn, hidden but to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.
+
+
+
+Moon
+
+White butterfly moon!
+
+
+
+over
+
+
+
+Moon over the
+
+A white curved
+
+Opening its petals slowly in the warmth
+The air is full of
+
+And languorous warm sounds. . .
+
+Moon over
+
+Weary moon on the river of the sky. . .
+
+
+
+of
+
+
+
+Japan,
+
+
+
+tropics,
+
+bud
+
+heaven.
+
+odours
+
+
+
+China,
+
+
+
+
+Out of the mists gleamed godlike the torm ot a youth, in winged helmet and
+sandals, caduceus-bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on earth. Before the
+face of the sleeper he thrice waved the rod which Apollo had given him in trade
+for the nine-corded shell of melody, and upon her brow he placed a wreath of
+myrtle and roses. Then, adoring, Hermes spoke:
+
+"0 Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyene or the sky-
+inhabiting Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast
+indeed discovered the secret of the Gods, which lieth in beauty and song.
+Prophetess more lovely than the Sybil of Cumae when Apollo first knew her,
+thou has truly spoken of the new age, for even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and
+stretches in his sleep, wishful to wake and behold about him the little rose-
+crowned fauns and the antique Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou divined what no
+mortal, saving only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth: that the Gods
+were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods
+in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth
+nigh the time of their awakening, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and
+Zeus sit once more on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a
+foam which only ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon
+the shepherds hear strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and
+fields are tremulous at twilight with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and
+immemorial Ocean yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are
+patient, and have slept long, but neither man nor giant shall defy the Gods
+forever. In Tartarus the Titans writhe and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the
+children of Uranus and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer for
+centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind and will not hurl
+him to the gulf made for denier s of Gods. Instead will their vengeance smite the
+darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under
+the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him,
+dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods,
+and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent
+to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in
+each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the
+promise from the lotosgardens beyond the sunset."
+
+Then in his arms Hermes bore the dreaming maiden through the skies. Gentle
+breezes from the tower of Aiolas wafted them high above warm, scented seas, till
+suddenly they came upon Zeus, holding court upon double-headed Parnassus,
+his golden throne flanked by Apollo and the Muses on the right hand, and by
+ivy-wreathed Dionysus and pleasure-flushed Bacchae on the left hand. So much
+of splendour Marcia had never seen before, either awake or in dreams, but its
+radiance did her no injury, as would have the radiance of lofty Olympus; for in
+this lesser court the Father of Gods had tempered his glories for the sight of
+
+
+
+
+mortals. Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six
+noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the
+dreamer recognized from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew
+that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the avernian Dante, the
+more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe
+and the musalan Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent
+to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that
+Gods speak to men. Then spake the Thunderer:
+
+"0 Daughter-for, being one of my endless line, thou art indeed my daughter-
+behold upon ivory thrones of honour the august messengers Gods have sent
+down that in the words and writing of men there may be still some traces of
+divine beauty. Other bards have men justly crowned with enduring laurels, but
+these hath Apollo crowned, and these have I set in places apart, as mortals who
+have spoken the language of the Gods. Long have we dreamed in lotosgardens
+beyond the West, and spoken only through our dreams; but the time approaches
+when our voices shall not be silent. It is a time of awakening and change. Once
+more hath Phaeton ridden low, searing the fields and drying the streams. In Gaul
+lone nymphs with disordered hair weep beside fountains that are no more, and
+pine over rivers turned red with the blood of mortals. Ares and his train have
+gone forth with the madness of Gods and have returned Deimos and Phobos
+glutted with unnatural delight. Tellus moons with grief, and the faces of men are
+as the faces of Erinyes, even as when Astraea fled to the skies, and the waves of
+our bidding encompassed all the land saving this high peak alone. Amidst this
+chaos, prepared to herald his coming yet to conceal his arrival, even now toileth
+our latest born messenger, in whose dreams are all the images which other
+messengers have dreamed before him. He it is that we have chosen to blend into
+one glorious whole all the beauty that the world hath known before, and to write
+words wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the loveliness of the past. He it is
+who shall proclaim our return and sing of the days to come when Fauns and
+Dryads shall haunt their accustomed groves in beauty. Guided was our choice by
+those who now sit before the Corycian grotto on thrones of ivory, and in whose
+songs thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou shalt know
+the greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they
+sing to thee here. Each note shall thou hear again in the poetry which is to come,
+the poetry which shall bring peace and pleasure to thy soul, though search for it
+through bleak years thou must. Attend with diligence, for each chord that
+vibrates away into hiding shall appear again to thee after thou hast returned to
+earth, as Alpheus, sinking his waters into the soul of Hellas, appears as the
+crystal arethusa in remote Sicilia."
+
+Then arose Homeros, the ancient among bards, who took his lyre and chanted
+his hymn to Aphrodite. No word of Greek did Marcia know, yet did the message
+
+
+
+
+not fall vainly upon her ears, for in the cryptic rhythm was that which spake to
+all mortals and Gods, and needed no interpreter.
+
+So too the songs of Dante and Goethe, whose unknown words dave the ether
+with melodies easy to ready and adore. But at last remembered accents
+resounded before the listener. It was the Swan of Avon, once a God among men,
+and still a God among Gods:
+
+
+
+Write, write, that from the
+My dearest master, your
+
+Bless him at home in peace
+His name with zealous fervour sanctify.
+
+
+
+bloody course
+dear son,
+
+whilst I
+
+
+
+of
+may
+from
+
+
+
+war,
+hie;
+far.
+
+
+
+Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal
+harmony:
+
+
+
+Or
+
+
+let thy
+
+
+lamp at
+
+
+midnight
+
+
+hour
+
+
+Be
+
+
+seen in
+
+
+some high
+
+
+lonely
+
+
+tower.
+
+
+Where
+
+
+I might
+
+
+oft outwatch
+
+
+the
+
+
+Bear
+
+
+With
+
+
+thrice-great
+
+
+Hermes,
+
+
+or
+
+
+unsphere
+
+
+The
+
+
+spirit
+
+
+of Plato,
+
+
+to
+
+
+unfold
+
+
+What
+
+
+worlds or
+
+
+what vast
+
+
+regions
+
+
+hold
+
+
+The
+
+
+immortal
+
+
+mind, that
+
+
+hath
+
+
+forsook
+
+
+
+Her mansion in this fleshy nook.
+
+
+
+Sometime let
+
+In sceptered pall
+
+Presenting Thebes,
+
+Or the tale of Troy divine.
+
+
+
+gorgeous tragedy
+
+come sweeping by,
+
+or Pelop's line.
+
+
+
+Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to the
+beauteous faun-folk:
+
+
+
+Heard melodies are sweet, but
+
+Are sweeter, therefore, yet sweep pipes, play on. . .
+
+
+
+those
+
+
+
+unheard
+
+
+
+When
+
+
+old
+
+
+age
+
+
+shall
+
+
+this
+
+
+generation
+
+
+waste.
+
+
+Thou
+
+
+shalt
+
+
+remain.
+
+
+in
+
+
+midst
+
+
+of other
+
+
+woe
+
+
+Than
+
+
+ours, a
+
+
+friend
+
+
+to
+
+
+man, to
+
+
+whom thou
+
+
+say'st
+
+
+
+
+"Beauty is truth — truth beauty" — that is all
+Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
+
+As the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt,
+where at night Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain Memnon. To the feet of
+the Thunderer flew the rosy-fingered Goddess and, kneeling, cried, "Master, it is
+time I unlocked the Gates of the East." And Phoebus, handing his lyre to
+Calliope, his bride among the Muses, prepared to depart for the jewelled and
+column-raised Palace of the Sun, where fretted the steeds already harnessed to
+the golden car of Day. So Zeus descended from his caryen throne and placed his
+hand upon the head of Marcia, saying:
+
+"Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the
+awakening of mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the
+shadow of false faiths will soon be gone and the Gods shall once more walk
+among men. Search thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou
+find peace and comfort. By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and
+in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find that which it craveth." As Zeus
+ceased, the young Hermes gently seized the maiden and bore her up toward the
+fading stars, up and westward over unseen seas.
+
+
+
+Many years have passed since Marcia dreamt of the Gods and of their Parnassus
+conclave. Tonight she sits in the same spacious drawing-room, but she is not
+alone. Gone is the old spirit of unrest, for beside her is one whose name is
+luminous with celebrity: the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world.
+He is reading from a manuscript words which none has ever heard before, but
+which when heard will bring to men the dreams and the fancies they lost so
+many centuries ago, when Pan lay down to doze in Arcady, and the great Gods
+withdrew to sleep in lotos-gardens beyond the lands of the Hesperides. In the
+subtle cadences and hidden melodies of the bard the spirit of the maiden had
+found rest at last, for there echo the divinest notes of Thracian Orpheus, notes
+that moved the very rocks and trees by Hebrus' banks. The singer ceases, and
+with eagerness asks a verdict, yet what can Marcia say but that the strain is "fit
+for the Gods"?
+
+And as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parnassus and the far-off sound
+of a mighty voice saying, "By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness,
+and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth."
+
+
+
+
+The Crawling Chaos - with Elizabeth
+Berkeley
+
+Written 1920/21
+
+Published April 1921 in The United Co-operative, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 1-6.
+
+Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and
+horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and
+interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well
+the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the
+inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet
+dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at
+the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the
+partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne. De Quincey was drawn back into
+Asia, that teeming land of nebulous shadows whose hideous antiquity is so
+impressive that "the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of
+youth in the individual," but farther than that he dared not go. Those who have
+gone farther seldom returned, and even when they have, they have been either
+silent or quite mad. I took opium but once — in the year of the plague, when
+doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose
+— my physician was worn out with horror and exertion — and I travelled very
+far indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange
+memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again.
+
+The pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug
+was administered. Of the future I had no heed; to escape, whether by cure,
+unconsciousness, or death, was all that concerned me. I was partly delirious, so
+that it is hard to place the exact moment of transition, but I think the effect must
+have begun shortly before the pounding ceased to be painful. As I have said,
+there was an overdose; so my reactions were probably far from normal. The
+sensation of falling, curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or direction,
+was paramount; though there was subsidiary impression of unseen throngs in
+incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely di-verse nature, but all more or less
+related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as though I were falling, than as though
+the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly my pain ceased, and I
+began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force. The
+falling had ceased also, giving place to a sensation of uneasy, temporary rest; and
+when I listened closely, I fancied the pounding was that of the vast, inscrutable
+sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated some desolate shore after a storm of
+titanic magnitude. Then I opened my eyes.
+
+
+
+
+For a moment my surroundings seemed confused, like a projected image
+hopelessly out of focus, but gradually I realised my solitary presence in a strange
+and beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the exact nature of the
+apartment I could form no idea, for my thoughts were still far from settled, but I
+noticed van-coloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs,
+ottomans, and divans, and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a
+suggestion of the exotic without being actually alien. These things I noticed, yet
+they were not long uppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon
+my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear
+of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming
+to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless,
+unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.
+
+Presently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was the
+hideous pounding whose incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly
+against my exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a point outside and below
+the edifice in which I stood, and to associate itself with the most terrifying mental
+images. I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung
+walls, and shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that
+opened so bewilderingly on every hand. Perceiving shutters attached to these
+windows, I closed them all, averting my eyes from the exterior as I did so. Then,
+employing a flint and steel which I found on one of the small tables, I lit the
+many candles reposing about the walls in arabesque sconces. The added sense of
+security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to some
+degree, but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was
+calmer, the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a
+contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking.
+Opening a portiere at the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a small
+and richly draped corridor ending in a cavern door and large oriel window. To
+this window I was irresistibly drawn, though my ill-defined apprehensions
+seemed almost equally bent on holding me back. As I approached it I could see a
+chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I attained it and glanced out on
+all sides, the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon me with full
+and devastating force.
+
+I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person
+can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building
+stood on a narrow point of land — or what was now a narrow point of land —
+fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of
+mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice
+of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in
+frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out a
+mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in height.
+
+
+
+
+and on the far horizon ghouhsh black clouds of grotesque contour were resting
+and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and purplish,
+almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with
+uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had
+declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by
+the angry sky.
+
+Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had
+thrown me, I realized that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I
+gazed, the bank had lost many feet, and it could not be long before the house
+would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves. Accordingly I
+hastened to the opposite side of the edifice, and finding a door, emerged at once,
+locking it after me with a curious key which had hung inside. I now beheld more
+of the strange region about me, and marked a singular division which seemed to
+exist in the hostile ocean and firmament. On each side of the jutting promontory
+different conditions held sway. At my left as I faced inland was a gently heaving
+sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in under a brightly shining sun.
+Something about that sun's nature and position made me shudder, but I could
+not then tell, and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was the sea, but
+it was blue, calm, and only gently undulating, while the sky above it was darker
+and the washed-out bank more nearly white than reddish.
+
+I now turned my attention to the land, and found occasion for fresh surprise; for
+the vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read about. It was
+apparently tropical or at least sub-tropical — a conclusion borne out by the
+intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace strange analogies with
+the flora of my native land, fancying that the well-known plants and shrubs
+might assume such forms under a radical change of climate; but the gigantic and
+omnipresent palm trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very
+small — hardly more than a cottage — but its material was evidently marble, and
+its architecture was weird and composite, involving a quaint fusion of Western
+and Eastern forms. At the corners were Corinthian columns, but the red tile roof
+was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland there stretched a path of
+singularly white sand, about four feet wide, and lined on either side with stately
+palms and unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants. It lay toward the side of
+the promontory where the sea was blue and the bank rather whitish. Down this
+path I felt impelled to flee, as if pursued by some malignant spirit from the
+pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill, then I reached a gentle crest.
+Behind me I saw the scene I had left; the entire point with the cottage and the
+black water, with the green sea on one side and the blue sea on the other, and a
+curse unnamed and unnamable lowering over all. I never saw it again, and often
+wonder.... After this last look I strode ahead and surveyed the inland panorama
+before me.
+
+
+
+
+The path, as I have intimated, ran along the right-hand shore as one went inland.
+Ahead and to the left I now viewed a magnificent valley comprising thousands
+of acres, and covered with a swaying growth of tropical grass higher than my
+head. Almost at the limit of vision was a colossal palm tree which seemed to
+fascinate and beckon me. By this time wonder and' escape from the imperilled
+peninsula had largely dissipated my fear, but as I paused and sank fatigued to
+the path, idiy digging with my hands into the warm, whitish-golden sand, a new
+and acute sense of danger seized me. Some terror in the swishing tall grass
+seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started up crying
+aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I
+am afraid of?" My mind wandered back to an ancient and classical story of tigers
+which I had read; I strove to recall the author, but had difficulty. Then in the
+midst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by Rudyard Kipling; nor did the
+grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author occur to me; I wished for the
+volume containing this story, and had almost started back toward the doomed
+cottage to procure it when my better sense and the lure of the palm prevented
+me.
+
+Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the
+counter-fascination of the vast palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was now
+dominant, and I left the path and crawled on hands and knees down the valley's
+slope despite my fear of the grass and of the serpents it might contain. I resolved
+to fight for life and reason as long as possible against all menaces of sea or land,
+though I sometimes feared defeat as the maddening swish of the uncanny
+grasses joined the still audible and irritating pounding of the distant breakers. I
+would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears for relief, but could never
+quite shut out the detestable sound. It was, as it seemed to me, only after ages
+that I finally dragged myself to the beckoning palm tree and lay quiet beneath its
+protecting shade.
+
+There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite
+extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not
+seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the
+palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I
+never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a
+faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow
+of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I
+heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent
+with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk
+below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled
+the child's head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: "It is the end. They
+have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and
+beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe." As the child
+
+
+
+
+spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising,
+greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A
+god and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they
+took my hands, saying, "Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well.
+In Teloe beyond the Milky Way and the Arinurian streams are cities all of amber
+and chalcedony. And upon their domes of many facets glisten the images of
+strange and beautiful stars. Under the ivory bridges of Teloe flow rivers of liquid
+gold bearing pleasure-barges bound for blossomy Cytharion of the Seven Suns.
+And in Teloe and Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, and pleasure, nor are any
+sounds heard, save of laughter, song, and the lute. Only the gods dwell in Teloe
+of the golden rivers, but among them shalt thou dwell."
+
+As I listened, enchanted, I suddenly became aware of a change in my
+surroundings. The palm tree, so lately overshadowing my exhausted form, was
+now some distance to my left and considerably below me. I was obviously
+floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the
+radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-
+crowned youths and maidens with wind- blown hair and joyful countenance. We
+slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from
+the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I
+must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the
+sphere I had just left. The youths and maidens now chanted mellifluous
+choriambics to the accompaniment of lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and
+happiness more profound than any I had in life imagined, when the intrusion of
+a single sound altered my destiny and shattered my soul. Through the ravishing
+strains of the singers and the lutanists, as if in mocking, daemoniac concord,
+throbbed from gulfs below the damnable, the detestable pounding of that
+hideous ocean. As those black breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot
+the words of the child and looked back, down upon the doomed scene from
+which I thought I had escaped.
+
+Down through the aether I saw the accursed earth slowly turning, ever turning,
+with angry and tempestuous seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and dashing
+foam against the tottering towers of deserted cities. And under a ghastly moon
+there gleamed sights I can never describe, sights I can never forget; deserts of
+corpselike clay and jungles of ruin and decadence where once stretched the
+populous plains and villages of my native land, and maelstroms of frothing
+ocean where once rose the mighty temples of my forefathers. Mound the
+northern pole steamed a morass of noisome growths and miasmal vapours,
+hissing before the onslaught of the ever-mounting waves that curled and fretted
+from the shuddering deep. Then a rending report dave the night, and athwart
+the desert of deserts appeared a smoking rift. Still the black ocean foamed and
+
+
+
+
+gnawed, eating away the desert on either side as the rift in the center widened
+and widened.
+
+There was now no land left but the desert, and still the fuming ocean ate and ate.
+All at once I thought even the pounding sea seemed afraid of something, afraid
+of dark gods of the inner earth that are greater than the evil god of waters, but
+even if it was it could not turn back; and the desert had suffered too much from
+those nightmare waves to help them now. So the ocean ate the last of the land
+and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever conquered.
+From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and decay; and
+from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely, uncovering nighted
+secrets of the years when Time was young and the gods unborn. Above the
+waves rose weedy remembered spires. The moon laid pale lilies of light on dead
+London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with star-dust.
+Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered; terrible
+spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands.
+
+There was not any pounding now, but only the unearthly roaring and hissing of
+waters tumbling into the rift. The smoke of that rift had changed to steam, and
+almost hid the world as it grew denser and denser. It seared my face and hands,
+and when I looked to see how it affected my companions I found they had all
+disappeared. Then very suddenly it ended, and I knew no more till I awaked
+upon a bed of convalescence. As the cloud of steam from the Plutonic gulf finally
+concealed the entire surface from my sight, all the firmament shrieked at a
+sudden agony of mad reverberations which shook the trembling aether. In one
+delirious flash and burst it happened; one blinding, deafening holocaust of fire,
+smoke, and thunder that dissolved the wan moon as it sped outward to the void.
+
+And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheld
+against the background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale
+mournful planets searching for their sister.
+
+
+
+
+The Disinterment - with Duane W.
+Rimel
+
+Written 1935
+
+I awoke abruptly from a horrible dream and stared wildly about. Then, seeing
+the high, arched ceiling and the narrow stained windows of my friend's room, a
+flood of uneasy revelation coursed over me; and I knew that all of Andrews'
+hopes had been realized. I lay supine in a large bed, the posts of which reared
+upward in dizzy perspective; while on vast shelves about the chamber were the
+familiar books and antiques I was accustomed to seeing in that secluded corner
+of the crumbling and ancient mansion which had formed our joint home for
+many years. On a table by the wall stood a huge candelabrum of early
+workmanship and design, and the usual light window-curtains had been
+replaced by hangings of somber black, which took on a faint, ghostly luster in the
+dying light.
+
+I recalled forcibly the events preceding my confinement and seclusion in this
+veritable medieval fortress. They were not pleasant, and I shuddered anew when
+I remembered the couch that had held me before my tenancy of the present one -
+the couch that everyone supposed would be my last. Memory burned afresh
+regarding those hideous circumstances which had compelled me to choose
+between a true death and a hypothetical one - with a later re-animation by
+therapeutic methods known only to my comrade, Marshall Andrews. The whole
+thing had begun when I returned from the Orient a year before and discovered,
+to my utter horror, that I had contracted leprosy while abroad. I had known that
+I was taking grave chances in caring for my stricken brother in the Philippines,
+but no hint of my own affliction appeared until I returned to my native land.
+Andrews himself had made the discovery, and kept it from me as long as
+possible; but our close acquaintance soon disclosed the awful truth.
+
+At once I was quartered in our ancient abode atop the crags overlooking
+crumbling Hampden, from whose musty halls and quaint, arched doorways I
+was never permitted to go forth. It was a terrible existence, with the yellow
+shadow hanging constantly over me; yet my friend never faltered in his faith,
+taking care not to contract the dread scourge, but meanwhile making life as
+pleasant and comfortable as possible. His widespread though somewhat sinister
+fame as a surgeon prevented any authority from discovering my plight and
+shipping me away.
+
+
+
+
+It was after nearly a year of this seclusion - late in August - that Andrews
+decided on a trip to the West Indies - to study "native" medical methods, he said.
+I was left in care of venerable Simes, the household factotum. So far no outward
+signs of the disease had developed, and I enjoyed a tolerable though almost
+completely private existence during my colleague's absence. It was during this
+time that I read many of the tomes Andrews had acquired in the course of his
+twenty years as a surgeon, and learned why his reputation, though locally of the
+highest, was just a bit shady. For the volumes included any number of fanciful
+subjects hardly related to modern medical knowledge: treatises and
+unauthoritative articles on monstrous experiments in surgery; accounts of the
+bizarre effects of glandular transplantation and rejuvenation in animals and men
+alike; brochures on attempted brain transference, and a host of other fanatical
+speculations not countenanced by orthodox physicians. It appeared, too, that
+Andrews was an authority on obscure medicaments; some of the few books I
+waded through revealing that he had spent much time in chemistry and in the
+search for new drugs which might be used as aids in surgery. Looking back at
+those studies now, I find them hellishly suggestive when associated with his later
+experiments.
+
+Andrews was gone longer than I expected, returning early in November, almost
+four months later; and when he did arrive, I was quite anxious to see him, since
+my condition was at last on the brink of becoming noticeable. I had reached a
+point where I must seek absolute privacy to keep from being discovered. But my
+anxiety was slight as compared with his exuberance over a certain new plan he
+had hatched while in the Indies - a plan to be carried out with the aid of a curious
+drug he had learned of from a native "doctor" in Haiti. When he explained that
+his idea concerned me, I became somewhat alarmed; though in my position there
+could be little to make my plight worse. I had, indeed, considered more than
+once the oblivion that would come with a revolver or a plunge from the roof to
+the jagged rocks below.
+
+On the day after his arrival, in the seclusion of the dimly lit study, he outlined
+the whole grisly scheme. He had found in Haiti a drug, the formula for which he
+would develop later, which induced a state of profound sleep in anyone taking
+it; a trance so deep that death was closely counterfeited - with all muscular
+reflexes, even the respiration and heart-beat, completely stilled for the time
+being. Andrews had, he said, seen it demonstrated on natives many times. Some
+of them remained somnolent for days at a time, wholly immobile and as much
+like death as death itself. This suspended animation, he explained further, would
+even pass the closest examination of any medical man. He himself, according to
+all known laws, would have to report as dead a man under the influence of such
+a drug. He stated, too, that the subject's body assumed the precise appearance of
+a corpse - even a slight rigor mortis developing in prolonged cases.
+
+
+
+
+For some time his purpose did not seem wholly clear, but when the full import of
+his words became apparent I felt weak and nauseated. Yet in another way I was
+relieved; for the thing meant at least a partial escape from my curse, an escape
+from the banishment and shame of an ordinary death of the dread leprosy.
+Briefly, his plan was to administer a strong dose of the drug to me and call the
+local authorities, who would immediately pronounce me dead, and see that I
+was buried within a very short while. He felt assured that with their careless
+examination they would fail to notice my leprosy symptoms, which in truth had
+hardly appeared. Only a trifle over fifteen months had passed since I had caught
+the disease, whereas the corruption takes seven years to run its entire course.
+
+Later, he said, would come resurrection. After my interment in the family
+graveyard - beside my centuried dwelling and barely a quarter-mile from his
+own ancient pile - the appropriate steps would be taken. Finally, when my estate
+was settled and my decease widely known, he would secretly open the tomb and
+bring me to his own abode again, still alive and none the worse for my
+adventure. It seemed a ghastly and daring plan, but to me it offered the only
+hope for even a partial freedom; so I accepted his proposition, but not without a
+myriad of misgivings. What if the effect of the drug should wear off while I was
+in my tomb? What if the coroner should discover the awful ruse, and fail to inter
+me? These were some of the hideous doubts which assailed me before the
+experiment. Though death would have been a release from my curse, I feared it
+even worse than the yellow scourge; feared it even when I could see its black
+wings constantly hovering over me.
+
+Fortunately I was spared the horror of viewing my own funeral and burial rites.
+They must, however, have gone just as Andrews had planned, even to the
+subsequent disinterment; for after the initial dose of the poison from Haiti I
+lapsed into a semi-paralytic state and from that to a profound, night-black sleep.
+The drug had been administered in my room, and Andrews had told me before
+giving it that he would recommend to the coroner a verdict of heart failure due
+to nerve strain. Of course, there was no embalming - Andrews saw to that - and
+the whole procedure, leading up to my secret transportation from the graveyard
+to his crumbling manor, covered a period of three days. Having been buried late
+in the afternoon of the third day, my body was secured by Andrews that very
+night. He had replaced the fresh sod just as it had been when the workmen left.
+Old Simes, sworn to secrecy, had helped Andrews in his ghoulish task.
+
+Later I had lain for over a week in my old familiar bed. Owing to some
+unexpected effect of the drug, my whole body was completely paralyzed, so that
+I could move my head only slightly. All my senses, however, were fully alert,
+and by another week's time I was able to take nourishment in good quantities.
+Andrews explained that my body would gradually regain its former sensibilities;
+
+
+
+
+though owing to the presence of the leprosy it might take considerable time. He
+seemed greatly interested in analyzing my daily symptoms, and always asked if
+there was any feeling present in my body.
+
+Many days passed before I was able to control any part of my anatomy, and
+much longer before the paralysis crept from my enfeebled limbs so that I could
+feel the ordinary bodily reactions. Lying and staring at my numb hulk was like
+having it injected with a perpetual anesthetic. There was a total alienation I could
+not understand, considering that my head and neck were quite alive and in good
+health.
+
+Andrews explained that he had revived my upper half first and could not
+account for the complete bodily paralysis; though my condition seemed to
+trouble him little considering the damnably intent interest he centered upon my
+reactions and stimuli from the very beginning. Many times during lulls in our
+conversation I would catch a strange gleam in his eyes as he viewed me on the
+couch - a glint of victorious exultation which, queerly enough, he never voiced
+aloud; though he seemed to be quite glad that I had run the gauntlet of death and
+had come through alive. Still, there was that horror I was to meet in less than six
+years, which added to my desolation and melancholy during the tedious days in
+which I awaited the return of normal bodily functions. But I would be up and
+about, he assured me, before very long, enjoying an existence few men had ever
+experienced. The words did not, however, impress me with their true and
+ghastly meaning until many days later.
+
+During that awful siege in bed Andrews and I became somewhat estranged. He
+no longer treated me so much like a friend as like an implement in his skilled and
+greedy fingers. I found him possessed of unexpected traits - little examples of
+baseness and cruelty, apparent even to the hardened Simes, which disturbed me
+in a most unusual manner. Often he would display extraordinary cruelty to live
+specimens in his laboratory, for he was constantly carrying on various hidden
+projects in glandular and muscular transplantation on guinea-pigs and rabbits.
+He had also been employing his newly discovered sleeping- potion in curious
+experiments with suspended animation. But of these things he told me very little;
+though old Simes often let slip chance comments which shed some light on the
+proceedings. I was not certain how much the old servant knew, but he had surely
+learned considerable, being a constant companion to both Andrews and myself.
+
+With the passage of time, a slow but consistent feeling began creeping into my
+disabled body; and at the reviving symptoms Andrews took a fanatical interest
+in my case. He still seemed more coldly analytical than sympathetic toward me,
+taking my pulse and heart-beat with more than usual zeal. Occasionally, in his
+fevered examinations, I saw his hands tremble slightly - an uncommon sight
+
+
+
+
+with so skilled a surgeon - but he seemed oblivious of my scrutiny. I was never
+allowed even a momentary glimpse of my full body, but with the feeble return of
+the sense of touch, I was aware of a bulk and heaviness which at first seemed
+awkward and unfamiliar.
+
+Gradually I regained the use of my hands and arms; and with the passing of the
+paralysis came a new and terrible sensation of physical estrangement. My limbs
+had difficulty in following the commands of my mind, and every movement was
+jerky and uncertain. So clumsy were my hands, that I had to become accustomed
+to them all over again. This must, I thought, be due to my disease and the
+advance of the contagion in my system. Being unaware of how the early
+symptoms affected the victim (my brother's being a more advanced case), I had
+no means of judging; and since Andrews shunned the subject, I deemed it better
+to remain silent.
+
+One day I asked Andrews - I no longer considered him a friend - if I might try
+rising and sitting up in bed. At first he objected strenuously, but later, after
+cautioning me to keep the blankets well up around my chin so that I would not
+be chilled, he permitted it. This seemed strange, in view of the comfortable
+temperature. Now that late autumn was slowly turning into winter, the room
+was always well heated. A growing chilliness at night, and occasional glimpses
+of a leaden sky through the window, had told me of the changing season; for no
+calendar was ever in sight upon the dingy walls. With the gentle help of Simes I
+was eased to a sitting position, Andrews coldly watching from the door to the
+laboratory. At my success a slow smile spread across his leering features, and he
+turned to disappear from the darkened doorway. His mood did nothing to
+improve my condition. Old Simes, usually so regular and consistent, was now
+often late in his duties, sometimes leaving me alone for hours at a time.
+
+The terrible sense of alienation was heightened by my new position. It seemed
+that the legs and arms inside my gown were hardly able to follow the
+summoning of my mind, and it became mentally exhausting to continue
+movement for any length of time. My fingers, woefully clumsy, were wholly
+unfamiliar to my inner sense of touch, and I wondered vaguely if I were to be
+accursed the rest of my days with an awkwardness induced by my dread
+malady.
+
+It was on the evening following my half-recovery that the dreams began. I was
+tormented not only at night but during the day as well. I would awaken,
+screaming horribly, from some frightful nightmare I dared not think about
+outside the realm of sleep. These dreams consisted mainly of ghoulish things;
+graveyards at night, stalking corpses, and lost souls amid a chaos of blinding
+light and shadow. The terrible reality of the visions disturbed me most of all: it
+
+
+
+
+seemed that some inside influence was inducing the grisly vistas of moonlit
+tombstones and endless catacombs of the restless dead. I could not place their
+source; and at the end of a week I was quite frantic with abominable thoughts
+which seemed to obtrude themselves upon my unwelcome consciousness.
+
+By that time a slow plan was forming whereby I might escape the living hell into
+which I had been propelled. Andrews cared less and less about me, seeming
+intent only on my progress and growth and recovery of normal muscular
+reactions. I was becoming every day more convinced of the nefarious doings
+going on in that laboratory across the threshold - the animal cries were shocking,
+and rasped hideously on my overwrought nerves. And I was gradually
+beginning to think that Andrews had not saved me from deportation solely for
+my own benefit, but for some accursed reason of his own. Simes's attention was
+slowly becoming slighter and slighter, and I was convinced that the aged servitor
+had a hand in the deviltry somewhere. Andrews no longer eyed me as a friend,
+but as an object of experimentation; nor did I like the way he fingered his scalpel
+when he stood in the narrow doorway and stared at me with crafty alertness. I
+had never before seen such a transformation come over any man. His ordinarily
+handsome features were now lined and whisker-grown, and his eyes gleamed as
+if some imp of Satan were staring from them. His cold, calculating gaze made me
+shudder horribly, and gave me a fresh determination to free myself from his
+bondage as soon as possible.
+
+I had lost track of time during my dream-orgy, and had no way of knowing how
+fast the days were passing. The curtains were often drawn in the daytime, the
+room being lit by waxen cylinders in the large candelabrum. It was a nightmare
+of living horror and unreality; though through it all I was gradually becoming
+stronger. I always gave careful responses to Andrews' inquiries concerning my
+returning physical control, concealing the fact that a new life was vibrating
+through me with every passing day - an altogether strange sort of strength, but
+one which I was counting on to serve me in the coming crisis.
+
+Finally, one chilly evening when the candles had been extinguished, and a pale
+shaft of moonlight fell through the dark curtains upon my bed, I determined to
+rise and carry out my plan of action. There had been no movement from either of
+my captors for several hours, and I was confident that both were asleep in
+adjoining bedchambers. Shifting my cumbersome weight carefully, I rose to a
+sitting position and crawled cautiously out of bed, down upon the floor. A
+vertigo gripped me momentarily, and a wave of weakness flooded my entire
+being. But finally strength returned, and by clutching at a bed-post I was able to
+stand upon my feet for the first time in many months. Gradually a new strength
+coursed through me, and I donned the dark robe which I had seen hanging on a
+nearby chair. It was quite long, but served as a cloak over my nightdress. Again
+
+
+
+
+came that feeling of awful unfamiliarity which I had experienced in bed; that
+sense of alienation, and of difficulty in making my limbs perform as they should.
+But there was need for haste before my feeble strength might give out. As a last
+precaution in dressing, I slipped some old shoes over my feet; but though I could
+have sworn they were my own, they seemed abnormally loose, so that I decided
+they must belong to the aged Simes.
+
+Seeing no other heavy objects in the room, I seized from the table the huge
+candelabrum, upon which the moon shone with a pallid glow, and proceeded
+very quietly toward the laboratory door. My first steps came jerkily and with
+much difficulty, and in the semi-darkness I was unable to make my way very
+rapidly. When I reached the threshold, a glance within revealed my former
+friend seated in a large overstuffed chair; while beside him was a smoking-stand
+upon which were assorted bottles and a glass. He reclined half-way in the
+moonlight through the large window, and his greasy features were creased in a
+drunken smirk. An opened book lay in his lap - one of the hideous tomes from
+his private library.
+
+For a long moment I gloated over the prospect before me, and then, stepping
+forward suddenly, I brought the heavy weapon down upon his unprotected
+head. The dull crunch was followed by a spurt of blood, and the fiend crumpled
+to the floor, his head laid half open. I felt no contrition at taking the man's life in
+such a manner. In the hideous, half-visible specimens of his surgical wizardry
+scattered about the room in various stages of completion and preservation, I felt
+there was enough evidence to blast his soul without my aid. Andrews had gone
+too far in his practices to continue living, and as one of his monstrous specimens
+
+- of that I was now hideously certain - it was my duty to exterminate him.
+
+Simes, I realized, would be no such easy matter; indeed, only unusual good
+fortune had caused me to find Andrews unconscious. When I finally reeled up to
+the servant's bedchamber door, faint from exhaustion, I knew it would take all
+my remaining strength to complete the ordeal.
+
+The old man's room was in utmost darkness, being on the north side of the
+structure, but he must have seen me silhouetted in the doorway as I came in. He
+screamed hoarsely, and I aimed the candelabrum at him from the threshold. It
+struck something soft, making a sloughing sound in the darkness; but the
+screaming continued. From that time on events became hazy and jumbled
+together, but I remember grappling with the man and choking the life from him
+little by little. He gibbered a host of awful things before I could lay hands on him
+
+- cried and begged for mercy from my clutching fingers. I hardly realized my
+own strength in that mad moment which left Andrews' associate in a condition
+like his own.
+
+
+
+
+Retreating from the darkened chamber, I stumbled for the stairway door, sagged
+through it, and somehow reached the landing below. No lamps were burning,
+and my only light was a filtering of moonbeams coming from the narrow
+windows in the hall. But I made my jerky way over the cold, damp slabs of stone,
+reeling from the terrible weakness of my exertion, and reached the front door
+after ages of fumbling and crawling about in the darkness.
+
+Vague memories and haunting shadows came to taunt me in that ancient
+hallway; shadows once friendly and understandable, but now grown alien and
+unrecognizable, so that I stumbled down the worn steps in a frenzy of something
+more than fear. For a moment I stood in the shadow of the giant stone manor,
+viewing the moonlit trail down which I must go to reach the home of my
+forefathers, only a quarter of a mile distant. But the way seemed long, and for a
+while I despaired of ever traversing the whole of it.
+
+At last I grasped a piece of dead wood as a cane and set out down the winding
+road. Ahead, seemingly only a few rods away in the moonlight, stood the
+venerable mansion where my ancestors had lived and died. Its turrets rose
+spectrally in the shimmering radiance, and the black shadow cast on the beetling
+hillside appeared to shift and waver, as if belonging to a castle of unreal
+substance. There stood the monument of half a century; a haven for all my family
+old and young, which I had deserted many years ago to live with the fanatical
+Andrews. It stood empty on that fateful night, and I hope that it may always
+remain so.
+
+In some manner I reached the aged place; though I do not remember the last half
+of the journey at all. It was enough to be near the family cemetery, among whose
+moss-covered and crumbling stones I would seek the oblivion I had desired. As I
+approached the moonlit spot the old familiarity - so absent during my abnormal
+existence - returned to plague me in a wholly unexpected way. I drew close to
+my own tombstone, and the feeling of homecoming grew stronger; with it came
+a fresh flood of that awful sense of alienation and disembodiment which I knew
+so well. I was satisfied that the end was drawing near; nor did I stop to analyze
+emotions till a little later, when the full horror of my position burst upon me.
+
+Intuitively I knew my own tombstone; for the grass had scarcely begun to grow
+between the pieces of sod. With feverish haste I began clawing at the mound, and
+scraping the wet earth from the hole left by the removal of the grass and roots.
+How long I worked in the nitrous soil before my fingers struck the coffin-lid, I
+can never say; but sweat was pouring from me and my nails were but useless,
+bleeding hooks.
+
+
+
+
+At last I threw out the last bit of loose earth, and with trembling fingers tugged
+on the heavy lid. It gave a trifle; and I was prepared to lift it completely open
+when a fetid and nauseous odor assailed my nostrils. I started erect, horrified.
+Had some idiot placed my tombstone on the wrong grave, causing me to unearth
+another body? For surely there could be no mistaking that awful stench.
+Gradually a hideous uncertainty came over me and I scrambled from the hole.
+One look at the newly made headpiece was enough. This was indeed my own
+grave .. . but what fool had buried within it another corpse?
+
+All at once a bit of the unspeakable truth propelled itself upon my brain. The
+odor, in spite of its putrescence, seemed somehow familiar - horribly familiar. . . .
+Yet I could not credit my senses with such an idea. Reeling and cursing, I fell into
+the black cavity once more, and by the aid of a hastily lit match, lifted the long lid
+completely open. Then the light went out, as if extinguished by a malignant
+hand, and I clawed my way out of that accursed pit, screaming in a frenzy of fear
+and loathing.
+
+When I regained consciousness I was lying before the door of my own ancient
+manor, where I must have crawled after that hideous rendezvous in the family
+cemetery. I realized that dawn was close at hand, and rose feebly, opening the
+aged portal before me and entering the place which had known no footsteps for
+over a decade. A fever was ravaging my weakened body, so that I was hardly
+able to stand, but I made my way slowly through the musty, dimly lit chambers
+and staggered into my own study - the study I had deserted so many years
+before.
+
+When the sun has risen, I shall go to the ancient well beneath the old willow tree
+by the cemetery and cast my deformed self into it. No other man shall ever view
+this blasphemy which has survived life longer than it should have. I do not know
+what people will say when they see my disordered grave, but this will not
+trouble me if I can find oblivion from that which I beheld amidst the crumbling,
+moss- crusted stones of the hideous place.
+
+I know now why Andrews was so secretive in his actions; so damnably gloating
+in his attitude toward me after my artificial death. He had meant me for a
+specimen all the time - a specimen of his greatest feat of surgery, his masterpiece
+of unclean witchery ... an example of perverted artistry for him alone to see.
+Where Andrews obtained that other with which I lay accursed in his moldering
+mansion I shall probably never know; but I am afraid that it was brought from
+Haiti along with his fiendish medicine. At least these long hairy arms and
+horrible short legs are alien to me ... alien to all natural and sane laws of
+mankind. The thought that I shall be tortured with that other during the rest of
+my brief existence is another hell.
+
+
+
+
+Now I can but wish for that which once was mine; that which every man blessed
+of God ought to have at death; that which I saw in that awful moment in the
+ancient burial ground when I raised the lid on the coffin - my own shrunken,
+decayed, and headless body.
+
+
+
+
+The Green Meadow - with Winifred V.
+Jackson
+
+Written 1918/19
+
+Published Spring 1927 in The Vagrant, p. 188-95
+
+(INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The following very singular narrative, or record of
+impressions, was discovered under circumstances so extraordinary that they
+deserve careful description. On the evening of Wednesday, August 27, 1913, at
+about eight-thirty o'clock, the population of the small seaside village of
+Potowonket, Maine, U.S.A., was aroused by a thunderous report accompanied
+by a blinding flash; and persons near the shore beheld a mammoth ball of fire
+dart from the heavens into the sea but a short distance out, sending up a
+prodigious column of water. The following Sunday a fishing party composed of
+John Richmond, Peter B. Carr, and Simon Canfield, caught in their trawl and
+dragged ashore a mass of metallic rock, weighing 360 pounds, and looking (as
+Mr. Canfield said) like a piece of slag. Most of the inhabitants agreed that this
+heavy body was none other than the fireball which had fallen from the sky four
+days before; and Dr. Richard M. Jones, the local scientific authority, allowed that
+it must be an aerolite or meteoric stone. In chipping off specimens to send to an
+expert Boston analyst. Dr. Jones discovered imbedded in the semi-metallic mass
+the strange book containing the ensuing tale, which is still in his possession.
+
+In form the discovery resembles an ordinary note-book, about 5X3 inches in
+size, and containing thirty leaves. In material, however it presents marked
+peculiarities. The covers are apparently of some dark stony substance unknown
+to geologists, and unbreakable by any mechanical means. No chemical reagent
+seems to act upon them. The leaves are much the same, save that they are lighter
+in colour, and so infinitely thin as to be quite flexible. The whole is bound by
+some process not very clear to those who have observed it; a process involving
+the adhesion of the leaf substance to the cover substance. These substances
+cannot now be separated, nor can the leaves be torn by any amount of force. The
+writing is Greek of the purest classical quality, and several students of
+palaeography declare that the characters are in a cursive hand used about the
+second century B. C. There is little in the text to determine the date. The
+mechanical mode of writing cannot be deduced beyond the fact that it must have
+resembled that of the modern slate and slate-pencil. During the course of
+analytical efforts made by the late Professor Chambers of Harvard, several pages,
+mostly at the conclusion of the narrative, were blurred to the point of utter
+effacement before being read; a circumstance forming a well-nigh irreparable
+
+
+
+
+loss. What remains of the contents was done into modem Greek letters by the
+palaeographer, Rutherford, and in this form submitted to the translators.
+
+Professor Mayfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who examined
+samples of the strange stone, declares it a true meteorite; an opinion in which Dr.
+von Winterfeldt of Heidelberg (interned in 1918 as a dangerous enemy alien)
+does not concur. Professor Bradley of Columbia College adopts a less dogmatic
+ground; pointing out that certain utterly unknown ingredients are present in
+large quantities, and warning that no classification is as yet possible.
+
+The presence, nature, and message of the strange book form so momentous a
+problem, that no explanation can even be attempted. The text, as far as
+preserved, is here rendered as literally as our language permits, in the hope that
+some reader may eventually hit upon an interpretation and solve one of the
+greatest scientific mysteries of recent years.)
+
+It was a narrow place, and I was alone. On one side, beyond a margin of vivid
+waving green, was the sea; blue; bright, and billowy, and send-ing up vaporous
+exhalations which intoxicated me. So profuse, indeed, were these exhalations,
+that they gave me an odd impression of a coales-cence of sea and sky; for the
+heavens were likewise bright and blue. On the other side was the forest, ancient
+almost as the sea itself, and stretch-ing infinitely inland. It was very dark, for the
+trees were grotesquely huge and luxuriant, and incredibly numerous. Their giant
+trunks were of a horrible green which blended weirdly with the narrow green
+tract whereon I stood. At some distance away, on either side of me, the strange
+forest extended down to the water's edge, obliterating the shore line and
+completely hemming in the narrow tract. Some of the trees, I observed, stood in
+the water itself; as though impatient of any barrier to their progress.
+
+I saw no living thing, nor sign that any living thing save myself had ever existed.
+The sea and the sky and the wood encircled me, and reached off into regions
+beyond my imagination. Nor was there any sound save of the wind-tossed wood
+and of the sea.
+
+As I stood in this silent place, I suddenly commenced to tremble; for though I
+knew not how I came there, and could scarce remember what my name and rank
+had been, I felt that I should go mad if I could understand what lurked about me.
+I recalled things I had learned, things I had dreamed, things I had imagined and
+yearned for in some other distant life. I thought of long nights when I had gazed
+up at the stars of heaven and cursed the gods that my free soul could not traverse
+the vast abysses which were inaccessible to my body. I conjured up ancient
+blasphemies, and terrible delvings into the papri of Democritus; but as memories
+appeared, I shuddered in deeper fear, for I knew that I was alone - horribly
+
+
+
+
+alone. Alone, yet dose to sentient impulses of vast, vague kind; which I prayed
+never to comprehend nor encounter. In the voice of the swaying green branches I
+fancied I could detect a kind of malignant hatred and demoniac triumph.
+Sometimes they struck me as being in horrible colloquy with ghastly and
+unthinkable things which the scaly green bodies of the trees half-hid; hid from
+sight but not from consciousness. The most oppressive of my sensations was a
+sinister feeling of alienage. Though I saw about me objects which I could name;
+trees, grass, sea, and sky; I felt that their relation to me was not the same as that
+of the trees, grass, sea, and sky I knew in another and dimly remembered life.
+The nature of the difference I could not tell, yet I shook in stark fright as And
+then, in a spot where I had before discerned nothing but the misty sea, I beheld
+the Green Meadow; separated from me by a vast expanse of blue rippling water
+with suntipped wavelets, yet strangely near. Often I would peep fearfully over
+my right shoulder at the trees, but I preferred to look at the Green Meadow,
+which affected me oddly.
+
+It was while my eyes were fixed upon this singular tract, that I first felt the
+ground in motion beneath me. Beginning with a kind of throbbing agitation
+which held a fiendish suggestion of conscious action, the bit of bank on which I
+stood detached itself from the grassy shore and commenced to float away; borne
+slowly onward as if by some current of resistless force. I did not move,
+astonished and startled as I was by the unprecedented phenomenon; but stood
+rigidly still until a wide lane of water yawned betwixt me and the land of trees.
+Then I sat down in a sort of daze, and again looked at the sun-tipped water and
+the Green Meadow.
+
+Behind me the trees and the things they may have been hiding seemed to radiate
+infinite menace. This I knew without turning to view them, for as I grew more
+used to the scene I became less and less depen-dent upon the five senses that
+once had been my sole reliance. I knew the green scaly forest hated me, yet now I
+was safe from it, for my bit of bank had drifted far from the shore.
+
+But though one peril was past, another loomed up before me. Pieces of earth
+were constantly crumbling from the floating isle which held me, so that death
+could not be far distant in any event. Yet even then I seemed to sense that death
+would be death to me no more, for I turned again to watch the Green Meadow,
+imbued with a curious feeling of security in strange contrast to my general
+horror.
+
+Then it was that I heard, at a distance immeasurable, the sound of falling water.
+Not that of any trival cascade such as I had known, but that which might be
+heard in the far Scythian lands if all the Mediterranean were poured down an
+
+
+
+
+unfathomable abyss. It was toward this sound that my shrinking island was
+drifting, yet I was content.
+
+Far in the rear were happening weird and terrible things; things which I turned
+to view, yet shivered to behold. For in the sky dark vaporous forms hovered
+fantastically, brooding over trees and seeming to answer the challenge of the
+waving green branches. Then a thick mist arose from the sea to join the sky-
+forms, and the shore was erased from my sight. Though the sun - what sun I
+knew not - shone brightly on the water around me, the land I had left seemed
+involved in a demoniac tempest where dashed the will of the hellish trees and
+what they hid, with that of the sky and the sea. And when the mist vanished, I
+saw only the blue sky and the blue sea, for the land and the trees were no more.
+
+It was at this point that my attention was arrested by the singing in the Green
+Meadow. Hitherto, as I have said, I had encountered no sign of human life; but
+now there arose to my ears a dull chant whose origin and nature were
+apparently unmistakable. While the words were utterly undistinguishable, the
+chant awaked in me a peculiar train of associations; and I was reminded of some
+vaguely disquieting lines I had once translated out of an Egyptian book, which in
+turn were taken from a papyrus of ancient Meroe. Through my brain ran lines
+that I fear to repeat; lines telling of very antique things and forms of life in the
+days when our earth was exceeding young. Of things which thought and moved
+and were alive, yet which gods and men would not consider alive. It was a
+strange book.
+
+As I listened, I became gradually conscious of a circumstance which had before
+puzzled me only subconsciously. At no time had my sight distinguished any
+definite objects in the Green Meadow, an impression of vivid homogeneous
+verdure being the sum total of my perception. Now, however, I saw that the
+current would cause my island to pass the shore at but a little distance; so that I
+might learn more of the land and of the singing thereon. My curiosity to behold
+the singers had mounted high, though it was mingled with apprehension.
+
+Bits of sod continued to break away from the tiny tract which carried me, but I
+heeded not their loss; for I felt that I was not to die with the body (or appearance
+of a body) which I seemed to possess. That everything about me, even life and
+death, was illusory; that I had overleaped the bounds of mortality and corporeal
+entity, becoming a free, detached thing; impressed me as almost certain. Of my
+location I knew nothing, save that I felt I could not be on the earth-planet once so
+familiar to me. My sensations, apart from a kind of haunting terror, were those of
+a traveller just embarked upon an unending voyage of discovery. For a moment I
+thought of the lands and persons I had left behind; and of strange ways whereby
+
+
+
+
+I might some day tell them of my adventurings, even though I might never
+return.
+
+I had now floated very near the Green Meadow, so that the voices were clear and
+distinct; but though I knew many languages I could not quite interpret the words
+of the chanting. Familiar they indeed were, as I had subtly felt when at a greater
+distance, but beyond a sensation of vague and awesome remembrance I could
+make nothing of them. A most extraordinary quality in the voices-a quality
+which I cannot describe-at once frightened and fascinated me. My eyes could
+now discern several things amidst the omnipresent verdure- rocks, covered with
+I bright green moss, shrubs of considerable height, and less definable shapes of
+great magnitude which seemed to move or vibrate amidst the shrubbery in a
+peculiar way. The chanting, whose authors I was so anxious to glimpse, seemed
+loudest, at points where these shapes were most numerous and most vigorously
+in motion.
+
+And then, as my island drifted closer and the sound of the distant waterfall grew
+louder, I saw clearly the source of the chanting, and in one horrible instant
+remembered everything. Of such things I cannot, dare not tell, for therein was
+revealed the hideous solution of all which had puzzled me; and that solution
+would drive you mad, even as it al-most drove me.... I knew now the change
+through which I had passed, and through which certain others who once were
+men had passed! and I knew the endless cycle of the future which none like me
+may escape... I shall live forever, be conscious forever, though my soul cries out
+to the gods for the boon of death and oblivion... All is before me: beyond the
+deafening torrent lies the land of Stethelos, where young men are infinitely old. . .
+The Green Meadow... I will send a message across the horrible immeasurable
+abyss....
+
+(At this point the text becomes illegible.)
+
+
+
+
+The Horror at Martin's Beach - with
+Sonia H. Greene
+
+Written June 1922
+
+Published November 1923 in Weird Tales, Vol. 2, No. 4, p. 75-76, 83
+
+I have never heard an even approximately adequate explanation of the horror at
+Martin's Beach. Despite the large number of witnesses, no two accounts agree;
+and the testimony taken by local authorities contains the most amazing
+discrepancies.
+
+Perhaps this haziness is natural in view of the unheard-of character of the horror
+itself, the almost paralytic terror of all who saw it, and the efforts made by the
+fashionable Wavecrest Inn to hush it up after the publicity created by Prof.
+Ahon's article "Are Hypnotic Powers Confined to Recognized Humanity?"
+
+Against all these obstacles I am striving to present a coherent version; for I
+beheld the hideous occurrence, and believe it should be known in view of the
+appalling possibilities it suggests. Martin's Beach is once more popular as a
+watering-place, but I shudder when I think of it. Indeed, I cannot look at the
+ocean at all now without shuddering.
+
+Fate is not always without a sense of drama and climax, hence the terrible
+happening of August 8, 1922, swiftly followed a period of minor and agreeably
+wonder-fraught excitement at Martin's Beach. On May 17 the crew of the fishing
+smack Alma of Gloucester, under Capt. James P. Orne, killed, after a battle of
+nearly forty hours, a marine monster whose size and aspect produced the
+greatest possible stir in scientific circles and caused certain Boston naturalists to
+take every precaution for its taxidermic preservation.
+
+The object was some fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about
+ten feet in diameter. It was unmistakably a gilled fish in its major affiliations; but
+with certain curious modifications such as rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet
+in place of pectoral fins, which prompted the widest speculation. Its
+extraordinary mouth, its thick and scaly hide, and its single, deep-set eye were
+wonders scarcely less remarkable than its colossal dimensions; and when the
+naturalists pronounced it an infant organism, which could not have been hatched
+more than a few days, public interest mounted to extraordinary heights.
+
+Capt. Orne, with typical Yankee shrewdness, obtained a vessel large enough to
+hold the object in its hull, and arranged for the exhibition of his prize. With
+
+
+
+
+judicious carpentry he prepared what amounted to an excellent marine museum,
+and, sailing south to the wealthy resort district of Martin's Beach, anchored at the
+hotel wharf and reaped a harvest of admission fees.
+
+The intrinsic marvelousness of the object, and the importance which it clearly
+bore in the minds of many scientific visitors from near and far, combined to
+make it the season's sensation. That it was absolutely unique - unique to a
+scientifically revolutionary degree - was well understood. The naturalists had
+shown plainly that it radically differed from the similarly immense fish caught
+off the Florida coast; that, while it was obviously an inhabitant of almost
+incredible depths, perhaps thousands of feet, its brain and principal organs
+indicated a development startlingly vast, and out of all proportion to anything
+hitherto associated with the fish tribe.
+
+On the morning of July 20 the sensation was increased by the loss of the vessel
+and its strange treasure. In the storm of the preceding night it had broken from
+its moorings and vanished forever from the sight of man, carrying with it the
+guard who had slept aboard despite the threatening weather. Capt. Orne, backed
+by extensive scientific interests and aided by large numbers of fishing boats from
+Gloucester, made a thorough and exhaustive searching cruise, but with no result
+other than the prompting of interest and conversation. By August 7 hope was
+abandoned, and Capt. Orne had returned to the Wavecrest Inn to wind up his
+business affairs at Martin's Beach and confer with certain of the scientific men
+who remained there. The horror came on August 8.
+
+It was in the twilight, when grey sea-birds hovered low near the shore and a
+rising moon began to make a glittering path across the waters. The scene is
+important to remember, for every impression counts. On the beach were several
+strollers and a few late bathers; stragglers from the distant cottage colony that
+rose modestly on a green hill to the north, or from the adjacent cliff-perched Inn
+whose imposing towers proclaimed its allegiance to wealth and grandeur.
+
+Well within viewing distance was another set of spectators, the loungers on the
+Inn's high-ceiled and lantern-lighted veranda, who appeared to be enjoying the
+dance music from the sumptuous ballroom inside. These spectators, who
+included Capt. Orne and his group of scientific confreres, joined the beach group
+before the horror progressed far; as did many more from the Inn. Certainly there
+was no lack of witnesses, confused though their stories be with fear and doubt of
+what they saw.
+
+There is no exact record of the time the thing began, although a majority say that
+the fairly round moon was "about a foot" above the low-lying vapors of the
+horizon. They mention the moon because what they saw seemed subtly
+
+
+
+
+connected with it - a sort of stealthy, dehberate, menacing ripple which rolled in
+from the far skyline along the shimmering lane of reflected moonbeams, yet
+which seemed to subside before it reached the shore.
+
+Many did not notice this ripple until reminded by later events; but it seems to
+have been very marked, differing in height and motion from the normal waves
+around it. Some called it cunning and calculating. And as it died away craftily by
+the black reefs afar out, there suddenly came belching up out of the glitter-
+streaked brine a cry of death; a scream of anguish and despair that moved pity
+even while it mocked it.
+
+First to respond to the cry were the two life guards then on duty; sturdy fellows
+in white bathing attire, with their calling proclaimed in large red letters across
+their chests. Accustomed as they were to rescue work, and to the screams of the
+drowning, they could find nothing familiar in the unearthly ululation; yet with a
+trained sense of duty they ignored the strangeness and proceeded to follow their
+usual course.
+
+Hastily seizing an air-cushion, which with its attached coil of rope lay always at
+hand, one of them ran swiftly along the shore to the scene of the gathering
+crowd; whence, after whirling it about to gain momentum, he flung the hollow
+disc far out in the direction from which the sound had come. As the cushion
+disappeared in the waves, the crowd curiously awaited a sight of the hapless
+being whose distress had been so great; eager to see the rescue made by the
+massive rope.
+
+But that rescue was soon acknowledged to be no swift and easy matter; for, pull
+as they might on the rope, the two muscular guards could not move the object at
+the other end. Instead, they found that object pulling with equal or even greater
+force in the very opposite direction, till in a few seconds they were dragged off
+their feet and into the water by the strange power which had seized on the
+proffered life- preserver.
+
+One of them, recovering himself, called immediately for help from the crowd on
+the shore, to whom he flung the remaining coil of rope; and in a moment the
+guards were seconded by all the hardier men, among whom Capt. Orne was
+foremost. More than a dozen strong hands were now tugging desperately at the
+stout line, yet wholly without avail.
+
+Hard as they tugged, the strange force at the other end tugged harder; and since
+neither side relaxed for an instant, the rope became rigid as steel with the
+enormous strain. The struggling participants, as well as the spectators, were by
+this time consumed with curiosity as to the nature of the force in the sea. The
+
+
+
+
+idea of a drowning man had long been dismissed; and hints of whales,
+submarines, monsters, and demons now passed freely around. Where humanity
+had first led the rescuers, wonder kept them at their task; and they hauled with a
+grim determination to uncover the mystery.
+
+It being decided at last that a whale must have swallowed the air-cushion, Capt.
+Orne, as a natural leader, shouted to those on shore that a boat must be obtained
+in order to approach, harpoon, and land the unseen leviathan. Several men at
+once prepared to scatter in quest of a suitable craft, while others came to
+supplant the captain at the straining rope, since his place was logically with
+whatever boat party might be formed. His own idea of the situation was very
+broad, and by no means limited to whales, since he had to do with a monster so
+much stranger. He wondered what might be the acts and manifestations of an
+adult of the species of which the fifty -foot creature had been the merest infant.
+
+And now there developed with appalling suddenness the crucial fact which
+changed the entire scene from one of wonder to one of horror, and dazed with
+fright the assembled band of toilers and onlookers. Capt. Orne, turning to leave
+his post at the rope, found his hands held in their place with unaccountable
+strength; and in a moment he realized that he was unable to let go of the rope.
+His plight was instantly divined, and as each companion tested his own situation
+the same condition was encountered. The fact could not be denied - every
+struggler was irresistibly held in some mysterious bondage to the hempen line
+which was slowly, hideously, and relentlessly pulling them out to sea.
+
+Speechless horror ensued; a horror in which the spectators were petrified to utter
+inaction and mental chaos. Their complete demoralization is reflected in the
+conflicting accounts they give, and the sheepish excuses they offer for their
+seemingly callous inertia. I was one of them, and know.
+
+Even the strugglers, after a few frantic screams and futile groans, succumbed to
+the paralyzing influence and kept silent and fatalistic in the face of unknown
+powers. There they stood in the pallid moonlight, blindly pulling against a
+spectral doom and swaying monotonously backward and forward as the water
+rose first to their knees, then to their hips. The moon went partly under a cloud,
+and in the half-light the line of swaying men resembled some sinister and
+gigantic centipede, writhing in the clutch of a terrible creeping death.
+
+Harder and harder grew the rope, as the tug in both directions increased, and the
+strands swelled with the undisturbed soaking of the rising waves. Slowly the
+tide advanced, till the sands so lately peopled by laughing children and
+whispering lovers were now swallowed by the inexorable flow. The herd of
+panic- stricken watchers surged blindly backward as the water crept above their
+
+
+
+
+feet, while the frightful line of strugglers swayed hideously on, half submerged,
+and now at a substantial distance from their audience. Silence was complete.
+
+The crowd, having gained a huddling-place beyond reach of the tide, stared in
+mute fascination; without offering a word of advice or encouragement, or
+attempting any kind of assistance. There was in the air a nightmare fear of
+impending evils such as the world had never before known.
+
+Minutes seemed lengthened into hours, and still that human snake of swaying
+torsos was seen above the fast rising tide. Rhythmically it undulated; slowly,
+horribly, with the seal of doom upon it. Thicker clouds now passed over the
+ascending moon, and the glittering path on the waters faded nearly out.
+
+Very dimly writhed the serpentine line of nodding heads, with now and then the
+livid face of a backward- glancing victim gleaming pale in the darkness. Faster
+and faster gathered the clouds, till at length their angry rifts shot down sharp
+tongues of febrile flame. Thunders rolled, softly at first, yet soon increasing to a
+deafening, maddening intensity. Then came a culminating crash - a shock whose
+reverberations seemed to shake land and sea alike - and on its heels a cloudburst
+whose drenching violence overpowered the darkened world as if the heavens
+themselves had opened to pour forth a vindictive torrent.
+
+The spectators, instinctively acting despite the absence of conscious and coherent
+thought, now retreated up the cliff steps to the hotel veranda. Rumors had
+reached the guests inside, so that the refugees found a state of terror nearly equal
+to their own. I think a few frightened words were uttered, but cannot be sure.
+
+Some, who were staying at the Inn, retired in terror to their rooms; while others
+remained to watch the fast sinking victims as the line of bobbing heads showed
+above the mounting waves in the fitful lightning flashes. I recall thinking of those
+heads, and the bulging eyes they must contain; eyes that might well reflect all the
+fright, panic, and delirium of a malignant universe - all the sorrow, sin, and
+misery, blasted hopes and unfulfilled desires, fear, loathing and anguish of the
+ages since time's beginning; eyes alight with all the soul-racking pain of eternally
+blazing infernos.
+
+And as I gazed out beyond the heads, my fancy conjured up still another eye; a
+single eye, equally alight, yet with a purpose so revolting to my brain that the
+vision soon passed. Held in the clutches of an unknown vise, the line of the
+damned dragged on; their silent screams and unuttered prayers known only to
+the demons of the black waves and the night-wind.
+
+
+
+
+There now burst from the infuriate sky such a mad cataclysm of satanic sound
+that even the former crash seemed dwarfed. Amidst a bhnding glare of
+descending fire the voice of heaven resounded with the blasphemies of hell, and
+the mingled agony of all the lost reverberated in one apocalyptic, planet-rending
+peal of Cyclopean din. It was the end of the storm, for with uncanny suddenness
+the rain ceased and the moon once more cast her pallid beams on a strangely
+quieted sea.
+
+There was no line of bobbing heads now. The waters were calm and deserted,
+and broken only by the fading ripples of what seemed to be a whirlpool far out
+in the path of the moonlight whence the strange cry had first come. But as I
+looked along that treacherous lane of silvery sheen, with fancy fevered and
+senses overwrought, there trickled upon my ears from some abysmal sunken
+waste the faint and sinister echoes of a laugh.
+
+
+
+
+The Last Test - with Adolphe de Castro
+
+Written 1927
+
+Published November 1928 in Weird Tales, Volume 12, No. 5, 625-56.
+
+I.
+
+Few persons know the inside of the Clarendon story, or even that there is an
+inside not reached by the newspapers. It was a San Francisco sensation in the
+days before the fire, both because of the panic and menace that kept it company,
+and because of its close linkage with the governor of the state. Governor Dalton,
+it will be recalled, was Clarendon's best friend, and later married his sister.
+Neither Dalton nor Mrs. Dalton would ever discuss the painful affair, but
+somehow the facts leaked out to a limited circle. But for that, and for the years
+which have give a sort of vagueness and impersonality to the actors, one would
+still pause before probing into secrets so strictly guarded at the time.
+
+The appointment of Dr. Alfred Clarendon as medical director of San Quentin
+Penitentiary in 189- was greeted with the keenest enthusiasm throughout
+California. San Francisco had at last the honour of harbouring one of the great
+biologists and physicians of the period, and solid pathological leaders from all
+over the world might be expected to flock thither to study his methods, profit by
+his advice and researches, and learn how to cope with their own local problems.
+California, almost over night, would become a centre of medical scholarship with
+earthwide influence and reputation.
+
+Governor Dalton, anxious to spread the news in its fullest significance, saw to it
+that the press carried ample and dignified accounts of his new appointee.
+Pictures of Dr. Clarendon and his new home near old Goat Hill, sketches of his
+career and manifold honours, and popular accounts of his salient scientific
+discoveries were all presented in the principal California dailies, till the public
+soon felt a sort of reflected pride in the man whose studies of pyemia in India, of
+the pest in China, and of every sort of kindred disorder elsewhere would soon
+enrich the world of medicine with an antitoxin of revolutionary importance - a
+basic antitoxin combating the whole febrile principle at its very source, and
+ensuring the ultimate conquest and extirpation of fever in all its diverse forms.
+
+Back of the appointments stretched an extended and now wholly unromantic
+history of early friendship, long separation, and dramatically renewed
+acquaintance. James Dalton and the clarendon family had been friends in New
+York ten years before - friends and more than friends, since the doctor's only
+
+
+
+
+sister, Georgina, was the sweetheart of Dahon's youth, while the doctor himself
+had been his closest associate and almost his protege, in the days of school and
+college. The father of Alfred and Georgina, a Wall Street pirate of the ruthless
+elder breed, had known Dalton's father well; so well, indeed, that he had finally
+stripped him of all he possessed in a memorable afternoon's fight on the stock
+exchange. Dalton Senior, hopeless of recuperation and wishing to give his one
+adored child the benefit of his insurance, had promptly blown out his brains; but
+James had not sought to retaliate. It was, as he viewed it, all in the game; and he
+wished no harm to the father of the girl he meant to marry and of the budding
+young scientist whose admirer and protector he had been throughout their years
+of fellowship and study. Instead, he turned to the law, established himself in a
+small way, and in due course asked 'Old Clarendon' for Georgina's hand.
+
+Old Clarendon had refused very firmly and loudly, vowing that no pauper and
+upstart lawyer was fit to be his son-in-law; and a scene of considerable violence
+had occurred. James, telling the wrinkled freebooter at last what he ought to
+have been told long before, had left the house and the city in a high temper; and
+was embarked within a month upon the California life which was to lead him to
+the governorship through many a fight with ring and politician. His farewells to
+Alfred and Georgina had been brief, and he had never known the aftermath of
+that scene in the Clarendon library. Only by a day did he miss the news of Old
+Clarendon's death from apoplexy, and by so missing it, changed the course of his
+whole career. He had not written Georgina in the decade that followed; knowing
+her loyalty to her father, and waiting till his own fortune and position might
+remove all obstacles to the match. Nor had he sent any word to Alfred, whose
+calm indifference in the face of affection and hero-worship had always savoured
+of conscious destiny and the self-sufficiency of genius. Secure in the ties of a
+constancy rare even then, he had worked and risen with thoughts only of the
+future; still a bachelor, and with a perfect intuitive faith that Georgina was also
+waiting.
+
+In this faith Dalton was not deceived. Wondering perhaps why no message ever
+came, Georgina found no romance save in her dreams and expectations; and in
+the course of time became busy with the new responsibilities brought by her
+brother's rise to greatness. Alfred's growth had not belied the promise of his
+youth, and the slim boy had darted quietly up the steps of science with a speed
+and permanence almost dizzying to contemplate. Lean and ascetic, with steel-
+rimmed pince-nez and pointed brown beard. Dr. Alfred Clarendon was an
+authority at twenty-five and an international figure at thirty. Careless of worldly
+affairs with the negligence of genius, he depended vastly on the care and
+management of his sister, and was secretly thankful that her memories of James
+had kept her from other and more tangible alliances.
+
+
+
+
+Georgina conducted the business and household of the great bacteriologist, and
+was proud of his strides toward the conquest of fever. She bore patiently with his
+eccentricism, calmed his occasional bouts of fanaticism, and healed those
+breaches with his friends which now and then resulted from his unconcealed
+scorn of anything less than a single-minded devotion to pure truth and its
+progress. Clarendon was undeniably irritating at times to ordinary folk; for he
+never tired of depreciating the service of the individual as contrasted with the
+service of mankind as a whole, and in censuring men of learning who mingled
+domestic life or outside interests with their pursuit of abstract science. His
+enemies called him a bore; but his admirers, pausing before the white heat of
+ecstasy into which he would work himself, became almost ashamed of ever
+having any standards or aspirations outside the one divine sphere of unalloyed
+knowledge.
+
+The doctor's travels were extensive and Georgina generally accompanied him on
+the shorter ones. Three times, however, he had taken long, lone jaunts to strange
+and distant places in his studies of exotic fevers and half-fabulous plagues; for he
+knew that it is out of the unknown lands of cryptic and immemorial Asia that
+most of the earth's diseases spring. On each of these occasions he had brought
+back curious mementoes which added to the eccentricity of his home, not least
+among which was the needlessly large staff of Thibetan servants picked up
+somewhere in U-tsang during an epidemic of which the world never heard, but
+amidst which Clarendon had discovered and isolated the germ of black fever.
+These men, taller than most Thibetans and clearly belonging to a stock but little
+investigated in the outside world, were of a skeletonic leanness which made one
+wonder whether the doctor had sought to symbolise in them the anatomical
+models of his college years. Their aspect, in the loose black silk robes of Bonpa
+priests which he chose to give them, was grotesque in the highest degree; and
+there was an unsmiling silence and stiffness in their motions which enhanced
+their air of fantasy and gave Georgina a queer, awed feeling of having stumbled
+into the pages of Vathek or the Arabian Nights.
+
+But queerest of all was the general factotum or clinic-man, whom Clarendon
+addressed as Surama, and whom he had brought back with him after a long stay
+in Northern Africa, during which he had studied certain odd intermittent fevers
+among the mysterious Saharan Tuaregs, whose descent from the primal race of
+lost Atlantis is an old archaeological rumour. Surama, a man of great intelligence
+and seemingly inexhaustible erudition, was as morbidly lean as the Thibetan
+servants; with swarthy, parchment-like skin drawn so tightly over his bald pate
+and hairless face that every line of the skull stood out in ghastly prominence -
+this death's-head effect being heightened by lustrelessly burning black eyes set
+with a depth which left to common visibility only a pair of dark, vacant sockets.
+Unlike the ideal subordinate, he seemed despite his impassive features to spend
+
+
+
+
+no effort in concealing such emotions as he possessed. Instead, he carried about
+an insidious atmosphere of irony or amusement, accompanied at certain
+moments by a deep, guttural chuckle like that of a giant turtle which has just torn
+to pieces some furry animal and is ambling away towards the sea. His race
+appeared to be Caucasian, but could not be classified more clearly than that.
+Some of Clarendon's friends thought he looked like a high-caste Hindoo
+notwithstanding his accentless speech, while many agreed with Georgina - who
+disliked him - when she gave her opinion that a Pharaoh's mummy, if
+miraculously brought to life, would form a very apt twin for this sardonic
+skeleton.
+
+Dalton, absorbed in his uphill political battles and isolated from Eastern interests
+through the peculiar self-sufficiency of the old West, had not followed the
+meteoric rise of his former comrade; Clarendon had actually heard nothing of
+one so far outside his chosen world of science as the governor. Being of
+independent and even of abundant means, the Clarendons had for many years
+stuck to their old Manhattan mansion in East Nineteenth Street, whose ghosts
+must have looked sorely askance at the bizarrerie of Surama and the Thibetans.
+Then, through the doctor's wish to transfer his base of medical observation, the
+great change had suddenly come, and they had crossed the continent to take up a
+secluded life in San Francisco; buying the gloomy old Bannister place near Goat
+Hill, overlooking the bay, and establishing their strange household in a rambling,
+French-roofed relic of mid-Victorian design and gold-rush parvenu display, set
+amidst high-walled grounds in a region still half suburban.
+
+Dr. Clarendon, though better satisfied than in New York, still felt cramped for
+lack of opportunities to apply and test his pathological theories. Unworldly as he
+was, he had never thought of using his reputation as an influence to gain public
+appointment; though more and more he realised that only the medical
+directorship of a government or a charitable institution - a prison, almshouse, or
+hospital - would give him a field of sufficient width to complete his researches
+and make his discoveries of the greatest use to humanity and science at large.
+
+Then he had run into James Dalton by sheer accident one afternoon in Market
+Street as the governor was swinging out of the Royal Hotel. Georgina had been
+with him, and an almost instant recognition had heightened the drama of the
+reunion. Mutual ignorance of one another's progress had bred long explanation
+and histories, and Clarendon was pleased to find that he had so important an
+official for a friend. Dalton and Georgina, exchanging many a glance, felt more
+than a trace of their youthful tenderness; and a friendship was then and there
+revived which led to frequent calls and a fuller and fuller exchange of
+confidences.
+
+
+
+
+James Dalton learned of his old protege's need for political appointment, and
+sought, true to his protective role of school and college days, to devise some
+means of giving 'Little Alf the needed position and scope. He had, it is true,
+wide appointive powers; but the legislature's constant attacks and
+encroachments forced him to exercise these with the utmost discretion. At length,
+however, scarcely three months after the sudden reunion, the foremost
+institutional medical office in the state fell vacant. Weighing all the elements with
+care, and conscious that his friend's achievements and reputation would justify
+the most substantial rewards, the governor felt at last able to act. Formalities
+were few, and on the eighth of November, 189-, Dr. Alfred Clarendon became
+medical director of the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin.
+
+II.
+
+In scarcely more than a month the hopes of Dr. Clarendon's admirers were
+amply fulfilled. Sweeping changes in methods brought to the prison's medical
+routine an efficiency never before dreamed of; and though the subordinates were
+naturally not without jealousy, they were obliged to admit the magical results of
+a really great man's superintendence. Then came a time where mere appreciation
+might well have grown to devour thankfulness at a providential conjunction of
+time, place, and man; for one morning Dr Jones came to his new chief with a
+grave face to announce his discovery of a case which he could not but identify as
+that selfsame black fever whose germ Clarendon had found and classified.
+
+Dr. Clarendon shewed no surprise, but kept on at the writing before him.
+
+"I know," he said evenly; "I came across that case yesterday. I'm glad you
+recognised it. Put the man in a separate ward, though I don't believe this fever is
+contagious."
+
+Dr. Jones, with his own opinion of the malady's contagiousness, was glad of this
+deference to caution; and hastened to execute the order. Upon his return.
+Clarendon rose to leave, declaring that he would himself take charge of the case
+alone. Disappointed in his wish to study the great man's methods and technique,
+the junior physician watched his chief stride away toward the lone ward where
+he had placed the patient, more critical of the new regime than at any time since
+admiration had displaced his first jealous pangs.
+
+Reaching the ward. Clarendon entered hastily, glancing at the bed and stepping
+back to see how far Dr. Jones's obvious curiosity might have led him. Then,
+finding the corridor still vacant, he shut the door and turned to examine the
+sufferer. The man was a convict of a peculiarly repulsive type, and seemed to be
+racked by the keenest throes of agony. His features were frightfully contracted.
+
+
+
+
+and his knees drawn sharply up in the mute desperation of the stricken.
+Clarendon studied him closely, raising his tightly shut eyelids, took his pulse
+and temperature, and finally dissolving a tablet in water, forced the solution
+between the sufferer's lips. Before long the height of the attack abated, as shewn
+by the relaxing body and returning normality of expression, and the patient
+began to breathe more easily. Then, by a soft rubbing of the ears, the doctor
+caused the man to open his eyes. There was life in them, for they moved from
+side to side, though they lacked the fine fire which we are wont to deem the
+image of the soul. Clarendon smiled as he surveyed the peace his help had
+brought, feeling behind him the power of an all-capable science. He had long
+known of this case, and had snatched the victim from death with the work of a
+moment. Another hour and this man would have gone - yet Jones had seen the
+symptoms for days before discovering them, and having discovered them, did
+not know what to do.
+
+Man's conquest of disease, however, cannot be perfect. Clarendon, assuring the
+dubious trusty-nurses that the fever was not contagious, had had the patient
+bathed, sponged in alcohol, and put to bed; but was told the next morning that
+the case was lost. The man had died after midnight in the most intense agony,
+and with such cries and distortions of face that the nurses were driven almost to
+panic. The doctor took this news with his usual calm, whatever his scientific
+feelings may have been, and ordered the burial of the patient in quicklime. Then,
+with a philosophic shrug of the shoulders, he made the final rounds of the
+penitentiary.
+
+Two days later the prison was hit again. Three men came down at once this time,
+and there was no concealing the fact that a black fever epidemic was under way.
+Clarendon, having adhered so firmly to this theory of non-contagiousness,
+suffered a distinct loss of prestige, and was handicapped by the refusal of the
+trusty-nurses to attend the patients. Theirs was not the soul-free devotion of
+those who sacrifice themselves to science and humanity. They were convicts,
+serving only because of the privileges they could not otherwise buy, and when
+the price became too great they preferred to resign the privileges.
+
+But the doctor was still master of the situation. Consulting with the warden and
+sending urgent messages to his friend the governor, he saw to it that special
+rewards in cash and in reduced terms were offered to the convicts for the
+dangerous nursing service; and by this succeeded in getting a very fair quota of
+volunteers. He was steeled for action now, and nothing could shake his poise
+and determination. Additional cases brought only a curt nod, and he seemed a
+stranger to fatigue as he hastened from bedside to bedside all over the vast stone
+home of sadness and evil. More than forty cases developed within another week,
+and nurses had to be brought from the city. Clarendon went home very seldom
+
+
+
+
+at this stage, often sleeping on a cot in the warden's quarters, and always giving
+himself up with typical abandon to the service of medicine and mankind. Then
+came the first mutterings of that storm which was soon to convulse San
+Francisco. News will out, and the menace of black fever spread over the town
+like a fog from the bay. Reporters trained in the doctrine of 'sensation first' used
+their imagination without restraint, and gloried when at last they were able to
+produce a case in the Mexican quarter which a local physician - fonder perhaps
+of money than of truth or civic welfare - pronounced black fever.
+
+That was the last straw. Frantic at the thought of the crawling death so close
+upon them, the people of San Francisco went mad en masse, and embarked upon
+that historic exodus of which all the country was soon to hear over busy wires.
+Ferries and rowboats, excursion steamers and launches, railways and cable- cars,
+bicycles and carriages, moving-vans and work carts, all were pressed into instant
+and frenzied service. Sausalito and Tamalpais, as lying in the direction of San
+Quentin, shared in the flight; while housing space in Oakley, Berkeley, and
+Alameda rose to fabulous prices. Tent colonies sprang up, and improvised
+villages lined the crowded southward highways from Millbrae to San Jose. Many
+sought refuge with friends in Sacramento, while the fright-shaken residue forced
+by various causes to stay behind could do little more than maintain the basic
+necessities of a nearly dead city.
+
+Business, save for quack doctors with 'sure cures' and 'preventives' for use
+against the fever, fell rapidly to the vanishing-point. At first the saloons offered
+'medicated drinks', but soon found that the populace preferred to be duped by
+charlatans of more professional aspect. In strangely noiseless streets persons
+peered into one another's faces to glimpse possible plague symptoms, and
+shopkeepers began more and more to refuse admission to their clientele, each
+customer seeming to them a fresh fever menace. Legal and judicial machinery
+began to disintegrate as attorneys and county clerks succumbed one by one to
+the urge for flight. Even the doctors deserted in large numbers, many of them
+pleading the need of vacations among the mountains and the lakes in the
+northern part of the state. Schools and colleges, theatres and cafA) As,
+restaurants and saloons, all gradually closed their doors; and in a single week
+San Francisco lay prostate and inert with only its light, power, and water service
+even half normal, with newspapers in skeletonic form, and with a crippled
+parody on transportation maintained by the horse and cable cars.
+
+This was the lowest ebb. It could not last long, for courage and observation are
+not altogether dead in mankind; and sooner or later the non-existence of any
+widespread black fever epidemic outside San Quentin became too obvious a fact
+to deny, notwithstanding several actual cases and the undeniable spread of
+typhoid in the unsanitary suburban tent colonies. The leaders and editors of the
+
+
+
+
+commentary conferred and took action, enlisting in their service the very
+reporters whose energies had done so much to bring on the trouble, but now
+turning their 'sensation first' avidity into more constructive channels. Editorials
+and fictitious interviews appeared, telling of Dr. Clarendon's complete control of
+the disease, and of the absolute impossibility of its diffusion beyond the prison
+walls. Reiteration and circulation slowly did their work, and gradually a slim
+backward trickle of urbanites swelled into a vigorous refluent stream. One of the
+first healthy symptoms was the start of a newspaper controversy of the approved
+acrimonious kind, attempting to fix blame for the panic wherever the various
+participants thought it belonged. The returning doctors, jealously strengthened
+by their timely vacations, began striking at Clarendon, assuring the public that
+they as well as he would keep the fever in leash, and censuring him for not doing
+even more to check its spread within San Quentin.
+
+Clarendon had, they averred, permitted far more deaths that were necessary. The
+veriest tyro in medicine knew how to check fever contagion; and if this
+renowned savant did not do it, it was clearly because he chose for scientific
+reasons to study the final effects of the disease, rather than to prescribe properly
+and save the victims. This policy, they insinuated, might be proper enough
+among convicted murderers in a penal institution, but it would not do in San
+Francisco, where life was still a precious and sacred thing. Thus they went on,
+the papers were glad to publish all they wrote, since the sharpness of the
+campaign, in which Dr. Clarendon would doubtless join, would help to
+obliterate confusion and restore confidence among the people.
+
+But Clarendon did not reply. He only smiled, while his singular clinic -man
+Surama indulged in many a deep, testudinous chuckle. He was at home more
+nowadays, so that reporters began besieging the gate of the great wall the doctor
+had built around his house, instead of pestering the warden's office at San
+Quentin. Results, though, were equally meagre; for Surama formed an
+impassable barrier between the doctor and the outer world - even after the
+reporters had got into the grounds. The newspaper men getting access to the
+front hall had glimpses of Clarendon's singular entourage and made the best
+they could in a 'write-up' of Surama and the queer skeletonic Thibetans.
+Exaggeration, of course, occurred in every fresh article, and the net effect of the
+publicity was distinctly adverse to the great physician. Most persons hate the
+unusual, and hundreds who could have excused heartlessness or incompetence
+stood ready to condemn the grotesque taste manifested in the chuckling
+attendant and the eight black-robed Orientals.
+
+Early in January an especially persistent young man from the Observer climbed
+the moated eight-foot brick wall in the rear of the Clarendon grounds and began
+a survey of the varied outdoor appearances which tree concealed from the front
+
+
+
+
+walk. With quick, alert brain he took in everything - the rose-arbour, the aviaries,
+the animal cages where all sorts of mammalia from monkeys to guinea-pigs
+might be seen and heard, the stout wooden clinic building with barred windows
+in the northwest corner of the yard - and bent searching glances throughout the
+thousand square feet of intramural privacy. A great article was brewing, and he
+would have escaped unscathed but for the barking of Dick, Georgina
+Clarendon's gigantic and beloved St. Bernard. Surama, instant in his response,
+had the youth by the collar before a protest could be uttered, and was presently
+shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, and dragging him through the trees to the
+front yard and the gate.
+
+Breathless explanations and quavering demands to see Dr. Clarendon were
+useless. Surama only chuckled and dragged his victim on. Suddenly a positive
+fright crept over the dapper scribe, and he began to wish desperately that this
+unearthly creature would speak, if only to prove that he really was a being of
+honest flesh and blood belonging to this planet. He became deathly sick, and
+strove not to glimpse the eyes which he knew must lie at the base of those gaping
+black sockets. Soon he heard the gate open and felt himself propelled violently
+through; in another moment waking rudely to the things of earth as he landed
+wetly and muddily in the ditch which Clarendon had had dug around the entire
+length of the wall. Fright gave a place to rage as he heard the massive gate slam
+shut, and he rose dripping to shake his fist at the forbidding portal. Then, as he
+turned to go, a soft sound grated behind him, and through a small wicket in the
+gate he felt the sunken eyes of Surama and heard the echoes of a deep-voiced,
+blood- freezing chuckle.
+
+This young man, feeling perhaps justly that his handling had been rougher than
+he deserved, resolved to revenge himself upon the household responsible for his
+treatment. Accordingly he prepared a fictitious interview with Dr. Clarendon,
+supposed to be held in the clinic building, during which he was careful to
+describe the agonies of a dozen black fever patients whom his imagination
+arranged on orderly rows of couches. His master-stroke was the picture of one
+especially pathetic sufferer gasping for water, while the doctor held a glass of the
+sparkling fluid just out of his reach, in a scientific attempt to determine the effect
+of a tantalising emotion on the course of the disease. This invention was followed
+by paragraphs of insinuating comment so outwardly respectful that it bore a
+double venom. Dr. Clarendon was, the article ran, undoubtedly the greatest and
+most single-minded scientist in the world; but science is no friend to individual
+welfare, and one would not like to have one's gravest ills drawn out and
+aggravated merely to satisfy an investigator on some point of abstract truth. Life
+is too short for that.
+
+
+
+
+Altogether, the article was diabolically skilful, and succeeded in horrifying nine
+readers out of ten against Dr. Clarendon and his supposed methods. Other
+papers were quick to copy and enlarge upon its substance, taking the cue it
+offered, and commencing a series of 'faked' interviews which fairly ran the
+gamut of derogatory fantasy. In no case, however, did the doctor condescend to
+offer a contradiction. He had no time to waste on fools and liars, and cared little
+for the esteem of a thoughtless rabble he despised. When James Dalton
+telegraphed his regrets and offered aid. Clarendon replied with an almost
+boorish curtness. He did not heed the barking of dogs, and could not bother to
+muzzle them. Nor would he thank anyone for messing with a matter wholly
+beneath notice. Silent and contemptuous, he continued his duties with tranquil
+evenness.
+
+But the young reporter's spark had done its work. San Francisco was insane
+again, and this time as much with rage as with fear. Sober judgment became a
+lost art; and though no second exodus occurred, there ensued a reign of vice and
+recklessness born of desperation, and suggesting parallel phenomena in
+mediaeval times of pestilence. Hatred ran riot against the man who had found
+the disease and was struggling to restrain it, and a light-headed public forgot his
+great services to knowledge in their efforts to fan the flames of resentment. They
+seemed, in their blindness, to hate him in person, rather than the plague which
+had come to their breeze-cleaned and usually healthy city.
+
+Then the young reporter, playing in the Neronic fire he had kindled, added a
+crowning personal touch of his own. Remembering the indignities he had
+suffered at the hands of the cadaverous clinic-man, he prepared a masterly article
+on the home and environment of Dr. Clarendon, giving especial prominence to
+Surama, whose very aspect he declared sufficient to scare the healthiest person
+into any sort of fever. He tried to make the gaunt chuckler appear equally
+ridiculous and terrible, succeeding best, perhaps, in the latter half of his
+intention, since a tide of horror always welled up whenever he thought of his
+brief proximity to the creature. He collected all the rumours current about the
+man, elaborated on the unholy depth of his reputed scholarship, and hinted
+darkly that it could have been no godly realm of secret and aeon-weighed Africa
+wherein Dr. Clarendon had found him.
+
+Georgina, who followed the papers closely, felt crushed and hurt by these attacks
+upon her brother, but James Dalton, who called often at the house, did his best to
+comfort her. In this he was warm and sincere; for he wished not only to console
+the woman he loved, but to utter some measure of the reverence he had always
+felt for the starward-bound genius who had been his youth's closest comrade. He
+told Georgina how greatness can never be exempted from the shafts of envy, and
+
+
+
+
+cited the long, sad list of splendid brains crushed beneath vulgar heels. The
+attacks, he pointed out, formed the truest of all proofs of Alfred's solid eminence.
+
+"But they hurt just the same," she replied, "and all the more because I know that
+Al really suffers from them, no matter how indifferent he tries to be."
+
+Dalton kissed her hand in a manner not then obsolete among well-born persona.
+
+"And it hurts me a thousand times more, knowing that it hurts you and Alf. But
+never mind, Georgie, we'll stand together and pull through it!"
+
+Thus it came about that Georgina came more and more to rely on the strength of
+the steel-firm, square- jawed governor who had been her youthful swain, and
+more and more to confide in him the things she feared. The press attacks and the
+epidemic were not quite all. There were aspects of the household which she did
+not like. Surama, cruel in equal measure to man and beast, filled her with the
+most unnamable repulsion; and she could not help but feel he meant some
+vague, indefinable harm to Alfred. She did not like the Thibetans, either, and
+thought it very peculiar that Surama was able to talk with them. Alfred would
+not tell her who or what Surama was, but had once explained rather haltingly
+that he was a much older man that he was a much older man than would be
+commonly thought credible, and that he had mastered secrets and been through
+experiences calculated to make him a colleague of phenomenal value for any
+scientist seeking Nature's hidden mysteries.
+
+Urged by her uneasiness, Dalton became a still more frequent visitor at the
+Clarendon home, though he saw that his presence was deeply resented by
+Surama. The bony clinic-man formed the habit of glaring peculiarly from those
+spectral sockets when admitting him, and would often, after closing the gate
+when he left, chuckle monotonously in a manner that made his flesh creep.
+Meanwhile Dr. Clarendon seemed oblivious of everything save his work at San
+Quentin, whither he went each day in his launch - alone save for Surama, who
+managed the wheel while the doctor read or collated his notes. Dalton welcomed
+these regular absences, for they gave him constant opportunities to renew his
+suit for Georgina's hand. When he would overstay and meet Alfred, however,
+the latter's greeting was always friendly despite his habitual reserve. In time the
+engagement of James and Georgina grew to be a definite thing, and the two
+awaited only a favourable time to speak to Alfred.
+
+The governor, whole-souled in everything and firm in his protective loyalty,
+spared no pains in spreading propaganda on his old friend's behalf. Press and
+officialdom both felt his influence, and he even succeeded in interesting scientists
+in the East, many of whom came to California to study the plague and
+
+
+
+
+investigate the anti-fever bacillus which Clarendon was so rapidly isolating and
+perfecting. These doctors and biologists, however, did not obtain the information
+they wished; so that several of them left with a very unfortunate impression. Not
+a few prepared articles hostile to Clarendon, accusing him of an unscientific and
+fame-seeking attitude, and intimating that he concealed his methods through a
+highly unprofessional desire for ultimate personal profit.
+
+Others, fortunately, were more liberal in their judgments, and wrote
+enthusiastically of Clarendon and his work. They had seen the patients, and
+could appreciate how marvellously he held the dread disease in leash. His
+secrecy regarding the antitoxin they deemed quite justifiable, since its public
+diffusion in unperfected form could not but do more harm than good. Clarendon
+himself, whom many of their number had met before, impressed them more
+profoundly than ever, and they did not hesitate to compare him with Jenner,
+Lister, Koch, Pasteur, Metchnikoff, and the rest of those whose whole lives have
+served pathology and humanity. Dalton was careful to save for Alfred all the
+magazines that spoke well of him, bringing them in person as an excuse to see
+Georgina. They did not, however, produce much effect save a contemptuous
+smile; and Clarendon would generally throw them to Surama, whose deep,
+disturbing chuckle upon reading formed a close parallel to the doctor's own
+ironic amusement.
+
+One Monday evening early in February Dalton called with the definite
+impression asking Clarendon for his sister's hand. Georgina herself admitted
+him to the grounds, and as they walked toward the house he stopped to pat the
+great dog which rushed up and laid friendly fore paws on his breast. It was Dick,
+Georgina's cherished St. Bernard, and Dalton was glad to feel that he had the
+affection of a creature which meant so much to her.
+
+Dick was excited and glad, and turned the governor nearly half about with his
+vigorous pressure as he gave a soft quick bark and sprang off through the trees
+toward the clinic. He did not vanish, though, but presently stopped and looked
+back, softly barking again as if he wished Dalton to follow. Georgina, fond of
+obeying her huge pet's playful whims, motioned to James to see what he wanted;
+and they both walked slowly after him as he trotted relievedly to the rear of the
+yard where the top of the clinic building stood silhouetted against the stars
+above the great brick wall.
+
+The outline of lights within shewed around the edges of the dark window-
+curtains, so they knew that Alfred and Surama were at work. Suddenly from the
+interior came a thin, subdued sound like the cry of a child - a plaintive call of
+'Mamma! Mamma!' at which Dick barked, while James and Georgina started
+perceptibly. Then Georgina smiled, remembering the parrots that Clarendon
+
+
+
+
+always kept for experimental uses, and patted Dick on the head either to forgive
+him for having fooled her and Dalton, or to console him for having been fooled
+himself.
+
+As they turned toward the house Dalton mentioned his resolve to speak to
+Alfred that evening about their engagement, and Georgina supplied no
+objection. She knew that her brother would not relish the loss of a faithful
+manager and companion, but believed his affection would place no barrier in the
+way of her happiness.
+
+Later that evening Clarendon came into the house with a springy step and aspect
+less grim than usual. Dalton, seeing a good omen in this easy buoyancy, took
+heart as the doctor wrung his hand with a jovial "Ah, Jimmy, how's politics this
+year?" He glanced at Georgina, and she quietly excused herself, while the two
+men settled down to a chat on general subjects. Little by little, amidst many
+reminders of their old youthful days, Dalton worked toward his point; till at last
+he came out plainly with the crucial inquiry.
+
+" Alf, I want to marry Georgina. Have we your blessing?"
+
+Keenly watching his old friend, Dalton saw a shadow steal over his face. The
+dark eyes flashed for a moment, then veiled themselves as wonted placidity
+returned. So science or selfishness was at work after all!
+
+"You're asking an impossibility, James. Georgina isn't the aimless butterfly she
+was years ago. She has a place in the service of truth and mankind now, and that
+place is here. She's decided to devote her life to my work - or the household that
+makes my work possible - and there's no room for desertion or personal
+caprice."
+
+Dalton waited to see if had finished. The same old fanaticism - humanity versus
+the individual - and the doctor was going to let it spoil his sister's life! Then he
+tried to answer.
+
+"But look here, Alf, do you mean to say that Georgina, in particular, is so
+necessary to your work that you must make a slave and martyr out of her? Use
+your sense of proportion, man! If it were a question of Surama or somebody in
+the utter thick of your experiments it might be different; but, after all, Georgina is
+only a housekeeper to you in the last analysis. She has promised to be my wife
+and says that she loves me. Have you the right to cut her off from the life that
+belongs to her? Have you the right - "
+
+
+
+
+"That'll do, James!" Clarendon's face was set and white. "Whether or not I have
+the right to govern my own family is no business of an outsider."
+
+"Outsider - you can say that to a man who - " Dalton almost choked as the steely
+voice of the doctor interrupted him again.
+
+"An outsider to my family, and from now on an outsider to my home. Dalton,
+your presumption goes just a little too far! Good evening. Governor!"
+
+And Clarendon strode from the room without extending his hand.
+
+Dalton hesitated for a moment, almost at a loss what to do, when presently
+Georgina entered. Her face shewed that she had spoken with her brother, and
+Dalton took both her hands impetuously.
+
+"Well, Georgie, what do you say? I'm afraid it's a choice between Alf and me.
+You know how I feel - you know how I felt before when it was your father I was
+up against. What's your answer this time?"
+
+He paused as she responded slowly.
+
+"James, dear, do you believe that I love you?"
+
+He nodded and pressed her hands expectantly.
+
+"Then, if you love me, you'll wait a while. Don't think of Al's rudeness. He's to
+be pitied. I can't tell you the whole thing now, but you know how worried I am -
+what with the strain of his work, the criticism, and the staring and cackling of
+that horrible creature Surama! I'm afraid he'll break down - he shews the strain
+more than anyone outside the family could tell. I can see it, for I've watched him
+all my life. He's changing - slowly bending under his burdens - and he puts on
+his extra brusqueness to hide it. You can see what I mean, can't you, dear?"
+
+She paused, and Dalton nodded again, pressing one of her hands to his breast.
+Then she concluded.
+
+"So promise me, dear, to be patient. I must stand by him; I must! I must!"
+
+Dalton did not speak for a while, but his head inclined in what was almost a bow
+of reverence. There was more of Christ in this devoted woman than he had
+thought any human being possessed, and in the face of such love and loyalty he
+could do no urging.
+
+
+
+
+Words of sadness and parting were brief; and James, whose blue eyes were
+misty, scarcely saw the gaunt clinic -man as the gate to the street was at last
+opened to him. But when it slammed to behind him he heard that blood-curdling
+chuckle he had come to recognize so well, and knew that Surama was there -
+Surama, whom Georgina had called her brother's evil genius. Walking away
+with a firm step, Dalton resolved to be watchful, and to act at the first sign of
+trouble.
+
+III.
+
+Meanwhile San Francisco, the epidemic still on the lips of all, seethed with anti-
+Clarendon feeling. Actually the cases outside the penitentiary were very few, and
+confined almost wholly to the lower Mexican element whose lack of sanitation
+was a standing invitation to disease of every kind; but politicians and the people
+needed no more than this to confirm the attacks made by the doctor's enemies.
+Seeing that Dalton was immovable in his championship of Clarendon, the
+malcontents, medical dogmatists, and wardheelers turned their attention to the
+state legislature; lining up the anti-Clarendonists and the governor's old enemies
+with great shrewdness, and preparing to launch a law - with a veto-proof
+majority - transferring the authority for minor institutional appointments from
+the chief executive to the various boards or commissions concerned.
+
+In the furtherance of this measure no lobbyist was more active than Clarendon's
+chief successor. Dr. Jones. Jealous of his superior from the first, he now saw an
+opportunity for turning matters to his liking; and he thanked fate for the
+circumstance - responsible indeed for his present position - of his relationship to
+the chairman of the prison board. The new law, if passed, would certainly mean
+the removal of Clarendon and the appointment of himself in his stead; so,
+mindful of his own interest, he worked hard for it. Jones was all that Clarendon
+was not - a natural politician and sycophantic opportunist who served his own
+advancement first and science only incidentally. He was poor, and avid for
+salaried position, quite in contrast to the wealthy and independent savant he
+sought to displace. So with a rat-like cunning and persistence he laboured to
+undermine the great biologist above him, and was one day rewarded by the
+news that the new law was passed. Thenceforward the governor was powerless
+to make appointments to the state institutions, and the medical dictatorship of
+San Quentin lay at the disposal of the prison board.
+
+Of all this legislative turmoil Clarendon was singularly oblivious. Wrapped
+wholly in matters of administration and research, he was blind to the treason of
+'that ass Jones' who worked by his side, and deaf to all the gossip of the
+warden's office. He had never in his life read the newspapers, and the
+banishment of Dalton from his home cut off his last real link with the world of
+
+
+
+
+outside events. With the naivetA) A of a recluse, he at no time thought of his
+position as insecure. In view of Dalton's loyalty, and of his forgiveness of even
+the greatest wrongs, as shewn in his dealings with the elder Clarendon who had
+crushed his father to death on the stock exchange, the possibility of a
+gubernatorial dismissal was, of course, out of the question; nor could the doctor's
+political ignorance envisage a sudden shift of power which might place the
+matter of retention or dismissal in very different hands. Thereupon he merely
+smiled with satisfaction when Dalton left for Sacramento; convinced that his
+place in San Quentin and his sister's place in his household were alike secure
+from disturbance. He was accustomed to having what he wanted, and fancied
+his luck was still holding out.
+
+The first week in March, a day or so after the enactment of the new law, the
+chairman of the prison board called at San Quentin. Clarendon was out, but Dr.
+Jones was glad to shew the august visitor - his own uncle, incidentally - through
+the great infirmary, including the fever ward made so famous by press and
+panic. By this time converted against his will to Clarendon's belief in the fever's
+non-contagiousness, Jones smilingly assured his uncle that nothing was to be
+feared, and encouraged him to inspect the patients in detail - especially a ghastly
+skeleton, once a very giant of bulk and vigour, who was, he insinuated, slowly
+and painfully dying because Clarendon would not administer the proper
+medicine.
+
+"Do you mean to say," cried the chairman, "that Dr. Clarendon refuses to let the
+man have what he needs, knowing his life could be saved?"
+
+"Just that," snapped Dr. Jones, pausing as the door opened to admit none other
+than Clarendon himself. Clarendon nodded coldly to Jones and surveyed the
+visitor, whom he did not know, with disapproval.
+
+"Dr. Jones, I thought you knew this case was not to be disturbed at all. And
+haven't I said that visitors aren't to be admitted except by special permission?"
+
+But the chairman interrupted before his nephew could introduce him.
+
+"Pardon me. Dr. Clarendon, but am I to understand that you refuse to give this
+man the medicine that would save him?"
+
+Clarendon glared coldly, and rejoined with steel in his voice,
+
+"That's an impertinent question, sir. I am in authority here, and visitors are not
+allowed. Please leave the room at once."
+
+
+
+
+The chairman, his sense of drama secretly tickled, answered with greater pomp
+and hauteur than were necessary.
+
+"You mistake me, sir! I, not you, am master here. You are addressing the
+chairman of the prison board. I must say, however, that I deem your activity a
+menace to the welfare of the prisoners, and must request your resignation.
+Henceforth Dr. Jones will be in charge, and if you choose to remain until your
+formal dismissal you will take your orders from him."
+
+It was Wilfred Jones's great moment. Life never gave him another such climax,
+and we need not grudge him this one. After all, he was a small rather than a bad
+man, and he had only obeyed a small man's code of looking to himself at all
+costs. Clarendon stood still, gazing at the speaker as if he thought him mad, till
+in another second the look of triumph on Dr. Jones's face convinced him that
+something important was indeed afoot. He was icily courteous as he replied.
+
+"No doubt you are what you claim to be, sir. But fortunately my appointment
+came from the governor of the state, and can therefore be revoked only by him."
+
+The chairman and his nephew both stared perplexedly, for they had not realized
+to what lengths unworldly ignorance can go. Then the older man, grasping the
+situation, explained at some length.
+
+"Had I found that the current reports did you an injustice," he concluded, "I
+would have deferred action; but the case of this poor man and your own
+arrogant manner left me no choice. As it is - "
+
+But Dr. Clarendon interrupted with a new razor-sharpness in his voice.
+
+"As it is, I am the director in charge at present, and I ask you to leave this room
+at once."
+
+The chairman reddened and exploded.
+
+"Look here, sir, who do you think you're talking to? I'll have you chucked out of
+here - damn your impertinence!"
+
+But he had time only to finish the sentence. Transferred by the insult to a sudden
+dynamo of hate, the slender scientist launched out with both fists in a burst of
+preternatural strength of which no one would have thought him capable. And if
+his strength was preternatural, his accuracy of aim was no less so; for not even a
+champion of the ring could have wrought a neater result. Both men - the
+chairman and Dr. Jones - were squarely hit; the one full in the face and the other
+on the point of the chin. Going down like felled trees, they lay motionless and
+
+
+
+
+unconscious on the floor; while Clarendon, now clear and completely master of
+himself, took his hat and cane and went out to join Surama in the launch. Only
+when seated in the moving boat did he at last give audible vent to the frightful
+rage that consumed him. Then, with face convulsed, he called down
+imprecations from the stars and the gulfs beyond the stars; so that even Surama
+shuddered, made an elder sign that no book of history records, and forgot to
+chuckle.
+
+IV.
+
+Georgina soothed her brother's hurt as best she could. He had come home
+mentally and physically exhausted and thrown himself on the library lounge;
+and in that gloomy room, little by little, the faithful sister had taken in the almost
+incredible news. Her consolations were instantaneous and tender, and she made
+him realise how vast, though unconscious, a tribute to his greatness the attacks,
+persecution, and dismissal all were. He had tried to cultivate the indifference she
+preached, and could have done so had personal dignity alone been involved. But
+the loss of scientific opportunity was more than he could calmly bear, and he
+sighed again and again as he repeated how three months more of study in the
+prison might have given him at last the long-sought bacillus which would make
+all fever a thing of the past.
+
+Then Georgina tried another mode of cheering, and told him that surely the
+prison board would send for him again if the fever did not abate, or if it broke
+out with increased force. But even this was ineffective, and Clarendon answered
+only in a string of bitter, ironic, and half-meaningless little sentences whose tone
+shewed all too clearly how deeply despair and resentment had bitten.
+
+"Abate? Break out again? Oh, it'll abate all right! At least, they'll think it has
+abated. They'd think anything, no matter what happens! Ignorant eyes see
+nothing, and bunglers are never discovered. Science never shews her face to that
+sort. And they call themselves doctors! Best of all, fancy that ass Jones in charge!"
+
+Coming with a quick sneer, he laughed so daemonically that Georgina shivered.
+
+The days that followed were dismal ones indeed at the Clarendon mansion.
+Depression, stark and unrelieved, had taken hold of the doctor's usually tireless
+mind; and he would even have refused food had not Georgina forced it upon
+him. His great notebook of observations lay unopened on the library table, and
+his little gold syringe of anti-fever serum - a clever device of his own, with a self-
+contained reservoir, attached to a broad gold ring, and single-pressure action
+peculiar to itself - rested idly in a small leather case beside it. Vigour, ambition,
+and the desire for stuffy and observation seemed to have died within him; and
+
+
+
+
+he made no inquiries about his chnic, where hundreds of germ cultures stood in
+their orderly phials awaiting his attention.
+
+The countless animals held for experiments played, lively and well fed, in the
+early spring sunshine; and as Georgina strolled out through the rose-arbour to
+the cages she felt a strangely incongruous sense of happiness about her. She
+knew, though, how tragically transient that happiness must be; since the start of
+new work would soon make all these small creatures unwilling martyrs to
+science. Knowing this, she glimpsed a sort of compensating element in her
+brother's inaction, and encouraged him to keep on in a rest he needed so badly.
+The eight Thibetan servants moved noiselessly about, each as impeccable
+effective as usual; and Georgina saw to it that the order of the household did not
+suffer because of the master's relaxation.
+
+Study and starward ambition laid aside in slippered and dressing-gowned
+indifference. Clarendon was content to let Georgina treat him as an infant. He
+met her maternal fussiness with a slow, sad smile, and always obeyed her
+multitude of orders and precepts. A kind of faint, wistful felicity came over the
+languid household, amidst which the only dissenting note was supplied by
+Surama. He indeed was miserable, and looked often with sullen and resentful
+eyes at the sunny serenity in Georgina's face. His only joy had been the turmoil
+of experiment, and he missed the routine of seizing the fated animals, bearing
+them to the clinic in clutching talons, and watching them with hot brooding gaze
+and evil chuckles as they gradually fell into the final coma with wide-opened,
+red-rimmed eyes, and swollen tongue lolling from froth-covered mouth.
+
+Now he was seemingly driven to desperation by the sight of the carefree
+creatures in their cages, and frequently came to ask Clarendon if there were any
+orders. Finding the doctor apathetic and unwilling to begin work, he would go
+away muttering under his breath and glaring curses upon everything; stealing
+with cat-like tread to his own quarters in the basement, where his voice would
+sometimes ascend in deep, muffled rhythms of blasphemous strangeness and
+uncomfortable ritualistic suggestion.
+
+All this wore on Georgina's nerves, but not by any means so gravely as her
+brother's continued lassitude itself. The duration of the state alarmed her, and
+little by little she lost the air of cheerfulness which had so provoked the clinic-
+man. Herself skilled in medicine, she found the doctor's condition highly
+unsatisfactory from an alienist's point of view; and she now feared as much from
+his absence of interest and activity as she had formerly feared from his fanatical
+zeal and overstudy. Was lingering melancholy about to turn the once brilliant
+man of intellect into an innocuous imbecile?
+
+
+
+
+Then, toward the end of May, came the sudden change. Georgina always
+recalled the smallest details connected with it; details as trivial as the box
+delivered to Surama the day before, postmarked Algiers, and emitting a most
+unpleasant odour; and the sharp, sudden thunderstorm, rare in the extreme for
+California, which sprang up that night as Surama chanted his rituals behind his
+locked basement door in a droning chest-voice louder and more intense than
+usual.
+
+It was a sunny day, and she had been in the garden gathering flowers for the
+dining-room. Re-entering the house, she glimpsed her bother in the library, fully
+dressed and seated at the table, alternately consulting the notes in his thick
+observation book, and making fresh entries with brisk assured strokes of the pen.
+He was alert and vital, and there was a satisfying resilience about his movements
+as he now and then turned a page, or reached for a book from the rear of the
+great table. Delighted and relieved, Georgina hastened to deposit her flowers in
+the dining-room and returned; but when she reached the library again she found
+that her brother was gone.
+
+She knew, of course, that he must be in the clinic at work, and rejoiced to think
+that his old mind and purpose had snapped back into place. Realizing it would
+be of no use to delay the luncheon for him, she at alone and set aside a bite to be
+kept warm in case of his return at an odd moment. But he did not come. He was
+making up for lost time, and was still in the great stout-planked clinic when she
+went for a stroll through the rose-arbour.
+
+As she walked among the fragrant blossoms she saw Surama fetching animals
+for the test. She wished she could notice him less, for he always made her
+shudder; but her very dread had sharpened her eyes and ears where he was
+concerned. He always went hatless around the yard, and total hairlessness of his
+head enhanced his skeleton-like aspect horribly. Now she heard a faint chuckle
+as he took a small monkey from its cage against the wall and carried it to the
+clinic, his long, bony fingers pressing so cruelly into its furry sides that it cried
+out in frightened anguish. The sight sickened her, and brought her walk to an
+end. Her inmost soul rebelled at the ascendancy this creature had gained over
+her brother, and she reflected bitterly that the two had almost changed places as
+master and servant.
+
+Night came without Clarendon's return to the house, and Georgina concluded
+that he was absorbed in one of his very longest sessions, which meant total
+disregard of time. She hated to retire without a talk with him about his sudden
+recovery; but finally, feeling it would be futile to wait up, she wrote a cheerful
+note and propped it before his chair on the library table; then started resolutely
+for bed.
+
+
+
+
+She was not quite asleep when she heard the outer door open and shut. So it had
+not been an all night session after all! Determined to see that her brother had a
+meal before retiring she rose, slipped on a robe, and descended to the library,
+halting only when she heard voices from behind the half-opened door.
+Clarendon and Surama were talking, and she waited till the clinic-man might go.
+
+Surama, however, shewed no inclination to depart; and indeed, the whole heated
+tenor of the discourse seemed to bespeak absorption and promise length.
+Georgina, though she had not meant to listen, could not help catching a phrase
+now and then, and presently became aware of a sinister undercurrent which
+frightened her very much without being wholly clear to her. Her brother's voice,
+nervous, incisive, held her notice with disquieting persistence.
+
+"But anyway," he was saying, "we haven't enough animals for another day, and
+you know how hard it is to get a decent supply at short notice. It seems silly to
+waste so much effort on comparative trash when human specimens could be had
+with just a little extra care."
+
+Georgina sickened at the possible implication, and caught at the hall rack to
+steady herself. Surama was replying in that deep, hollow tone which seemed tOo
+echo with the evil of a thousand ages and a thousand planets.
+
+"Steady, steady - what a child you are with your haste and impatience! You
+crowd things so! When you've lived as I have, so that a whole life will seem only
+an hour, you won't be so fretful about a day or week or month! You work too
+fast. You've plenty of specimens in the cages for a full week if you'll only go at a
+sensible rate. You might even begin on the older material if you'd be sure not to
+overdo it."
+
+"Never mind my haste!" the reply was snapped out sharply. "I have my own
+methods. I don't want to use our material if I can help it, for I prefer them as they
+are. And you'd better be careful of them anyway - you know the knives some of
+those sly dogs carry."
+
+Surama's deep chuckle came.
+
+"Don't worry about that. The brutes eat, don't they? Well, I can get you one any
+time you need it. But go slow - with the boy gone, there are only eight, and now
+that you've lost San Quentin it'll be hard to get new ones by the wholesale. I'd
+advise you to start in on Tsanpo - he's the least use to you as he is, and - "
+
+But that was all Georgina heard. Transfixed by a hideous dread from the
+thoughts this talk excited, she nearly sank to the floor where she stood, and was
+
+
+
+
+scarcely able to drag herself up the stairs and into her room. What was the evil
+monster Surama planning? Into what was he guiding her brother? What
+monstrous circumstances lay behind these cryptic sentences? A thousand
+phantoms of darkness and menace danced before her eyes, and she flung herself
+upon the bed without hope of sleep. One thought above the rest stood out with
+fiendish prominence, and she almost screamed aloud as it beat itself into her
+brain with renewed force. Then Nature, kinder than she expected, intervened at
+last. Closing her eyes in a dead faint, she did not awake till morning, nor did any
+fresh nightmare come to join the lasting one which the overheard words had
+brought.
+
+With the morning sunshine came a lessening of the tension. What happens in the
+night when one is tired often reaches the consciousness in distorted forms, and
+Georgina could see that her brain must have given strange colour to scraps of
+common medical conversation. To suppose her brother - only son of the gentle
+Frances Schuyler Clarendon - guilty of strange sacrifices in the name of science
+would be to do an injustice to their blood, and she decided to omit all mention of
+her trip downstairs, lest Alfred ridicule her fantastic notions.
+
+When she reached the breakfast table she found that Clarendon was already
+gone, and regretted that not even this second morning had given her a chance to
+congratulate him on his revived activity. Quietly taking the breakfast served by
+stone-deaf old Margarita, the Mexican cook, she read the morning paper and
+seated herself with some needlework by the sitting-room window overlooking
+the great yard. All was silent out there, and she could see that the last of the
+animal cages had been emptied. Science was served, and the lime-pit held all that
+was left of the once pretty and lively little creatures. This slaughter had always
+grieved her, but she had never complained, since she knew it was all for
+humanity. Being a scientist's sister, she used to say to herself, was like being the
+sister of a soldier who kills to save his countrymen from their foes.
+
+After luncheon Georgina resumed her post by the window, and had been busy
+sewing for some time when the sound of a pistol shot from the yard caused her
+to look out in alarm. There, not far from the clinic, she saw the ghastly form of
+Surama, a revolver in his hand, and his skull-face twisted into a strange
+expression as he chuckled at a cowering figure robed in black silk and carrying a
+long Thibetan knife. It was the servant Tsanpo, and as she recognised the
+shrivelled face Georgina remembered horribly what she had overheard the night
+before. The sun flashed on the polished blade, and suddenly Surama's revolver
+spat once more. This time the knife flew from the Mongol's hand, and Surama
+glanced greedily at his shaking and bewildered prey.
+
+
+
+
+Then Tsanpo, glancing quickly at his unhurt hand and at the fallen knife, sprang
+nimbly away from the stealthily approaching clinic-man and made a dash for the
+house. Surama, however, was too swift for him, and caught him in a single leap,
+seizing his shoulder and almost crushing him. For a moment the Thibetan tried
+to struggle, but Surama lifted him like an animal by the scruff of the neck and
+bore him off toward the clinic. Georgina heard him chuckling and taunting the
+man in his own tongue, and saw the yellow face of the victim twist and quiver
+with fright. Suddenly realising against her own will what was taking place, a
+great horror mastered her and she fainted for the second time within twenty-four
+hours.
+
+When consciousness returned, the golden light of late afternoon was flooding the
+room. Georgina, picking up her fallen work-basket and scattered materials, was
+lost in a daze of doubts; but finally felt convinced that the scene which had
+overcome her must have been all too tragically real. Her first fears, then, were
+horrible truths. What to do about it, nothing in her experience could tell her; and
+she was vaguely thankful that her brother did not appear. She must talk to him,
+but not now. She could not talk to anybody now. And, thinking shudderingly of
+the monstrous happening behind those barred clinic windows, she crept into bed
+for a long night of anguished sleeplessness.
+
+Rising haggardly on the following day, Georgina saw the doctor for the first time
+since his recovery. He was bustling about preoccupiedly, circulating between the
+house and the clinic, and paying little attention to anything besides his work.
+There was no chance for the dreaded interview, and Clarendon did not even
+notice his sister's worn-out aspect and hesitant manner.
+
+In the evening she heard him in the library, talking to himself in a fashion most
+unusual for him, and she felt that he was under a great strain which might
+culminate in the return of his apathy. Entering the room, she tried to clam him
+without referring to any trying subject, and forced a steadying cup of bouillon
+upon him. Finally she asked gently what was distressing him, and waited
+anxiously for his reply, hoping to hear that Surama's treatment of the poor
+Thibetan had horrified and outraged him.
+
+There was a note of fretfulness in his voice as he responded.
+
+"What's distressing me? Good God, Georgina, what isn't? Look at the cages and
+see if you have to ask again! Cleaned out - milked dry - not a cursed specimen
+left; and a line of the most important bacterial cultures incubating in their tubes
+without a chance to do an ounce of good! Days' work wasted - whole
+programme set back - it's enough to drive a man mad! How shall I ever get
+anywhere if I can't scrape up some decent subjects?"
+
+
+
+
+Georgina stroked his forehead.
+
+"I think you ought to rest a while, Al dear."
+
+He moved away.
+
+"Rest? That's good! That's damn good! What else have I been doing but resting
+and vegetating and staring blankly into space for the last fifty or a hundred or a
+thousand years? Just as I manage to shake off the clouds, I have to run short of
+material - and then I'm told to lapse back again into drooling stupefaction! God!
+And all the while some sneaking thief is probably working with my data and
+getting ready to come out ahead of me with the credit for my own work. I'll lose
+by a neck - some fool with the proper specimens will get the prize, when one
+week more with even half-adequate facilities would see me through with flying
+colours!"
+
+His voice rose querulously, and there was an overtone of mental strain which
+Georgina did not like. She answered softly, yet not so softly as to hint at the
+soothing of a psychopathic case.
+
+"But you're killing yourself with this worry and tension, and if you're dead, how
+can you do your work?"
+
+He gave a smile that was almost a sneer.
+
+"I guess a week or a month - all the time I need - wouldn't quite finish me, and it
+doesn't much matter what becomes of me or any other individual in the end.
+Science is what must be served - science - the austere cause of human knowledge.
+I'm like the monkeys and birds and guinea pigs I use - just a cog in the machine,
+to be used to the advantage of the whole. They had to be killed - 1 may have to be
+killed - what of it? Isn't the cause we serve worth that and more?"
+
+Georgina sighed. For a moment she wondered whether, after all, this ceaseless
+round of slaughter really was worthwhile.
+
+"But are you absolutely sure your discovery will be enough of a boon to
+humanity to warrant these sacrifices?"
+
+Clarendon's eyes flashed dangerously.
+
+"Humanity! What the deuce is humanity? Science! Dolts! Just individuals over
+and over again! Humanity is made for preachers to whom it means the blindly
+credulous. Humanity is made for the predatory rich to whom it speaks in terms
+of dollars and cents. Humanity is made for the politician to whom it signifies
+
+
+
+
+collective power to be used to his advantage. What is humanity? Nothing! Thank
+God that crude illusion doesn't last! What a grown man worships is truth -
+knowledge - science - light - the rending of the veil and the pushing back of the
+shadow. Knowledge, the juggernaut! There is death in our own ritual. We must
+kill - dissect - destroy - and all for the sake of discovery - the worship of the
+ineffable light. The goddess Science demands it. We test a doubtful poison by
+killing. How else? No thought for self - just knowledge - the effect must be
+known."
+
+His voice trailed off in a kind of temporary exhaustion, and Georgina shuddered
+slightly.
+
+"But this is horrible, Al! You shouldn't think of it that way!"
+
+Clarendon cackled sardonically, in a manner which stirred odd and repugnant
+associations in his sister's mind.
+
+"Horrible? You think what I say is horrible? You ought to hear Surama! I tell you,
+things were known to the priests of Atlantis that would have you drop dead of
+fright if you heard a hint of them. Knowledge was knowledge a hundred
+thousand years ago, when our especial forbears were shambling about Asia as
+speechless semi-apes! They know something of it in the Hoggar region - there are
+rumours in the farther uplands of Thibet - and once I heard an old man in China
+calling on Yog-Sothoth - "
+
+He turned pale, and made a curious sign in the air with his extended forefinger.
+Georgina felt genuinely alarmed, but became somewhat calmer as his speech
+took a less fantastic form.
+
+"Yes, it may be horrible, but it's glorious too. The pursuit of knowledge, I mean.
+Certainly, there's no slovenly sentiment connected with it. Doesn't Nature kill -
+constantly and remorselessly - and are any but fools horrified at the struggle?
+Killings are necessary. They are the glory of science. We learn something from
+them, and we can't sacrifice learning to sentiment. Hear the sentimentalities howl
+against vaccination! They fear it will kill the child. Well, what if it does? How
+else can we discover the laws of disease concerned? As a scientist's sister you
+ought to know better that to praise sentiment. You ought to help my work
+instead of hindering it!"
+
+"But, Al," protested Georgina, "I haven't the slightest intention of hindering your
+work. Haven't I always tried to help as much as I could? I am ignorant, I
+suppose, and can't help very actively; but at least I'm proud of you - proud for
+
+
+
+
+my own sake and for the family's sake - and I've always tried to smooth the way.
+You've given me credit for that many a time."
+
+Clarendon looked at her keenly.
+
+"Yes," he said jerkily as he rose and strode from the room, "you're right. You've
+always tried to help as best you know. You may have yet a chance to help still
+more."
+
+Georgina, seeing him disappear through the front door, followed him into the
+yard. Some distance away a lantern was shining through the trees, and as they
+approached it they saw Surama bending over a large object stretched on the
+ground. Clarendon, advancing, gave a short grunt; but when Georgina saw what
+it was she rushed up with a shriek. It was Dick, the great St. Bernard, and he was
+lying still with reddened eyes and protruding tongue.
+
+"He's sick, Al!" she cried. "Do something for him, quick!"
+
+The doctor looked at Surama, who had uttered something in a tongue unknown
+to Georgina.
+
+"Take him to the clinic," he ordered; "I'm afraid Dick's caught the fever."
+
+Surama took up the dog as he had taken poor Tsanpo the day before, and carried
+him silently to the building near the mall. He did not chuckle this time, but
+glanced at Clarendon with what appeared to be real anxiety. It almost seemed to
+Georgina that Surama was asking the doctor to save her pet.
+
+Clarendon, however, made no move to follow, but stood still for a moment and
+then sauntered slowly toward the house. Georgina, astonished at such
+callousness, kept up a running fire of entreaties on Dick's behalf, but it was of no
+use. Without paying the slightest attention to her pleas he made directly for the
+library and began to read in a large old book which had lain face down on the
+table. She put her hand on his shoulder as he sat there, but he did not speak or
+turn his head. He only kept on reading, and Georgina, glancing curiously over
+his shoulder, wondered in what strange alphabet this brass-bound tome was
+written.
+
+In the cavernous parlour across the hall, sitting alone in the dark a quarter of an
+hour later, Georgina came to her decision. Something was gravely wrong - just
+what, and to what extent, she scarcely dared formulate to herself - and it was
+time that she called in some stronger force to help her. Of course it must be
+James. He was powerful and capable, and his sympathy and affection would
+
+
+
+
+shew him the right thing to do. He had known Al always, and would
+understand.
+
+It was by this time rather late, but Georgina had resolved on action. Across the
+hall the light still shone from the library, and she looked wistfully at the doorway
+as she quietly donned a hat and left the house. Outside the gloomy mansion and
+forbidding grounds, it was only a short way to Jackson Street, where by good
+luck she found a carriage to take her to the Western Union telegraph office. There
+she carefully wrote out a message to James Dalton in Sacramento, asking him to
+come at once to San Francisco on a matter of the greatest importance to them all.
+
+V.
+
+Dalton was frankly perplexed by Georgina's sudden message. He had had no
+word from the Clarendons since that stormy February evening when Alfred had
+declared him an outsider to his home; and he in turn had studiously refrained
+from communicating, even when he had longed to express sympathy after the
+doctor's summary outing from office. He had fought hard to frustrate the
+politicians and keep the appointee power, and was bitterly sorry to watch the
+unseating of a man who, despite recent estrangements, still represented to him
+the ultimate ideal of scientific competence.
+
+Now, with this clearly frightened summons before him, he could not imagine
+what had happened. He knew, though, that Georgina was not one to lose her
+head or send forth a needless alarm; hence he wasted no time, but took the
+Overland which left Sacramento within the hour, going at once to his club and
+sending word to Georgina by a messenger that he was in town and wholly at her
+service.
+
+Meanwhile things had been quiescent at the Clarendon home, notwithstanding
+the doctor's continued taciturnity and his absolute refusal to report on the dog's
+condition. Shadows of evil seemed omnipresent and thickening, but for the
+moment there was a lull. Georgina was relieved to get Dalton's message and
+learn that he was close at hand, and sent back word that she would call him
+when necessity arose. Amidst all the gathering tension some faint compensating
+element seemed manifest, and Georgina finally decided that it was the absence of
+the lean Thibetans, whose stealthy, sinuous ways and disturbing exotic aspect
+had always annoyed her. They had vanished all at once; and old Margarita, the
+sole visible servant left in the house, told her they were helping their master and
+Surama at the clinic.
+
+The following morning - the twenty-eighth of May - long to be remembered -
+was dark and lowering, and Georgina felt the precarious calm wearing thin. She
+
+
+
+
+did not see her brother at all, but knew he was in the clinic hard at work at
+something despite the lack of specimens he had bewailed. She wondered how
+poor Tsanpo was getting along, and whether he had really been subjected to any
+serious inoculation, but it must be confessed that she wondered more about
+Dick. She longed to know whether Surama had done anything for the faithful
+dog amidst his master's oddly callous indifference. Surama's apparent solicitude
+on the night of Dick's seizure had impressed her greatly, giving her perhaps the
+kindliest feeling she had ever had for the detested clinic-man. Now, as the day
+advanced, she found herself thinking more and more of Dick; till at last her
+harassed nerves, finding in this one detail a sort of symbolic summation of the
+whole horror that lay upon the household, could stand the suspense no longer.
+
+Up to that time she had always respected Al's imperious wish that he be never
+approached or disturbed at the clinic; but as this fateful afternoon advanced, her
+resolution to break through the barrier grew stronger and stronger. Finally she
+set out with determined face, crossing the yard and entering the unlocked
+vestibule of the forbidden structure with the fixed intention of discovering how
+the dog was or of knowing the reason for her brother's secrecy.
+
+The inner door, as usual, was locked; and behind it she heard voices in heated
+conversation. When her knocking brought no response she rattled the knob as
+loudly as possible, but still the voices argued on unheeding. They belonged, of
+course, to Surama and her brother; and as she stood there trying to attract
+attention she could not help catch something of their drift. Fate had made her for
+the second time an eavesdropper, and once more the matter she overheard
+seemed likely to tax her mental poise and nervous endurance to their ultimate
+bounds. Alfred and Surama were plainly quarrelling with increasing violence,
+and the purport of their speech was enough to arouse the wildest fears and
+confirm the gravest apprehensions. Georgina shivered as her brother's voice
+mounted shrilly to dangerous heights of fanatical tension.
+
+"You, damn you - you're a fine one to talk defeat and moderation to me! Who
+started all this, anyway? Did I have any idea of your cursed devil-gods and elder
+world? Did I ever in my life think of your damned spaces beyond the stars and
+your crawling chaos Nyarlathotep? I was a normal scientific man, confound you,
+till I was fool enough to drag you out of the vaults with your devilish Atlantean
+secrets. You egged me on, and now you want to cut me off! You loaf around
+doing nothing and telling me to go slow when you might just as well as not be
+going out and getting material. You know damn well that I don't know hot to go
+about such things, whereas you must have been an old hand at it before the earth
+was made. It's like you, you damned walking corpse, to start something you
+won't or can't finish!"
+
+
+
+
+Surama's evil chuckle came.
+
+"You're insane. Clarendon. That's the only reason I let you rave on when I could
+send you to hell in three minutes. Enough is enough, and you've certainly had
+enough material for any novice at your stage. You've had all I'm going to get
+you, anyhow! You're only a maniac on the subject now - what a cheap, crazy
+thing to sacrifice even your poor sister's pet dog, when you could have spared
+him as well as not! You can't look at any living thing without wanting to jab that
+gold syringe into it. No - Dick had to go where the Mexican boy went - where
+Tsanpo and the other seven went - where all the animals went! What a pupil!
+You're no fun any more - you've lost your nerve. You set out to control things,
+and they're controlling you. I'm about done with you. Clarendon. I thought you
+had the stuff in you, but you haven't. It's about time I tried somebody else. I'm
+afraid you'll have to go!"
+
+In the doctor's shouted reply there was both fear and frenzy.
+
+"Be careful, you - - ! There are powers against your powers - I didn't go to China
+for nothing, and there are things in Alhazred's Azif which weren't known in
+Atlantis! We've both meddled in dangerous things, but you needn't think you
+know all my resources. How about the Nemesis of Flame? I talked in Yemen
+with an old man who had come back alive from the Crimson Desert - he had
+seen Irem, the City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of
+Nug and Yeb - la! Shub-Niggurath!"
+
+Through Clarendon's shrieking falsetto cut the deep chuckle of the clinic-man.
+
+"Shut up, you fool! Do you suppose your grotesque nonsense has any weight
+with me? Words and formulae - words and formulae - what do they all mean to
+one who has the substance behind them? We're in a material sphere now, and
+subject to material laws. You have your fever; I have my revolver. You'll get no
+specimens and I'll get no fever so long as I have you in front of me with this gun
+between!"
+
+That was all Georgina could hear. She felt her senses reeling, and staggered out
+of the vestibule for a saving breath of the lowering outside air. She that the crisis
+had come at last, and that help must now arrive quickly if her brother was to be
+saved from the unknown gulfs of madness and mystery. Summoning up all her
+reserve energy, she managed to reach the house and get to the library, where she
+scrawled a hasty note for Margarita to take to James Dalton.
+
+When the old woman had gone, Georgina had just strength enough to cross to
+the lounge and sink weakly down into a sort of semi-stupor. There she lay for
+
+
+
+
+what seemed like years, conscious only of the fantastic creeping up of the
+twilight from the lower corners of the great, dismal room, and plagued by a
+thousand shadowy shapes of terror which filed with phantasmal, half-limned
+pageantry through her tortured and stifled brain. Dusk deepened into darkness,
+and still the spell held. Then a firm tread sounded in the hall, and she heard
+someone enter the room and fumble at the match-safe. Her heart almost stopped
+beating as the gas-jets of the chandelier flared up one by one, but then she saw
+that the arrival was her brother. Relieved to the bottom of her heart that he was
+still alive, she gave vent to an involuntary sigh, profound, long-drawn, and
+tremulous, and lapsed at last into kindly oblivion.
+
+At the sound of that sigh Clarendon turned in alarm toward the lounge, and was
+inexpressibly shocked to see the pale and unconscious form of his sister there.
+Her face had a death-like quality that frightened his inmost spirit, and he flung
+himself on his knees by her side, awake to a realisation of what her passing away
+would mean to him. Long unused to private practice amidst his ceaseless quest
+for truth, he had lost the physician's instinct of first aid, and could only call out
+her name and chafe her wrists mechanically as fear and grief possessed him.
+Then he thought of water, and ran to the dining-room for a carafe. Stumbling
+about in a darkness which seemed to harbour vague terrors, he was some time in
+finding what he sought; but at last he clutched it in shaking hand and hastened
+back to dash the cold fluid in Georgina's face. The method was crude but
+effective. She stirred, sighed a second time, and finally opened her eyes.
+
+"You are alive!" he cried, and put his cheek to hers as she stroked his head
+maternally. She was almost glad she fainted, for the circumstance seemed to
+have dispelled the strange Alfred and brought her own brother back to her. She
+sat up slowly and tried to reassure him.
+
+"I'm all right, Al. just give me a glass of water. It's a sin to waste it this way - to
+say nothing of spoiling my waist! Is that the way to behave every time your sister
+drops off for a nap? You needn't think I'm going to be sick, for I haven't time for
+such nonsense!"
+
+Alfred's eyes shewed that her cool, common-sense speech had had its effect. His
+brotherly panic dissolved in an instant, and instead there came into his face a
+vague, calculating expression, as if some marvellous possibility had just dawned
+upon him. As she watched the subtle waves of cunning and appraisal pass
+fleetingly over his countenance she became less and less certain that her mode of
+reassurance had been a wise one, and before he spoke she found herself
+shivering at something she could not define. A keen medical instinct almost told
+her that his moment of sanity had passed, and that he was now once more the
+unrestrained fanatic for scientific research. There was something morbid in the
+
+
+
+
+quick narrowing of his eyes at her casual mention of good heahh. What was he
+thinking? To what unnatural extreme was his passion for experiment about to be
+pushed? Wherein lay the special significance of her pure blood and absolutely
+flawless organic state? None of these misgivings, however, troubled Georgina for
+more than a second, and she was quite natural and unsuspicious as she felt her
+brother's steady fingers at her pulse.
+
+"You're a bit feverish, Georgina," he said in a precise, elaborately restrained
+voice as he looked professionally into her eyes.
+
+"Why, nonsense, I'm all right," she replied. "One would think you were on the
+watch for fever patients just for the sake of showing off your discovery! It would
+be poetic, though, if you could your final proof and demonstration by curing
+your own sister!"
+
+Clarendon started violently and guiltily. Had she suspected his wish? Had he
+muttered anything aloud? He looked at her closely, and saw that she had no
+inkling of the truth. She smiled up sweetly into his face and patted his hand as he
+stood by the side of the lounge. Then he took a small oblong leather case from his
+vest pocket, and taking out a little gold syringe, he began fingering it
+thoughtfully, pushing the piston speculatively in and out of the empty cylinder.
+
+"I wonder," he began with suave sententiousness, "whether you would really be
+willing to help science in - something like that way - if the need arose? Whether
+you would have the devotion to offer yourself to the cause of medicine as a sort
+of Jephthah's daughter if you knew it meant the absolute perfection and
+completion of my work?"
+
+Georgina, catching the odd and unmistakable glitter in her brother's eyes, knew
+at last that her worst fears were true. There was nothing to now but keep him
+quiet at all hazards and to pray that Margarita had found James Dalton at his
+club.
+
+"You look tired, Al dear," she said gently. "Why not take a little morphia and get
+some of the sleep you need so badly?"
+
+He replied with a kind of crafty deliberation.
+
+"Yes, you're right. I'm worn out, and so are you. Each of us needs a good sleep.
+Morphine is just the thing - wait till I go and fill the syringe and we'll both take a
+proper dose."
+
+Still fingering the empty syringe, he walked softly out of the room. Georgina
+looked about her with the aimlessness of desperation, ears alert for any sign of
+
+
+
+
+possible help. She thought she heard Margarita again in the basement kitchen,
+and rose to ring the bell, in an effort to learn of the fate of her message. The old
+servant answered her summons at once, and declared she had given the message
+at the club hours ago. Governor Dalton had been out, but the clerk had promised
+to deliver the note at the very moment of his arrival.
+
+Margarita waddled below stairs again, but still Clarendon did not reappear.
+What was he doing? What was he planning? She had heard the outer door slam,
+so knew he must be at the clinic. Had he forgotten his original intention with the
+vacillating mind of madness? The suspense grew almost unbearable, and
+Georgina had to keep her teeth clenched tightly to avoid screaming.
+
+It was the gate bell, which rang simultaneously in house and clinic, that broke
+the tension at last. She heard the cat-like tread of Surama on the walk as he left
+the clinic to answer it; and the, with an almost hysterical sigh, she caught the
+firm, familiar accents of Dalton in conversation with the sinister attendant.
+Rising, she almost tottered to meet him as he loomed up in the library doorway;
+and for a moment no word was spoken while he kissed her hand in his courtly,
+old school fashion. Then Georgina burst forth into a torrent of hurried
+explanation, telling all that had happened, all she had glimpsed and overheard,
+and all she feared and suspected.
+
+Dalton listened gravely and comprehendingly, his first bewilderment gradually
+giving place to astonishment, sympathy, and resolution. The message, held by a
+careless clerk, had been slightly delayed, and had found him appropriately
+enough in the midst of a warm lounging-room discussion about Clarendon. A
+fellow-member. Dr. MacNeil, had brought in a medical journal with an article
+well calculated to disturb the devoted scientist, and Dalton had just asked to
+keep the paper for future reference when the message was handed him at last.
+Abandoning his half-formed plan to take Dr. MacNeil into his confidence
+regarding Alfred, he called at once for his hat and stick, and lost not a moment in
+getting a cab for the Clarendon home.
+
+Surama, he thought, appeared alarmed at recognising him; though he had
+chuckled as usual when striding off again toward the clinic. Dalton always
+recalled Surama's stride and chuckle on this ominous night, for he was never to
+see the unearthly creature again. As the chuckler entered the clinic vestibule his
+deep, guttural gurgles seemed to blend with some low mutterings of thunder
+which troubled the far horizon.
+
+When Dalton had heard all Georgina had to say, and learned that Alfred was
+expected back at any moment with an hypodermic dose of morphine, he decided
+he had better talk with the doctor alone. Advising Georgina to retire to her room
+
+
+
+
+and await developments, he walked about the gloomy library, scanning the
+shelves and listening for Clarendon's nervous footstep on the clinic path outside.
+The vast room's corners were dismal despite the chandelier, and the closer
+Dalton looked at his friend's choice of books the less he liked them. It was not the
+balanced collection of a normal physician, biologist, or man of general culture.
+There were too many volumes on doubtful borderland themes; dark speculations
+and forbidden rituals of the Middle Ages, and strange exotic mysteries in alien
+alphabets both known and unknown.
+
+The great notebook of observations on the table was unwholesome, too. The
+handwriting had a neurotic cast, and the spirit of the entries was far from
+reassuring. Long passages were inscribed in crabbed Greek characters, and as
+Dalton marshaled his linguistic memory for their translation he gave a sudden
+start, and wished his college struggles with Xenophon and Homer had been
+more conscientious. There was something wrong - something hideously wrong -
+here, and the governor sank limply into the chair by the table as he pored more
+and more closely over the doctor's barbarous Greek. Then a sound came,
+startlingly near, and he jumped nervously at a hand laid sharply on his shoulder.
+
+"What, may I ask, is the cause of this intrusion? You might have stated your
+business to Surama."
+
+Clarendon was standing icily by the chair, the little gold syringe in one hand. He
+seemed very calm and rational, and Dalton fancied for a moment that Georgina
+must have exaggerated his condition. How, too, could a rusty scholar be
+absolutely sure about these Greek entries? The governor decided to be very
+cautious in his interview, and thanked the lucky chance which had a specious
+pretext in his coat pocket. He was very cool and assured as he rose to reply.
+
+"I didn't think you'd care to have things dragged before a subordinate, but I
+thought you ought to see this article at once."
+
+He drew forth the magazine given him by Dr. MacNeil and handed it to
+Clarendon.
+
+"On page 542 - you see the heading, 'Black Fever Conquered by New Serum.' It's
+by Dr. Miller of Philadelphia - and he thinks he's got ahead of you with your
+cure. They were discussing it at the club, and MacNeil thought the exposition
+very convincing. I, as a layman, couldn't pretend to judge; but at all events I
+thought you oughtn't to miss a chance to digest the thing while it's fresh. If
+you're busy, of course, I won't disturb you - "
+
+Clarendon cut in sharply.
+
+
+
+
+"I'm going to give my sister an hypodermic - she's not quite well - but I'll look at
+what that quack has to say when I get back. I know Miller - a damn sneak and
+incompetent - and I don't believe he has the brains to steal my methods from the
+little he's seen of them."
+
+Dalton suddenly felt a wave of intuition warning him that Georgina must not
+receive that intended dose. There was something sinister about it. From what she
+had said, Alfred must have been inordinately long preparing it, far longer than
+was needed for the dissolving of a morphine tablet. He decided to hold his host
+as long as possible, meanwhile testing his attitude in a more or less subtle way.
+
+"I'm sorry Georgina isn't well. Are you sure that the injection will do her good?
+That it won't do her any harm?"
+
+Clarendon's spasmodic start shewed that something had been struck home.
+
+"Do her harm?" he cried. "Don't be absurd! You know Georgina must be in the
+best of health - the very best, I say - in order to serve science as a Clarendon
+should serve it. She, at least, appreciates the fact that she is my sister. She deems
+no sacrifice too great in my service. She is a priestess of truth and discovery, as I
+am a priest."
+
+He paused in his shrill tirade, wild-eyed, and somewhat out of breath. Dalton
+could see that his attention had been momentarily shifted.
+
+"But let me see what this cursed quack has to say," he continued. "If he thinks
+his pseudo-medical rhetoric can take a real doctor in, he is even simpler than I
+thought!"
+
+Clarendon nervously found the right page and began reading as he stood there
+clutching his syringe. Dalton wondered what the real facts were. MacNeil had
+assured him that the author was a pathologist of the highest standing, and that
+whatever errors the article might have, the mind behind it was powerful, erudite,
+and absolutely honourable and sincere.
+
+Watching the doctor as he read, Dalton saw the thin, bearded face grow pale. The
+great eyes blazed, and the pages crackled in the tenser grip of the long, lean
+fingers. A perspiration broke out on the high, ivory- white forehead where the
+hair was already thinning, and the reader sank gaspingly into the chair his visitor
+had vacated as he kept on with his devouring of the tract. Then came a wild
+scream as from a haunted beast, and Clarendon lurched forward on the table, his
+outflung arms sweeping books and paper before them as consciousness went out
+like a wind-quenched candle-flame.
+
+
+
+
+Dalton, springing to help his stricken friend, raised the sHm form and tihed it
+back in the chair. Seeing the carafe on the floor near the lounge, he dashed some
+water into the twisted face, and was rewarded by seeing the large eyes slowly
+open. They were sane eyes now - deep and sad and unmistakably sane - and
+Dalton felt awed in the presence of a tragedy whose ultimate depth he could
+never hope or dare to plumb.
+
+The golden hypodermic was still clutched in the lean left hand, and as Clarendon
+drew a deep, shuddering breath he unclosed his fingers and studied the
+glittering thing that rolled about on his palm. Then he spoke - slowly, and with
+the ineffable sadness of utter, absolute despair.
+
+"Thanks, Jimmy, I'm quite all right. But there's much to be done. You asked me a
+while back if this shot of morphia would do Georgie any harm. I'm in a position
+now to tell you that it won't."
+
+He turned a small screw in the syringe and laid a finger on the piston, at the
+same time pulling with his left hand at the skin of his own neck. Dalton cried out
+in alarm as a lightning motion of his right hand injected the contents of the
+cylinder into the ridge of distended flesh.
+
+"Good Lord, Al, what have you done?"
+
+Clarendon smiled gently - a smile almost of peace and resignation, different
+indeed from the sardonic sneer of the past few weeks.
+
+"You ought to know, Jimmy, if you've still the judgment that made you a
+governor. You must have pieced together enough from my notes to realise that
+there's nothing else to do. With your marks in Greek back at Columbia I guess
+you couldn't have missed much. All I can say is that it's true.
+
+"James, I don't like to pass blame along, but it's only right to tell you that Surama
+got me into this. I can't tell you who or what he is, for I don't fully know myself,
+and what I do know is stuff that no sane person ought to know; but I will say
+that I don't consider him a human being in the fullest sense, and that I'm not sure
+whether or not he's alive as we know life.
+
+"You think I'm talking nonsense. I wish I were, but the whole hideous mess is
+damnably real. I started out in life with a clean mind and purpose. I wanted to
+rid the world of fever. I tried and failed - and I wish to God I had been honest
+enough to say that I'd failed. Don't let my old talk of science deceive you, James -
+I found no antitoxin and was never even half on the track of one!
+
+
+
+
+"Don't look so shaken up, old fellow! A veteran politician-fighter like you must
+have seen plenty of unmaskings before. I tell you, I never even had the start of a
+fever cure. But my studies had taken me into some queer places, and it was just
+my damned luck to listen to the stories of some still queerer people. James, if you
+ever wish any man well, tell him to keep clear of the ancient, hidden places of the
+earth. Old backwaters are dangerous - things are handed down there that don't
+do healthy people any good. I talked too much with old priests and mystics, and
+got to hoping I might achieve things in dark ways that I couldn't achieve in
+lawful ways.
+
+"I shan't tell you just what I mean, for if I did I'd be as bad as the old priests that
+were the ruin of me. All I need say is that after what I've learned I shudder at the
+thought of the world and what it's been through. The world is cursed old, James,
+and there have been whole chapters lived and closed before the dawn of our
+organic life and the geologic eras connected with it. It's an awful thought - whole
+forgotten cycles of evolution with beings and races and wisdom and diseases - all
+lived through and gone before the first amoeba ever stirred in the tropic seas
+geology tells us about.
+
+"I said gone, but I didn't quite mean that. It would have been better that way, but
+it wasn't quite so. In places traditions have kept on - I can't tell you how - and
+certain archaic life-forms have managed to struggle thinly down the aeons in
+hidden spots. There were cults, you know - bands of evil priests in lands now
+buried under the sea. Atlantis was the hotbed. That was a terrible place. If
+heaven is merciful, no one will ever drag up that horror from the deep.
+
+"It had a colony, though, that didn't sink; and when you get too confidential
+with one of the Tuareg priests in Africa, he's likely to tell you wild tales about it -
+tales that connect up with whispers you'll hear among the mad lamas and flighty
+yak-drivers on the secret table-lands of Asia. I'd heard all the common tales and
+whispers when I came on the big one. What that was, you'll never know - but it
+pertained to somebody or something that had come down from a blasphemously
+long time ago, and could be made to live again - or seem alive again - through
+certain processes that weren't very clear to the man who told me.
+
+"Now, James, in spite of my confessions about the fever, you know I'm not bad
+as a doctor. I plugged hard at medicine, and soaked up about as much as the next
+man - maybe a little more, because down there in the Hoggar country I did
+something no priest had ever been able to do. They led me blindfolded to a place
+that had been sealed up for generations - and I came back with Surama.
+
+"Easy, James! I know what you want to say. How does he know all he knows? -
+why does he speak English - or any other language, for that matter - without an
+
+
+
+
+accent? - why did he come away with me? - and all that. I can't tell you
+altogether, but I can say that he takes in ideas and images and impressions with
+something besides his brains and senses. He had a use for me and my science. He
+told me things, and opened up vistas. He taught me to worship ancient,
+primordial, and unholy gods, and mapped out a road to a terrible goal which I
+can't even hint to you. Don't press me, James - it's for the sake of your sanity and
+the world's sanity!
+
+"The creature is beyond all bounds. He's in league with the stars and all the
+forces of Nature. Don't think I'm still crazy, James - I swear to you I'm not! I've
+had too many glimpses to doubt. He gave me new pleasures that were forms of
+his palaeogean worship, and the greatest of those was the black fever.
+
+"God, James! Haven't you seen through the business by this time? Do you still
+believe the black fever came out of Thibet, and that I learned about it there? Use
+your brains, man! Look at Miller's article here! He's found a basic antitoxin that
+will end all fever within half a century, when other men learn how to modify it
+for the different forms. He's cut the ground of my youth from under me - done
+what I'd have given my life to do - taken the wind out of all the honest sails I
+ever flung to the breeze of science! Do you wonder his article gave me a turn? Do
+you wonder it shocks me out of my madness back to the old dreams of my
+youth? Too late! Too late! But not too late to save others!
+
+"I guess I'm rambling a bit now, old man. You know - the hypodermic. I asked
+you why you didn't tumble to the facts about black fever. How could you,
+though? Doesn't Miller say he's cured seven cases with his serum? A matter of
+diagnosis, James. He only thinks it is black fever. I can read between his lines.
+Here, old chap, on page 551, is the key to the whole thing. Read it again.
+
+"You see, don't you? The fever cases from the Pacific Coast didn't respond to his
+serum. They puzzled him. They didn't even seem like any true fever he knew.
+Well, those were my cases! Those were the real black fever cases! And there can't
+ever be an antitoxin on earth that'll cure black fever!
+
+"How do I know? Because black fever isn't of this earth! It's from somewhere
+else, James - and Surama alone knows where, because he brought it here. He
+brought it and I spread it! That's the secret, James! That's all I wanted the
+appointment for - that's all I ever did - just spread the fever that I carried in the
+gold syringe and in the deadlier finger-ring-pump-syringe you see on my index
+finger! Science? A blind! I wanted to kill, and kill, and kill! A single pressure on
+my finger, and the black fever was inoculated. I wanted to see living things
+writhe and squirm, scream and froth at the mouth. A single pressure of the
+pump-syringe and I could watch them as they died, and I couldn't live or think
+
+
+
+
+unless I had plenty to watch. That's why I jabbed everything in sight with the
+accursed hollow needle. Animals, criminals, children, servants - and the next
+would have been - "
+
+Clarendon's voice broke, and he crumpled up perceptibly in his chair.
+
+"That - that, James - was - my life. Surama made it so - he taught me, and kept
+me at it till I couldn't stop. Then - then it got too much even for him. He tried to
+check me. Fancy - he trying to check anybody in that line! But now I've got my
+last specimen. That is my last test. Good subject, James - I'm healthy - devilish
+healthy. Deuced ironic, though - the madness has gone now, so there won't be
+any fun watching the agony! Can't he - can't - "
+
+A violent shiver of fever racked the doctor, and Dalton mourned amidst his
+horror-stupefaction that he could give no grief. How much of Alfred's story was
+sheer nonsense, and how much nightmare truth he could not say; but in any case
+he felt that the man was a victim rather than a criminal, and above all, he was a
+boyhood comrade and Georgina's brother. Thoughts of the old days came back
+kaleidoscopically. 'Little Alf - the yard at Phillips Exeter - the quadrangle at
+Columbia - the fight with Tom Cortland when he saved Alf from a pommeling. . .
+
+He helped Clarendon to the lounge and asked gently what he could do. There
+was nothing. Alfred could only whisper now, but he asked forgiveness for all his
+offences, and commended his sister to the care of his friend.
+
+"You - you'll - make her happy," he gasped. "She deserves it. Martyr - to - a
+myth! Make it up to her, James. Don't - let - her - know - more - than she has to!"
+
+His voice trailed off in a mumble, and he fell into a stupor. Dalton rang the bell,
+but Margarita had gone to bed, so he called up the stairs for Georgina. She was
+firm of step, but very pale. Alfred's scream had tried her sorely, but she trusted
+James. She trusted him still as he shewed her the unconscious form on the lounge
+and asked to her go back to her room and rest, no matter what sounds she might
+hear. He did not wish her to witness the spectacle of delirium certain to come,
+but bade her kiss her brother a final farewell as he lay there calm and still, very
+like the delicate boy he had once been. So she left him - the strange, moonstruck,
+star-reading genius she had mothered so long - and the picture she carried away
+was a very merciful one.
+
+Dalton must bear to his grave a sterner picture. His fears of delirium were not
+vain, and all through the black midnight hours his giant strength restrained the
+fearful contortion of the mad sufferer. What he heard from those swollen,
+blackening lips he will never repeat. He has never been quite the same man
+
+
+
+
+since, and he knows that no one who hears such things can ever be wholly as he
+was before. So, for the world's good, he dares not speak, and he thanks God that
+his layman's ignorance of certain subjects makes many of the revelations cryptic
+and meaningless to him.
+
+Toward morning Clarendon suddenly woke to a sane consciousness and began
+to speak in a firm voice.
+
+"James, I didn't tell you what must be done - about everything. Blot out those
+entries in Greek and send my notebook to Dr. Miller. All my other notes, too,
+that you'll find in the files. He's the big authority today - his article proves it.
+Your friend at the club was right.
+
+"But everything in the clinic must go. Everything without exception, dead or
+alive or - otherwise. All the plagues of hell are in those bottles on the shelves.
+Burn them - burn it all - if one thing escapes, Surama will spread black death
+throughout the world. And above all burn Surama! That - that thing - must not
+breathe the wholesome air of heaven. You know now - what I told you - why
+such an entity can't be allowed on earth. It won't be murder - Surama isn't
+human - if you're as pious as you used to be, James, I shan't have to urge you.
+Remember the old text - 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' - or something of
+the sort.
+
+"Burn him, James! Don't let him chuckle again over the torture of mortal flesh! I
+say, burn him - the Nemesis of Flame - that's all that can reach him, James, unless
+you catch him asleep and drive a wooden stake through his heart... Kill him -
+extirpate him - cleanse the decent universe of its primal taint - the taint I recalled
+from its age-long sleep... "
+
+The doctor had risen on his elbow, and his voice was a piercing shriek toward
+the last. The effort was too much, however, and he lapsed very suddenly into a
+deep, tranquil coma. Dalton, himself fearless of fever, since he knew the dread
+germ to be non-contagious, composed Alfred's arms and legs on the lounge and
+threw a light afghan over the fragile form. After all, mightn't much of this horror
+be exaggeration and delirium? Mightn't old Doc MacNeil pull him through on a
+long chance? The governor strove to keep awake, and walked briskly up and
+down the room, but his energies had been taxed too deeply for such measures. A
+second's rest in the chair by the table took matters out of his hands, and he was
+presently sleeping soundly despite his best intentions.
+
+Dalton started up as a fierce light shone in his eyes, and for a moment he thought
+the dawn had come. But it was not the dawn, and as he rubbed his heavy lids he
+saw that it was the glare of the burning clinic in the yard, whose stout planks
+
+
+
+
+flamed and roared and crackled heavenward in the most stupendous holocaust
+he had ever seen. It was indeed the "Nemesis of Flame" that Clarendon had
+wished, and Dalton felt that some strange combustibles must be involved in a
+blaze so much wilder than anything normal pine of redwood could afford. He
+glanced alarmedly at the lounge, but Alfred was not there. Starting up, he went
+to call Georgina, but met her in the hall, roused as he was by the mountain of
+living fire.
+
+"The clinic's burning down!" she cried. "How is Al now?"
+
+"He's disappeared - disappeared while I dropped asleep!" replied Dalton,
+reaching out a steadying arm to the form which faintness had begun to sway.
+
+Gently leading her upstairs toward her room, he promised to search at once for
+Alfred, but Georgina slowly shook her head as the flames from outside cast a
+weird glow through the window on the landing.
+
+"He must be dead, James - he could never live, sane and knowing what he did. I
+heard him quarrelling with Surama, and know that awful things were going on.
+He is my brother, but - it is best as it is."
+
+Her voice had sunk to a whisper.
+
+Suddenly through the open window came the sound of a deep, hideous chuckle,
+and the flames of the burning clinic took fresh contours till they half resembled
+some nameless, Cyclopean creatures of nightmare. James and Georgina paused
+hesitant, and peered out breathlessly through the landing window. Then from
+the sky came a thunderous peal, as a forked bolt of lightning shot down with
+terrible directness into the very midst of the blazing ruin. The deep chuckle
+ceased, and in its place came a frantic, ululant yelp of a thousand ghouls and
+werewolves in torment. It died away with long, reverberant echoes, and slowly
+the flames resumed their normal shape.
+
+The watchers did not move, but waited till the pillar of fire had shrunk to a
+smouldering glow. They were glad of a half-rusticity which had kept the firemen
+from trooping out, and of the wall that excluded the curious. What had
+happened was not for vulgar eyes - it involved too much of the universe's inner
+secrets for that.
+
+In the pale dawn, James spoke softly to Georgina, who could do no more than
+put her head on his breast and sob.
+
+"Sweetheart, I think he has atoned. He must have set the fire, you know, while I
+was asleep. He told me it ought to be burned - the clinic, and everything in it.
+
+
+
+
+Surama, too. It was the only way to save the world from the unknown horrors he
+had loosed upon it. He knew, and he did what was best.
+
+"He was a great man, Georgie. Let's never forget that. We must always be proud
+of him, for he started out to help mankind, and was titanic even in his sins. I'll
+tell you more sometime. What he did, be it good or evil, was what no man ever
+did before. He was the first and last to break through certain veils, and even
+ApoUonius of Tyana takes second place beside him. But we mustn't talk about
+that. We must remember him only as the Little Alf we knew - as the boy who
+wanted to master medicine and conquer fever."
+
+In the afternoon the leisurely firemen overhauled the ruins and found two
+skeletons with bits of blackened flesh adhering - only two, thanks to the
+undisturbed lime-pits. One was of a man; the other is still a subject of debate
+among the biologists of the coast. It was not exactly an ape's or a saurian's
+skeleton, but it had disturbing suggestions of lines of evolution of which
+palaeontology has revealed no trace. The charred skull, oddly enough, was
+human, and reminded people of Surama, but the rest of the bones were beyond
+conjecture. Only well-cut clothing could have made such a body look like a man.
+
+But the human bones were Clarendon's. No one disputed this, and the world at
+large still mourns the untimely death of the greatest doctor of his age; the
+bacteriologist whose universal fever serum would have far eclipsed Dr. Miller's
+kindred antitoxin had he lived to bring it to perfection. Much of Miller's late
+success, indeed, is credited to the notes bequeathed him by the hapless victim of
+the flames. Of the old rivalry and hatred almost none survived, and even Dr.
+Wilfred Jones has been known to boast of his association with the vanished
+leader.
+
+James Dalton and his wife Georgina have always preserved a reticence which
+modesty and family grief might well account for. They published certain notes as
+a tribute to the great man's memory, but have never confirmed or contradicted
+either the popular estimate or the rare hints of marvels that a very few keen
+thinkers have been to whisper. It was very subtly and slowly that the facts
+filtered out. Dalton probably gave Dr. MacNeil an inkling of the truth, and that
+good soul had not many secrets from his son.
+
+The Daltons have led, on the whole, a very happy life, for their cloud of terror
+lies far in the background, and a strong mutual love has kept the world fresh for
+them. But there are things which disturb them oddly - little things, of which one
+would scarcely ever think of complaining. They cannot bear persons who are
+lean or deep-voiced beyond certain limits, and Georgina turns pale at the sound
+of any guttural chuckling. Senator Dalton has a mixed horror of occultism, travel.
+
+
+
+
+hypodermics, and strange alphabets which most find hard to unify, and there are
+still those who blame him for the vast proportion of the doctor's library that he
+destroyed with such painstaking completeness.
+
+MacNeil, though, seemed to realise. He was a simple man, and he said a prayer
+as the last of Alfred Clarendon's strange books crumbled to ashes. Nor would
+anyone who had peered understandingly within those books wish a word of that
+prayer unsaid.
+
+
+
+
+The Man of Stone - with Hazel Heald
+
+Written 1932
+
+Published October 1932 in Wonder Stories, Volume 4, Number 5, pages 440-45,
+470.
+
+Ben Hayden was always a stubborn chap, and once he had heard about those
+strange statues in the upper Adirondacks, nothing could keep him from going to
+see them. I had been his closest acquaintance for years, and our Damon and
+Pythias friendship made us inseparable at all times. So when Ben finally decided
+to go - well, I had to trot along too, like a faithful collie.
+
+"Jack," he said, "you know Henry Jackson, who was up in a shack beyond Lake
+Placid for that beastly spot in his lung? Well, he came back the other day nearly
+cured, but had a lot to say about some devilish queer conditions up there. He ran
+into the business all of a sudden and can't be sure yet that it's anything more
+than a case of bizarre sculpture; but just the same his uneasy impression sticks.
+
+"It seems he was out hunting one day, and came across a cave with what looked
+like a dog in front of it. Just as he was expecting the dog to bark he looked again,
+and saw the thing wasn't alive at all. It was a stone dog - such a perfect image,
+down to the smallest whisker, that he couldn't decide whether it was a
+supernaturally clever statue or a petrified animal. He was almost afraid to touch
+it, but when he did he realized it was surely made of stone.
+
+"After a while he nerved himself up to go into the cave - and there he got a still
+bigger jolt. Only a little way in there was another stone figure - or what looked
+like it - but this time it was a man's. It lay on the floor, on its side, wore clothes,
+and had a peculiar smile on its face. This time Henry didn't stop to do any
+touching, but beat it straight to the village. Mountain Top, you know. Of course
+he asked questions - but they did not get him very far. He found he was on a
+ticklish subject, for the natives only shook their heads, crossed their fingers, and
+muttered something about a 'Mad Dan' - whoever he was.
+
+"It was too much for Jackson, so he came home weeks ahead of his planned time.
+He told me all about it because he knows how fond I am of strange things - and
+oddly enough, I was able to fish up a recollection that dovetailed pretty neatly
+with his yarn. Do you remember Arthur Wheeler, the sculptor who was such a
+realist that people began calling him nothing but a solid photographer? I think
+you knew him slightly. Well, as a matter of fact, he ended up in that part of the
+Adirondacks himself. Spent a lot of time there, and then dropped out of sight.
+
+
+
+
+Never heard from again. Now if stone statues that look Hke men and dogs are
+turning up around there, it looks to me as if they might be his work - no matter
+what the rustics say, or refuse to say, about them. Of course a fellow with
+Jackson's nerves might easily get flighty and disturbed over things like that; but
+I'd have done a lot of examining before running away.
+
+"In fact. Jack, I'm going up there now to look things over - and you're coming
+along with me. It would mean a lot to find Wheeler - or any of his work.
+Anyhow, the mountain air will brace us both up."
+
+So less then a week later, after a long train ride and a jolting bus trip through
+breathlessly exquisite scenery, we arrived at Mountain Top in the late, golden
+sunlight of a June evening. The village comprised only a few small houses, a
+hotel, and the general store at which our bus drew up; but we knew that the
+latter would probably prove a focus for such information. Surely enough, the
+usual group of idlers was gathered around the steps; and when we represented
+ourselves as health-seekers in search of lodgings they had many
+recommendations to offer.
+
+Though we had not planned to do any investigating till the next day, Ben could
+not resist venturing some vague, cautious questions when he noticed the senile
+garrulousness of one of the ill-clad loafers. He felt, from Jackson's previous
+experience, that it would be useless to begin with references to the queer statues;
+but decided to mention Wheeler as one whom we had known, and in whose fate
+we consequently had a right to be interested.
+
+The crowd seemed uneasy when Sam stopped his whittling and started talking,
+but they had slight occasion for alarm. Even this barefoot old mountain decadent
+tightened up when he heard Wheeler's name, and only with difficulty could Ben
+get anything coherent out of him.
+
+"Wheeler?" he had finally wheezed. "Oh, yeh - that feller as was all the time
+blastin' rocks and cuttin' 'em up into statues. So yew knowed him, hey? Wal,
+they ain't much we kin tell ye, and mebbe that's too much. He stayed out to Mad
+Dan's cabin in the hills - but not so very long. Got so he wa'nt wanted around no
+more... by Dan, that is. Kinder soft-spoken and got around Dan's wife till the old
+devil took notice. Pretty sweet on her, I guess. But he took the trail sudden, and
+nobody's seen hide nor hair of him since. Dan must a told him sumthin' pretty
+plain - bad feller to get agin ye, Dan is! Better keep away from thar, boys, for they
+ain't no good in that part of the hills. Dan's ben workin' up a worse and worse
+mood, and ain't seen about no more. Nor his wife, neither. Guess he's penned
+her up so's nobody else kin make eyes at her!"
+
+
+
+
+As Sam resumed his whittling after a few more observations, Ben and I
+exchanged glances. Here, surely, was a new lead which deserved intensive
+following up. Deciding to lodge at the hotel, we settled ourselves as quickly as
+possible; planning for a plunge into the wild hilly country on the next day.
+
+At sunrise we made our start, each bearing a knapsack laden with provisions and
+such tools as we thought we might need. The day before us had an almost
+stimulating air of invitation - through which only a faint undercurrent of the
+sinister ran. Our rough mountain road quickly became steep and winding, so
+that before long our feet ached considerably.
+
+After about two miles we left the road - crossing a stone wall on our right near a
+great elm and striking off diagonally toward a steeper slope according to the
+chart and directions which Jackson had prepared for us. It was rough and briery
+travelling, but we knew that the cave could not be far off. In the end we came
+upon the aperture quite suddenly - a black, bush-grown crevice where the
+ground shot abruptly upward, and beside it, near a shallow rock pool, a small,
+still figure stood rigid - as if rivalling its own uncanny petrification.
+
+It was a grey dog - or a dog's statue - and as our simultaneous gasp died away
+we scarcely knew what to think. Jackson had exaggerated nothing, and we could
+not believe that any sculptor's hand had succeeded in producing such perfection.
+Every hair of the animal's magnificent coat seemed distinct, and those on the
+back were bristled up as if some unknown thing had taken his unaware. Ben, at
+last half-kindly touching the delicate stony fur, gave vent to an exclamation.
+
+"Good God, Jack, but this can't be any statue! Look at it - all the little details, and
+the way the hair lies! None of Wheeler's technique here! This is a real dog -
+though heaven only knows how he ever got in this state. Just like stone - feel for
+yourself. Do you suppose there's any strange gas that sometimes comes out of
+the cave and does this to animal life? We ought to have looked more into the
+local legends. And if this is a real dog - or was a real dog - then that man inside
+must be the real thing too."
+
+It was with a good deal of genuine solemnity - almost dread - that we finally
+crawled on hands and knees through the cave-mouth, Ben leading. The
+narrowness looked hardly three feet, after which the grotto expanded in every
+direction to form a damp, twilight chamber floored with rubble and detritus. For
+a time we could make out very little, but as we rose to our feet and strained our
+eyes we began slowly to descry a recumbent figure amidst the greater darkness
+ahead. Ben fumbled with his flashlight, but hesitated for a moment before
+turning it on the prostate figure. We had little doubt that the stony thing was
+what had once been a man, and something in the thought unnerved us both.
+
+
+
+
+When Ben at last sent forth the electric beam we saw that the object lay on its
+side, back toward us. It was clearly of the same material as the dog outside, but
+was dressed in the mouldering and unpetrified remains of rough sport clothing.
+Braced as we were for a shock, we approached quite calmly to examine the thing;
+Ben going around to the other side to glimpse the averted face. Neither could
+possibly have been prepared for what Ben saw when he flashed the light on
+those stony features. His cry was wholly excusable, and I could not help echoing
+it as I leaped to his side and shared the sight. Yet it was nothing hideous or
+intrinsically terrifying. It was merely a matter of recognition, for beyond the least
+shadow of a doubt this chilly rock figure with its half-frightened, half-bitter
+expression had at one time been our old acquaintance, Arthur Wheeler.
+
+Some instinct sent us staggering and crawling out of the cave, and down the
+tangled slope to a point whence we could not see the ominous stone dog. We
+hardly knew what to think, for our brains were churning with conjectures and
+apprehensions. Ben, who had known Wheeler well, was especially upset; and
+seemed to be piecing together some threads I had overlooked.
+
+Again and again as we passed on the green slope he repeated "Poor Arthur, poor
+Arthur!" but not till he muttered the name "Mad Dan" did I recall the trouble
+into which, just before his disappearance. Mad Dan, Ben implied, would
+doubtless be glad to see what had happened. For a moment it flashed over both
+of us that the jealous host might have been responsible for the sculptor's
+presence in this evil cave, but the thought went as quickly as it came.
+
+The thing that puzzled us most was to account for the phenomenon itself. What
+gaseous emanation or mineral vapour could have wrought this change in so
+relatively short a time was utterly beyond us. Normal petrification, we know, is a
+slow chemical replacement process requiring vast ages for completion; yet here
+were two stone images which had been living things - or at least Wheeler had -
+only a few weeks before. Conjecture was useless. Clearly, nothing remained but
+to notify the authorities and let them guess what they might; and yet at the back
+of Ben's head that notion about Mad Dan still persisted. Anyhow, we clawed our
+way back to the road, but Ben did not turn toward the village, but looked along
+upward toward where old Sam had said Dan's cabin lay. It was the second house
+from the village, the ancient loafer had wheezed, and lay on the left far back from
+the road in a thick copse of scrub oaks. Before I knew it Ben was dragging me up
+the sandy highway past a dingy farmstead and into a region of increasing
+wildness.
+
+It did not occur to me to protest, but I felt a certain sense of mounting menace as
+the familiar marks of agriculture and civilization grew fewer and fewer. At last
+the beginning of a narrow, neglected path opened up on our left, while the
+
+
+
+
+peaked roof of a squalid, unpainted building shewed itself beyond a sickly
+growth of half-dead trees. This, I knew, must be Mad Dan's cabin; and I
+wondered that wheeler had ever chosen so unprepossessing a place for his
+headquarters. I dreaded to walk up that weedy, uninviting path, but could not
+lag behind, when Ben strode determinedly along and began a vigorous rapping
+at the rickety, musty-smelling door.
+
+There was no response to the knock, and something in its echoes sent a series of
+shivers through one. Ben, however, was quite unperturbed; and at once began to
+circle the house in quest of unlocked windows. The third that he tried - in the
+rear of the dismal cabin - proved capable of opening, and after a boost and a
+vigorous spring he was safely inside and helping me after him.
+
+The room in which we landed was full of limestone and granite blocks, chiselling
+tools and clay models, and we realised at once that it was Wheeler's erstwhile
+studio. So far we had not met with any sign of life, but over everything hovered a
+damnably ominous dusty odour. On our left was an open door evidently leading
+to a kitchen on the chimney side of the house, and through this Ben started,
+intent on finding anything he could concerning his friend's last habitat. He was
+considerably ahead of me when he crossed the threshold, so that I could not see
+at first what brought him up short and wrung a low cry of horror from his lips.
+
+In another moment, though, I did see - and repeated his cry as instinctively as I
+had done in the cave. For here in this cabin - far from any subterranean depths
+which could breed strange gases and work strange mutations - were two stony
+figures which I knew at once were no products of Arthur Wheeler's chisel. In a
+rude armchair before the fireplace, bound in position by the lash of a long
+rawhide whip, was the form of a man - unkempt, elderly, and with a look of
+fathomless horror on its evil, petrified face.
+
+On the floor beside it lay a woman's figure; graceful, and with a face betokening
+considerable youth and beauty. Its expression seemed to be one of sardonic
+satisfaction, and near its outflung right hand was a large tin pail, somewhat
+stained on the inside, as with a darkish sediment.
+
+We made no move to approach those inexplicably petrified bodies, nor did we
+exchange any but the simplest conjectures. That this stony couple hand been
+Mad Dan and his wife we could not well doubt, but how to account for their
+present condition was another matter. As we looked horrifiedly around we saw
+the suddenness with which the final development must have come - for
+everything about us seemed, despite a heavy coating of dust, to have been left in
+the midst of commonplace household activities.
+
+
+
+
+The only exception to this rule of casualness was on the kitchen table; in whose
+cleared centre, as if to attract attention, lay a thin, battered, blank-book weighed
+down by a sizeable tin funnel. Crossing to read the thing, Ben saw that it was a
+kind of diary or set of dated entries, written in a somewhat cramped and none
+too practiced hand. The very first words riveted my attention, and before ten
+seconds had elapsed he was breathlessly devouring the halting text - I avidly
+following as I peered over his shoulder. As we read on - moving as we did so
+into the less loathsome atmosphere of the adjoining room - many obscure things
+became terribly clear to us, and we trembled with a mixture of complex
+emotions.
+
+This is what we read - and what the coroner read later on. The public has seen a
+highly twisted and sensationalised version in the cheap newspapers, but not
+even that has more than a fraction of the genuine terror which the original held
+for us as we puzzled it out alone in that musty cabin among the wild hills, with
+two monstrous stone abnormalities lurking in the death-like silence of the next
+room. When we had finished Ben pocketed the book with a gesture half of
+repulsion, and his first words were "Let's get out of here."
+
+Silently and nervously we stumbled to the front of the house, unlocked the door,
+and began the long tramp back to the village. There were many statements to
+make and questions to answer in the days that followed, and I do not think that
+either Ben or I can ever shake off the effects of the whole harrowing experience.
+Neither can some of the local authorities and city reporters who flocked around -
+even though they burned a certain book and many papers found in attic boxes,
+and destroyed considerable apparatus in the deepest part of that sinister hillside
+cave. But here is the text itself:
+
+"Nov. 5 - My name is Daniel Morris. Around here they call me 'Mad Dan'
+because I believe in powers that nobody else believes in nowadays. When I go up
+on Thunder Hill to keep the Feast of the Foxes they think I am crazy - all except
+the back country folks that are afraid of me. They try to stop me from sacrificing
+the Black Goat at Hallow Eve, and always prevent my doing the Great Rite that
+would open the gate. They ought to know better, for they know that I am a Van
+Kauran on my mother's side, and anybody this side of the Hudson can tell what
+the Van Kaurans have handed down. We come from Nicholas Van Kauran, the
+wizard, who was hanged in Wijtgaart in 1587, and everybody knows he had
+made the bargain with the Black Man.
+
+"The soldiers never got his Book of Eibon when they burned his house, and his
+grandson, William Van Kauran, brought it over when he came to
+Rensselaerwyck and later crossed the river to Esopus. Ask anybody in Kingston
+or Hurley about what the William Van Kauran line could do to people that got in
+
+
+
+
+their way. Also, ask them if my Uncle Hendrik didn't manage to keep hold of the
+Book of Eibon when they ran him out of town and he went up the river to this
+place with his family.
+
+"I am writing this - and am going to keep writing this - because I want people to
+know the truth after I am gone. Also, I am afraid I shall really go mad if I don't
+set things down in plain black and white. Everything is going against me, and if
+it keeps up I shall have to use the secrets in the Book and call in certain Powers.
+Three months ago that sculptor Arthur Wheeler came to Mountain Top, and they
+sent him up to me because I am the only man in the place who knows anything
+except farming, hunting, and fleecing summer boarders. The fellow seemed to be
+interested in what I had to say, and made a deal to stop in here for $13.00 a week
+with meals. I gave him the back room beside the kitchen for his lumps of stone
+and his chiselling, and arranged with Nate Williams to tend to his rock blasting
+and haul his big pieces with a drag and yoke of oxen.
+
+"That was three months ago. Now I know why that cursed son of hell took so
+quick to the place. It wasn't my talk at all, but the looks of my wife Rose, that is
+Osborne Chandler's oldest girl. She is sixteen years younger than I am, and is
+always casting sheep's eyes at the fellows in town. But we always managed to
+get along fine enough till this dirty rat shewed up, even if she did balk at helping
+me with the Rites on Roodmas and Hallowmass. I can see now that Wheeler is
+working on her feelings and getting her so fond of him that she hardly looks at
+me, and I suppose he'll try to elope with her sooner or later.
+
+"But he works slow like all sly, polished dogs, and I've got plenty of time to
+think up what to do about it. They don't either of them know I suspect anything,
+but before long they'll both realise it doesn't pay to break up a Van Kauran's
+home. I promise them plenty of novelty in what I'll do.
+
+"Nov. 25 - Thanksgiving Day! That's a pretty good joke! But at that I'll have
+something to be thankful for when I finish what I've started. No question but
+that Wheeler is trying to steal my wife. For the time being, though, I'll let him
+keep on being a star boarder. Got the Book of Eibon down from Uncle Hendrik's
+old trunk in the attic last week, and am looking up something good which won't
+require sacrifices that I can't make around here. I want something that'll finish
+these two sneaking traitors, and at the same time get me into no trouble. If it has
+a twist of drama in it, so much the better. I've thought of calling in the emanation
+of Yoth, but that needs a child's blood and I must be careful about the
+neighbours. The Green Decay looks promising, but that would be a bit
+unpleasant for me as well as for them. I don't like certain sights and smells.
+
+
+
+
+"Dec. 10 - Eureka! I've got the very thing at last! Revenge is sweet - and this is the
+perfect cHmax! Wheeler, the sculptor - this is too good! Yes, indeed, that damned
+sneak is going to produce a statue that will sell quicker than any of the things
+he's been carving these past weeks! A realist, eh? Well - the new statuary won't
+lack any realism! I found the formula in a manuscript insert opposite page 679 of
+the Book. From the handwriting I judge it was put there by my great-grandfather
+Bareut Picterse Van Kauran - the one who disappeared from New Paltz in 1839.
+la! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!
+
+"To be plain, I've found a way to turn those wretched rats into stone statues. It's
+absurdly simple, and really depends more on plain chemistry than on the Outer
+Powers. If I can get hold of the right stuff I can brew a drink that'll pass for
+home-made wine, and one swig ought to finish any ordinary being short of an
+elephant. What it amounts to is a kind of petrification infinitely speeded up.
+Shoots the whole system full of calcium and barium salts and replaces living cells
+with mineral matter so fast that nothing can stop it. It must have been one of
+those things great-grandfather got at the Great Sabbat on Sugar-Loaf in the
+Catskills. Queer things used to go on there. Seems to me I heard of a man in New
+Paltz - Squire Hasbruck - turned to stone or something like that in 1834. He was
+an enemy of the Van Kaurans. First thing I must do is order the five chemicals I
+need from Albany and Montreal. Plenty of time later to experiment. When
+everything is over I'll round up all the statues and sell them as Wheeler's work to
+pay for his overdue board bill! He always was a realist and an egoist - wouldn't
+it be natural for him to make a self-portrait in stone, and to use my wife for
+another model - as indeed he's really been doing for the past fortnight? Trust the
+dull public not to ask what quarry the queer stone came from!
+
+"Dec. 25 - Christmas. Peace on earth, and so forth! These two swine are goggling
+at each other as if I didn't exist. They must think I'm deaf, dumb, and blind!
+Well, the barium sulphate and calcium chloride came from Albany last
+Thursday, and the acids, catalytics, and instruments are due from Montreal any
+day now. The mills of the gods - and all that! I'll do the work in Allen's Cave
+near the lower wood lot, and at the same time will be openly making some wine
+in the cellar here. There ought to be some excuse for offering a new drink -
+though it won't take much planning to fool those two moonstruck nincompoops.
+The trouble will be to make Rose take wine, for she pretends not to like it. Any
+experiments that I make on animals will be down at the cave, and nobody ever
+thinks of going there in winter. I'll do some wood-cutting to account for my time
+away. A small load or two brought in will keep him off the track.
+
+"Jan. 20 - It's harder work than I thought, a lot depends on the exact proportions.
+The stuff came from Montreal, but I had to send again for some better scales and
+an acetylene lamp. They're getting curious down at the village. Wish the express
+
+
+
+
+office weren't in Steenwyck's store. Am trying various mixtures on the sparrows
+that drink and bathe in the pool in front of the cave - when it's melted.
+Sometimes it kills them, but sometimes they fly away. Clearly, I've missed some
+important reaction. I suppose Rose and that upstart are making the most of my
+absence - but I can afford to let them, there can be no doubt of my success in the
+end.
+
+"Feb. 11 - Have got it at last! Put a fresh lot in the little pond - which is well
+melted today - and the first bird that drank toppled over as if he were shot. I
+picked him up a second later, and he was a perfect piece of stone, down to the
+smallest claws and feather. Not a muscle changed since he was poised for
+drinking, so he must have died the instant any of the stuff got to his stomach. I
+didn't expect the petrification to come so soon. But a sparrow isn't a fair test of
+the way the thing would act with a large animal. I must get something bigger to
+try it on, for it must be the right strength when I give it to those swine. I guess
+Rose's dog Rex will do. I'll take him along the next time and say a timber wolf
+got him. she thinks a lot of him, and I shan't be sorry to give her something to
+sniffle over before the big reckoning. I must be careful where I keep this book.
+Rose sometimes pries around in the queerest places.
+
+"Feb. 15 - Getting warm! Tried it on Rex and it worked like a charm with only
+double the strength. I fixed the rock pool and got him to drink. He seemed to
+know something queer had hit him, for he bristled and growled, but he was a
+piece of stone before he could turn his head, the solution ought to have been
+stronger, and for a human being ought to be very much stronger. I think I'm
+getting the hang of it now, and am about ready for that cur Wheeler. The stuff
+seems to be tasteless, but to make sure I'll flavour it with the new wine I'm
+making up at the house. Wish I were surer about the tastelessness, so I could give
+it to Rose in water without trying to urge wine on her. I'll get the two separately -
+Wheeler out here and Rose at home. Have just fixed a strong solution and
+cleared away all strange objects in front of the cave. Rose whimpered like a
+puppy when I told her a wolf had got Rex, and Wheeler gurgled a lot of
+sympathy.
+
+"March 1 - la R'lyeh! Praise the Lord Tsathoggua! I've got the son of hell at last!
+Told him I'd found a new ledge of friable limestone down this way, and he
+trotted after me like the yellow cur he is! I had the wine-flavoured stuff in a
+bottle on my hip, and he was glad of a swig when we got here. Gulped it down
+without a wink - and dropped in his tracks before you could count three. But he
+knows I've had my vengeance, for I made a face at him that he couldn't miss. I
+saw the look of understanding come into his face as he keeled over. In two
+minutes he was solid stone.
+
+
+
+
+"I dragged him into the cave and put Rex's figure outside again, that bristhng
+dog shape will help to scare people off. It's getting time for the spring hunters,
+and besides, there's a damned lunger' named Jackson in a cabin over the hill
+who does a lot of snooping around in the snow. I wouldn't want my laboratory
+and storeroom to be found just yet! when I got home I told Rose that Wheeler
+had found a telegram at the village summoning him suddenly home. I don't
+know whether she believed me or not but I doesn't matter. For form's sake, I
+packed Wheeler's things and took them down the hill, telling her I was going to
+ship them after him. I put them in the dry well at the abandoned Rapelye place.
+Now for Rose!
+
+"March 3 - Can't get Rose to drink any wine. I hope that stuff is tasteless enough
+to go unnoticed in water. I tried it in tea and coffee, but it forms a precipitate and
+can't be used that way. If I use it in water I'll have to cut down the dose and trust
+to a more gradual action. Mr. and Mrs. Hoog dropped in this noon, and I had
+hard work keeping the conversation away from Wheeler's departure. It mustn't
+get around that we say he was called back to New York when everybody at the
+village knows that no telegram came, and that he didn't leave on the bus. Rose is
+acting damned queer about the whole thing. I'll have to pick a quarrel with her
+and keep her locked in the attic. The best way is to try to make her drink that
+doctored wine - and if she does give in, so much better.
+
+"March 7 - Have started in on Rose. She wouldn't drink the wine so I took a
+whip to her and drove her up to the attic. She'll never come down alive. I pass
+her a platter of salty bread and salt meat, and a pail of slightly doctored water,
+twice a day. The salt food ought to make her drink a lot, and it can't be long
+before the action sets in. I don't like the way she shouts about Wheeler when I'm
+at the door. The rest of the time she is absolutely silent.
+
+"March 9 - It's damned peculiar how slow that stuff is in getting hold of Rose. I'll
+have to make it stronger - probably she'll never taste it with all the salt I've been
+feeding her. well, if it doesn't get there are plenty of other ways to fall back on.
+but I would like to carry this neat statue plan through! Went to the cave this
+morning and all is well there. I sometimes hear Rose's footsteps on the ceiling
+overhead, and I think they're getting more and more dragging. The stuff is
+certainly working, but it's too slow. Not strong enough. From now on I'll rapidly
+stiffen up the dose.
+
+"March 11 - It is very queer. She is still alive and moving. Tuesday night I heard
+her piggling with a window, so went up and gave her a rawhiding. She acts
+more sullen than frightened, and her eyes look swollen. But she could never drop
+to the ground from that height and there's nowhere she could climb down. I
+
+
+
+
+have had dreams at night, for her slow, dragging pacing on the floor above gets
+on my nerves. Sometimes I think she works at the lock on the door.
+
+"March 15 - Still alive, despite all the strengthening of the dose. There's
+something queer about it. she crawls now, and doesn't pace very often. But the
+sound of her crawling is horrible. She rattles the windows, too, and fumbles with
+the door. I shall have to finish her off with the rawhide if this keeps up. I'm
+getting very sleepy. Wonder if Rose has got on her guard somehow. But she
+must be drinking the stuff. This sleepiness is abnormal - I think the strain is
+telling on me. I'm sleepy. . ."
+
+(Here the cramped handwriting trails out in a vague scrawl, giving place to a
+note in a firmer, evidently feminine handwriting, indicative of great emotional
+tension.)
+
+"March 16-4 a.m. - This is added by Rose C. Morris, about to die. Please notify
+my father, Osborne E. Chandler, Route 2, Mountain Top, N.Y. I have just read
+what the beast has written. I felt sure he had killed Arthur Wheeler, but did not
+know till I read this terrible notebook. Now I know what I escaped. I noticed the
+water tasted queer, so took none of it after the first sip. I threw it all out of the
+window. That one sip has half paralysed me, but I can still get about. The thirst
+was terrible, but I ate as little as possible of the salty food and was able to get a
+little water up here under places where the roof leaked.
+
+"There were two great rains. I thought he was trying to poison me, though I
+didn't know what the poison was like. What he has written about himself and
+me is a lie. We were never happy together and I think I married him only under
+one of those spells that he was able to lay on people. I guess he hypnotised both
+my father and me, for he was always hated and feared and suspected of dark
+dealings with the devil. My father once called him The Devil's Kin, and he was
+right.
+
+"No one will ever know what I went through as his wife. It was not simply
+common cruelty - though God knows he was cruel enough, and beat me often
+with a leather whip. It was more - more than anyone in this age can ever
+understand. He was a monstrous creature, and practiced all sorts of hellish
+ceremonies handed down by his mother's people. He tried to make me help in
+the rites - and I don't dare even hint what they were. I would not, so he beat me.
+It would be blasphemy to tell what he tried to make me do. I can say he was a
+murderer even then, for I know what he sacrificed one night on Thunder Hill. He
+was surely the Devil's Kin. I tried four times to run away, but he always caught
+and beat me. Also, he had a sort of hold over my mind, and even over my
+father's mind.
+
+
+
+
+"About Arthur Wheeler I have nothing to be ashamed of. We did come to love
+each other, but only in an honorable way. He gave me the first kind treatment I
+had ever had since leaving my father's, and meant to help me get out of the
+clutches of that fiend. He had several talks with my father, and was going to help
+me get out west. After my divorce we would have been married.
+
+"Ever since that brute locked me in the attic I have planned to get out and finish
+him. I always kept the poison overnight in case I could escape and find him
+asleep and give it to him somehow. At first he waked easily when I worked on
+the lock of the door and tested the conditions at the windows, but later he began
+to get more tired and sleep sounder. I could always tell by his snoring when he
+asleep.
+
+"Tonight he was so fast asleep I forced the lock without waking him. it was hard
+work getting downstairs with my partial paralysis, but I did. I found him here
+with the lamp burning - asleep at the table, where he had been writing in this
+book. In the corner was the long rawhide whip he had so often beaten me with. I
+used it to tie him to the chair so he could not move a muscle. I lashed his neck so
+that I could pour anything down his throat without his resisting.
+
+"He waked up just as I was finishing and I guess he saw right off that he was
+done for. he shouted frightful things and tried to chant mystical formulas, but I
+choked him off a dish towel from the sink. Then I saw this book he had been
+writing in, and stopped to read it. the shock was terrible, and I almost fainted
+four or five time. My mind was not ready for such things. After that I talked to
+that fiend for two or three hours steady. I told everything I had wanted to tell
+him through all the years I had been his slave, and lot of other things that had to
+with what I read in this awful book.
+
+"He looked almost purple when I was through, and I think he was half delirious.
+Then I got a funnel from the cupboard and jammed it into his mouth after taking
+out the gag. He knew what I was going to do, but was helpless. I had brought
+down the pail of poisoned water, and without a qualm, I poured a good half of it
+into the funnel.
+
+"It must have been a very strong dose, for almost at once I saw that brute begin
+to stiffen and turn a dull stony grey. In ten minutes I knew he was solid stone. I
+could bear to touch him, but the tin funnel clinked horribly when I pulled it out
+of his mouth. I wish I could have given that Kin of the Devil a more painful,
+lingering death, but surely this was the most appropriate he could have had.
+
+"There is not much more to say. I am half-paralysed, and with Arthur murdered
+I have nothing to live for. I shall make things complete by drinking the rest of the
+
+
+
+
+poison after placing this book where it will be found. In a quarter of an hour I
+shall be a stone statue. My only wish is to be buried beside the statue that was
+Arthur - when it is found in that cave where the fiend left it. Poor trusting Rex
+ought to lie at our feet. I do not care what becomes of the stone devil tied in the
+chair...."
+
+
+
+
+The Night Ocean - with R. H. Barlow
+
+Written 1936
+
+I went to EUston Beach not only for the pleasures of sun and ocean, but to rest a
+weary mind. Since I knew no person in the little town, which thrives on summer
+vacationists and presents only blank windows during most of the year, there
+seemed no likelihood that I might be disturbed. This pleased me, for I did not
+wish to see anything but the expanse of pounding surf and the beach lying
+before my temporary home.
+
+My long work of the summer was completed when I left the city, and the large
+mural design produced by it had been entered in the contest. It had taken me the
+bulk of the year to finish the painting, and when the last brush was cleaned I was
+no longer reluctant to yield to the claims of health and find rest and seclusion for
+a time. Indeed, when I had been a week on the beach I recalled only now and
+then the work whose success had so recently seemed all-important. There was no
+longer the old concern with a hundred complexities of colour and ornament; no
+longer the fear and mistrust of my ability to render a mental image actual, and
+turn by my own skill alone the dim-conceived idea into the careful draught of a
+design. And yet that which later befell me by the lonely shore may have grown
+solely from the mental constitution behind such concern and fear and mistrust.
+For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and
+dreaming; and who can say that such a nature does not open latent eyes sensitive
+to unsuspected worlds and orders of being?
+
+Now that I am trying to tell what I saw I am conscious of a thousand maddening
+limitations. Things seen by the inward sight, like those flashing visions which
+come as we drift into the blankness of sleep, are more vivid and meaningful to us
+in that form than when we have sought to weld them with reality. Set a pen to a
+dream, and the colour drains from it. The ink with which we write seems diluted
+with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot
+delineate the incredible memory. It is as if our inward selves, released from the
+bonds of daytime and objectivity, revelled in prisoned emotions which are
+hastily stifled when we translate them. In dreams and visions lie the greatest
+creations of man, for on them rests no yoke of line or hue. Forgotten scenes, and
+lands more obscure than the golden world of childhood, spring into the sleeping
+mind to reign until awakening puts them to rout. Amid these may be attained
+something of the glory and contentment for which we yearn; some image of
+sharp beauties suspected but not before revealed, which are to us as the Grail to
+holy spirits of the medieval world. To shape these things on the wheel of art, to
+seek to bring some faded trophy from that intangible realm of shadow and
+
+
+
+
+gossamer, requires equal skill and memory. For although dreams are in all of us,
+few hands may grasp their moth-wings without tearing them.
+
+Such skill this narrative does not have. If I might, I would reveal to you the
+hinted events which I perceived dimly, like one who peers into an unlit realm
+and glimpses forms whose motion is concealed. In my mural design, which then
+lay with a multitude of others in the building for which they were planned, I had
+striven equally to catch a trace of this elusive shadow-world, and had perhaps
+succeeded better than I shall now succeed. My stay in Ellston was to await the
+judging of that design; and when days of unfamiliar leisure had given me
+perspective, I discovered that - in spite of those weaknesses which a creator
+always detects most clearly - I had indeed managed to retain in line and colour
+some fragments snatched from the endless world of imagining. The difficulties of
+the process, and the resulting strain on all my powers, had undermined my
+health and brought me to the beach during this period of waiting. Since I wished
+to be wholly alone, I rented (to the delight of the incredulous owner) a small
+house some distance from the village of Ellston - which, because of the waning
+season, was alive with a moribund bustle of tourists, uniformly uninteresting to
+me. The house, dark from the sea-wind though it had not been painted, was not
+even a satellite of the village; but swung below it on the coast like a pendulum
+beneath a still clock, quite alone upon a hill of weed-grown sand. Like a solitary
+warm animal it crouched facing the sea, and its inscrutable dirty windows stared
+upon a lonely realm of earth and sky and enormous sea. It will not do to use too
+much imagining in a narrative whose facts, could they be augmented and fitted
+into a mosaic, would be strange enough in themselves; but I thought the little
+house was lonely when I saw it, and that like myself, it was conscious of its
+meaningless nature before the great sea.
+
+I took the place in late August, arriving a day before I was expected, and
+encountering a van and two workingmen unloading the furniture provided by
+the owner. I did not know then how long I would stay, and when the truck that
+brought the goods had left I settled my small luggage and locked the door
+(feeling very proprietary about having a house after months of a rented room) to
+go down the weedy hill and on the beach. Since it was quite square and had but
+one room, the house required little exploration. Two windows in each side
+provided a great quantity of light, and somehow a door had been squeezed in as
+an after-thought on the oceanward wall. The place had been built about ten years
+previously, but on account of its distance from Ellston village was difficult to
+rent even during the active summer season. There being no fireplace, it stood
+empty and alone from October until far into the spring. Though actually less
+than a mile below Ellston, it seemed more remote; since a bend in the coast
+caused one to see only grassy dunes in the direction of the village.
+
+
+
+
+The first day, half-gone when I was installed, I spent in the enjoyment of sun and
+restless water-things whose quiet majesty made the designing of murals seem
+distant and tiresome. But this was the natural reaction to a long concern with one
+set of habits and activities. I was through with my work and my vacation was
+begun. This fact, while elusive for the moment, showed in everything which
+surrounded me that afternoon of my arrival, and in the utter change from old
+scenes. There was an effect of bright sun upon a shifting sea of waves whose
+mysteriously impelled curves were strewn with what appeared to be rhinestone.
+Perhaps a water-colour might have caught the solid masses of intolerable light
+which lay upon the beach where the sea mingled with the sand. Although the
+ocean bore her own hue, it was dominated wholly and incredibly by the
+enormous glare. There was no other person near me, and I enjoyed the spectacle
+without the annoyance of any alien object upon the stage. Each of my senses was
+touched in a different way, but sometimes it seemed that the roar of the sea was
+akin to that great brightness, or as if the waves were glaring instead of the sun,
+each of these being so vigorous and insistent that impressions coming from them
+were mingled. Curiously, I saw no one bathing near my little square house
+during that or succeeding afternoons, although the curving shore included a
+wide beach even more inviting than that at the village, where the surf was dotted
+with random figures. I supposed that this was because of the distance and
+because there had never been other houses below the town. Why this unbuilt
+stretch existed, I could not imagine; since many dwellings straggled along the
+northward coast, facing the sea with aimless eyes.
+
+I swam until the afternoon had gone, and later, having rested, walked into the
+little town. Darkness hid the sea from me as I entered, and I found in the dingy
+lights of the streets tokens of a life which was not even conscious of the great,
+gloom-shrouded thing lying so close. There were painted women in tinsel
+adornments, and bored men who were no longer young - a throng of foolish
+marionettes perched on the lip of the ocean-chasm; unseeing, unwilling to see
+what lay above them and about, in the multitudinous grandeur of the stars and
+the leagues of the night ocean. I walked along that darkened sea as I went back to
+the bare little house, sending the beams of my flashlight out upon the naked and
+impenetrable void. In the absence of the moon, this light made a solid bar
+athwart the walls of the uneasy tide; and I felt an indescribable emotion born of
+the noise of the waters and the perception of my smallness as I cast that tiny
+beam upon a realm immense in itself, yet only the black border of the earthly
+deep. That nighted deep, upon which ships were moving alone in the darkness
+where I could not see them, gave off the murmur of a distant, angry rabble.
+
+When I reached my high residence I knew that I had passed no one during the
+mile's walk from the village, and yet there somehow lingered an impression that
+I had been all the while accompanied by the spirit of the lonely sea. It was, I
+
+
+
+
+thought, personified in a shape which was not revealed to me, but which moved
+quietly about beyond my range of comprehension. It was like those actors who
+wait behind darkened scenery in readiness for the lines which will shortly call
+them before our eyes to move and speak in the sudden revelation of the
+footlights. At last I shook off this fancy and sought my key to enter the place,
+whose bare walls gave a sudden feeling of security.
+
+My cottage was entirely free of the village, as if it had wandered down the coast
+and was unable to return; and there I heard nothing of the disturbing clamour
+when I returned each night after supper. I generally stayed but a short while
+upon the streets of Ellston, though sometimes I went into the place for the sake of
+the walk it provided. There were all the multitude of curio-shops and falsely
+regal theatre fronts that clutter vacation towns, but I never went into these; and
+the place seemed useful only for its restaurants. It was astonishing the number of
+useless things people found to do.
+
+There was a succession of sun-filled days at first. I rose early, and beheld the grey
+sky agleam with promise of sunrise; a prophecy fulfilled as I stood witness.
+Those dawns were cold and their colours faint in comparison to that uniform
+radiance of day which gives to every hour the quality of white noon. That great
+light, so apparent the first day, made each succeeding day a yellow page in the
+book of time. I noticed that many of the beach people were displeased by the
+inordinate sun, whereas I sought it. After grey months of toil the lethargy
+induced by a physical existence in a region governed by the simple things - the
+wind and light and water - had a prompt effect upon me, and since I was anxious
+to continue this healing process, I spent all my time outdoors in the sunlight.
+This induced a state at once impassive and submissive, and gave me a feeling of
+security against the ravenous night. As darkness is akin to death, so is light to
+vitality. Through the heritage of a million years ago, when men were closer to the
+mother sea, and when the creatures of which we are born lay languid in the
+shallow, sun-pierced water; we still seek today the primal things when we are
+tired, steeping ourselves within their lulling security like those early half-
+mammals which had not yet ventured upon the oozy land.
+
+The monotony of the waves gave repose, and I had no other occupation than
+witnessing a myriad ocean moods. There is a ceaseless change in the waters -
+colours and shades pass over them like the insubstantial expressions of a well-
+known face; and these are at once communicated to us by half- recognized
+senses. When the sea is restless, remembering old ships that have gone over her
+chasms, there comes up silently in our hearts the longing for a vanished horizon.
+But when she forgets, we forget also. Though we know her a lifetime, she must
+always hold an alien air, as if something too vast to have shape were lurking in
+the universe to which she is a door. The morning ocean, glimmering with a
+
+
+
+
+reflected mist of blue-white cloud and expanding diamond foam, has the eyes of
+one who ponders on strange things; and her intricately woven webs, through
+which dart a myriad coloured fishes, hold the air of some great idle thing which
+will arise presently from the hoary immemorial chasms and stride upon the land.
+
+I was content for many days, and glad that I had chosen the lonely house which
+sat like a small beast upon those rounded cliffs of sand. Among the pleasantly
+aimless amusements fostered by such a life, I took to following the edge of the
+tide (where the waves left a damp, irregular outline rimmed with evanescent
+foam) for long distances; and sometimes I found curious bits of shell in the
+chance litter of the sea. There was an astonishing lot of debris on that inward-
+curving coast which my bare little house overlooked, and I judged that currents
+whose courses diverge from the village beach must reach that spot. At any rate,
+my pockets - when I had any - generally held vast stores of trash; most of which I
+threw away an hour or two after picking it up, wondering why I had kept it.
+Once, however, I found a small bone whose nature I could not identify, save that
+it was certainly nothing out of a fish; and I kept this, along with a large metal
+bead whose minutely carven design was rather unusual. This latter depicted a
+fishy thing against a patterned background of seaweed instead of the usual floral
+or geometrical designs, and was still clearly traceable though worn with years of
+tossing in the surf. Since I had never seen anything like it, I judged that it
+represented some fashion, now forgotten, of a previous year at EUston, where
+similar fads were common.
+
+I had been there perhaps a week when the weather began a gradual change. Each
+stage of this progressive darkening was followed by another subtly intensified,
+so that in the end the entire atmosphere surrounding me had shifted from day to
+evening. This was more obvious to me in a series of mental impressions than in
+what I actually witnessed, for the small house was lonely under the grey skies,
+and there was sometimes a beating wind that came out of the ocean bearing
+moisture. The sun was displaced by long intervals of cloudiness - layers of grey
+mist beyond whose unknown depth the sun lay cut off. Though it might glare
+with the old intensity above that enormous veil, it could not penetrate. The beach
+was a prisoner in a hueless vault for hours at a time, as if something of the night
+were welling into other hours.
+
+Although the wind was invigorating and the ocean whipped into little churning
+spirals of activity by the vagrant flapping, I found the water growing chill, so
+that I could not stay in it as long as I had done previously, and thus I fell into the
+habit of long walks, which - when I was unable to swim - provided the exercise
+that I was so careful to obtain. These walks covered a greater range of sea-edge
+than my previous wanderings, and since the beach extended in a stretch of miles
+beyond the tawdry village, I often found myself wholly isolated upon an endless
+
+
+
+
+area of sand as evening drew close. When this occurred, I would stride hastily
+along the whispering sea-border, following the outline so that I should not
+wander inland and lose my way. And sometimes, when these walks were late (as
+they grew increasingly to be) I would come upon the crouching house that
+looked like a harbinger of the village. Insecure upon the wind- gnawed cliffs, a
+dark blot upon the morbid hues of the ocean sunset, it was more lonely than by
+the full light of either orb; and seemed to my imagination like a mute,
+questioning face turned toward me expectant of some action. That the place was
+isolated I have said, and this at first pleased me; but in that brief evening hour
+when the sun left a gore-splattered decline and darkness lumbered on like an
+expanding shapeless blot, there was an alien presence about the place: a spirit, a
+mood, an impression that came from the surging wind, the gigantic sky, and that
+sea which drooled blackening waves upon a beach grown abruptly strange. At
+these times I felt an uneasiness which had no very definite cause, although my
+solitary nature had made me long accustomed to the ancient silence and the
+ancient voice of nature. These misgivings, to which I could have put no sure
+name, did not affect me long, yet I think now that all the while a gradual
+consciousness of the ocean's immense loneliness crept upon me, a loneliness that
+was made subtly horrible by intimations - which were never more than such - of
+some animation or sentience preventing me from being wholly alone.
+
+The noisy, yellow streets of the town, with their curiously unreal activity, were
+very far away, and when I went there for my evening meal (mistrusting a diet
+entirely of my own ambiguous cooking) I took increasing and quite unreasonable
+care that I should return to the cottage before the late darkness, though I was
+often abroad until ten or so. You will say that such action is unreasonable; that if
+I had feared the darkness in some childish way, I would have entirely avoided it.
+You will ask me why I did not leave the place since its loneliness was depressing
+me. To all this I have no reply, save that whatever unrest I felt, whatever of
+remote disturbance there was to me in brief aspects of the darkening sun or the
+eager salt- brittle wind or in the robe of the dark sea that lay crumpled like an
+enormous garment so close to me, was something which had an origin half in my
+own heart, which showed itself only at fleeting moments, and which had no very
+long effect upon me. In the recurrent days of diamond light, with sportive waves
+flinging blue peaks at the basking shore, the memory of dark moods seemed
+rather incredible, yet only an hour or two afterward I might again experience
+these moods once more, and descend to a dim region of despair.
+
+Perhaps these inward emotions were only a reflection of the sea's own mood, for
+although half of what we see is coloured by the interpretation placed upon it by
+our minds, many of our feelings are shaped quite distinctly by external, physical
+things. The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle
+token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her
+
+
+
+
+mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these
+memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share
+her gaiety or remorse. Since I was doing no work, seeing no person that I knew, I
+was perhaps susceptible to shades of her cryptic meaning which would have
+been overlooked by another. The ocean ruled my life during the whole of that
+late summer; demanding it as recompense for the healing she had brought me.
+
+There were drownings at the beach that year; and while I heard of these only
+casually (such is our indifference to a death which does not concern us, and to
+which we are not witness), I knew that their details were unsavoury. The people
+who died - some of them swimmers of a skill beyond the average - were
+sometimes not found until many days had elapsed, and the hideous vengeance
+of the deep had scourged their rotten bodies. It was as if the sea had dragged
+them into a chasm-lair, and had mulled them about in the darkness until,
+satisfied that they were no longer of any use, she had floated them ashore in a
+ghastly state. No one seemed to know what had caused these deaths. Their
+frequency excited alarm among the timid, since the undertow at Ellston was not
+strong, and since there were known to be no sharks at hand. Whether the bodies
+showed marks of any attacks I did not learn, but the dread of a death which
+moves among the waves and comes on lone people from a lightless, motionless
+place is a dread which men know and do not like. They must quickly find a
+reason for such a death, even if there are no sharks. Since sharks formed only a
+suspected cause, and one never to my knowledge confirmed, the swimmers who
+continued during the rest of the season were on guard against treacherous tides
+rather than against any possible sea-animal. Autumn, indeed, was not a great
+distance off, and some people used this as an excuse for leaving the sea, where
+men were snared by death, and going to the security of inland fields, where one
+cannot even hear the ocean. So August ended, and I had been at the beach many
+days.
+
+There had been a threat of storm since the fourth of the new month, and on the
+sixth, when I set out for a walk in the damp wind, there was a mass of formless
+cloud, colourless and oppressive, above the ruffled leaden sea. The motion of the
+wind, directed toward no especial goal but stirring uneasily, provided a
+sensation of coming animation - a hint of life in the elements which might be the
+long-expected storm. I had eaten my luncheon at Ellston, and though the
+heavens seemed the closing lid of a great casket, I ventured far down the beach
+and away from both the town and my no-longer-to-be-seen house. As the
+universal grey became spotted with a carrion purple - curiously brilliant despite
+its sombre hue - I found that I was several miles from any possible shelter. This,
+however, did not seem very important, for despite the dark skies with their
+added glow of unknown presage I was in a curious mood that flashed through a
+body grown suddenly alert and sensitive to the outline of shapes and meanings
+
+
+
+
+that were previously dim. Obscurely, a memory came to me; suggested by the
+likeness of the scene to one I had imagined when a story was read to me in
+childhood. That tale - of which I had not thought for many years - concerned a
+woman who was loved by the dark-bearded king of an underwater realm of
+blurred cliffs where fish- things lived; and who was taken from the golden-
+haired youth of her troth by a dark being crowned with a priest-like mitre and
+having the features of a withered ape. What had remained in the corner of my
+fancy was the image of cliffs beneath the water against the hueless, dusky no-sky
+of such a realm; and this, though I had forgotten most of the story, was recalled
+quite unexpectedly by the same pattern of cliff and sky which I then beheld. The
+sight was similar to what I had imagined in a year now lost save for random,
+incomplete impressions. Suggestions of this story may have lingered behind
+certain irritating unfinished memories, and in certain values hinted to my senses
+by scenes whose actual worth was bafflingly small. Frequently, in a momentary
+perception, we feel that a feathery landscape (for instance), a woman's dress
+along the curve of a road by afternoon, or the solidity of a century-defying tree
+against the pale morning sky (the conditions more than the object being
+significant) hold something precious, some golden virtue that we must grasp.
+And yet when such a scene or arrangement is viewed later, or from another
+point, we find that it has lost its value and meaning for us. Perhaps this is
+because the thing we see does not hold that elusive quality, but only suggests to
+the mind some very different thing which remains unremembered. The baffled
+mind, not wholly sensing the cause of its flashing appreciation, seizes on the
+object exciting it, and is surprised when there is nothing of worth therein. Thus it
+was when I beheld the purpling clouds. They held the stateliness and mystery of
+old monastery towers at twilight, but their aspect was also that of the cliffs in the
+old fairy-tale. Suddenly reminded of this lost image, I half expected to see, in the
+fine-spun dirty foam and among the waves which were now as if they had been
+poured of flawed black glass, the horrid figure of that ape-faced creature,
+wearing a mitre old with verdigris, advancing from its kingdom in some lost gulf
+to which those waves were sky.
+
+I did not see any such creature from the realm of imagining, but as the chill wind
+veered, slitting the heavens like a rustling knife, there lay in the gloom of
+merging cloud and water only a grey object, like a piece of driftwood, tossing
+obscurely on the foam. This was a considerable distance out, and since it
+vanished shortly, may not have been wood, but a porpoise coming to the
+troubled surface.
+
+I soon found that I had stayed too long contemplating the rising storm and
+linking my early fancies with its grandeur, for an icy rain began spotting down,
+bringing a more uniform gloom upon a scene already too dark for the hour.
+Hurrying along the grey sand, I felt the impact of cold drops upon my back, and
+
+
+
+
+before many moments my clothing was soaked throughout. At first I had run,
+put to flight by the colourless drops whose pattern hung in long linking strands
+from an unseen sky; but after I saw that refuge was too far to reach in anything
+like a dry state, I slackened my pace, and returned home as if I had walked under
+clear skies. There was not much reason to hurry, although I did not idle as upon
+previous occasions. The constraining wet garments were cold upon me, and with
+the gathering darkness, and the wind that rose endlessly from the ocean, I could
+not repress a shiver. Yet there was, beside the discomfort of the precipitous rain,
+an exhilaration latent in the purplish ravelled masses of cloud and the stimulated
+reactions of the body. In a mood half of exultant pleasure from resisting the rain
+(which streamed from me now, and filled my shoes and pockets) and half of
+strange appreciation of those morbid, dominant skies which hovered with dark
+wings above the shifting eternal sea, I tramped along the grey corridor of EUston
+Beach. More rapidly than I had expected the crouching house showed in the
+oblique, flapping rain, and all the weeds of the sand cliff writhed in
+accompaniment to the frantic wind, as if they would uproot themselves to join
+the far-travelling element. Sea and sky had altered not at all, and the scene was
+that which had accompanied me, save that there was now painted upon it the
+hunching roof that seemed to bend from the assailing rain. I hurried up the
+insecure steps, and let myself into a dry room, where, unconsciously surprised
+that I was free of the nagging wind, I stood for a moment with water rilling from
+every inch of me.
+
+There are two windows in the front of that house, one on each side, and these
+face nearly straight upon the ocean; which I now saw half obscured by the
+combined veils of the rain and the imminent night. From these windows I looked
+as I dressed myself in a motley array of dry garments seized from convenient
+hangers and from a chair too laden to sit upon. I was prisoned on all sides by an
+unnaturally increased dusk which had filtered down at some undefined hour
+under cover of the fostering storm. How long I had been on the reaches of wet
+grey sand, or what the real time was, I could not tell, though a moment's search
+produced my watch - fortunately left behind and thus avoiding the uniform
+wetness of my clothing. I half guessed the hour from the dimly seen hands,
+which were only slightly less indecipherable than the surrounding figures. In
+another moment my sight penetrated the gloom (greater in the house than
+beyond the bleared window) and saw that it was 6:45.
+
+There had been no one upon the beach as I came in, and naturally I expected to
+see no further swimmers that night. Yet when I looked again from the window
+there appeared surely to be figures blotting the grime of the wet evening. I
+counted three moving about in some incomprehensible manner, and close to the
+house another - which may not have been a person but a wave-ejected log, for
+the surf was now pounding fiercely. I was startled to no little degree, and
+
+
+
+
+wondered for what purpose those hardy persons stayed out in such a storm. And
+then I thought that perhaps hke myself they had been caught unintentionally in
+the rain and had surrendered to the watery gusts. In another moment, prompted
+by a certain civilized hospitality which overcame my love of solitude, I stepped
+to the door and emerged momentarily (at the cost of another wetting, for the rain
+promptly descended upon me in exultant fury) on the small porch, gesticulating
+toward the people. But whether they did not see me, or did not understand, they
+made no returning signal. Dim in the evening, they stood as if half*surprised, or
+as if they awaited some other action from me. There was in their attitude
+something of that cryptic blankness, signifying anything or nothing, which the
+house wore about itself as seen in the morbid sunset. Abruptly there came to me
+a feeling that a sinister quality lurked about those un-moving figures who chose
+to stay in the rainy night upon a beach deserted by all people, and I closed the
+door with a surge of annoyance which sought all too vainly to disguise a deeper
+emotion of fear; a consuming fright that welled up from the shadows of my
+consciousness. A moment later, when I had stepped to the window, there
+seemed to be nothing outside but the portentous night. Vaguely puzzled, and
+even more vaguely frightened - like one who has seen no alarming thing, but is
+apprehensive of what may be found in the dark street he is soon compelled to
+cross - I decided that I had very possibly seen no one; and that the murky air had
+deceived me.
+
+The aura of isolation about the place increased that night, though just out of sight
+on the northward beach a hundred houses rose in the rainy darkness, their light
+bleared and yellow above streets of polished glass, like goblin-eyes reflected in
+an oily forest pool. Yet because I could not see them, or even reach them in bad
+weather - since I had no car nor any way to leave the crouching house except by
+walking in the figure- haunted darkness - I realized quite suddenly that I was, to
+all intents, alone with the dreary sea that rose and subsided unseen, unkenned,
+in the mist. And the voice of the sea had become a hoarse groan, like that of
+something wounded which shifts about before trying to rise.
+
+Fighting away the prevalent gloom with a soiled lamp - for the darkness crept in
+at my windows and sat peering obscurely at me from the corners like a patient
+animal - I prepared my food, since I had no intentions of going to the village. The
+hour seemed incredibly advanced, though it was not yet nine o'clock when I
+went to bed. Darkness had come early and furtively, and throughout the
+remainder of my stay lingered evasively over each scene and action which I
+beheld. Something had settled out of the night - something forever undefined,
+but stirring a latent sense within me, so that I was like a beast expecting the
+momentary rustle of an enemy.
+
+
+
+
+There were hours of wind, and sheets of the downpour flapped endlessly on the
+meagre walls barring it from me. Lulls came in which I heard the mumbling sea,
+and I could guess that large formless waves jostled one another in the pallid
+whine of the winds, and flung on the beach a spray bitter with salt. Yet in the
+very monotony of the restless elements I found a lethargic note, a sound that
+beguiled me, after a time, into slumber grey and colourless as the night. The sea
+continued its mad monologue, and the wind her nagging; but these were shut
+out by the walls of unconsciousness, and for a time the night ocean was banished
+from a sleeping mind.
+
+Morning brought an enfeebled sun - a sun like that which men will see when the
+earth is old, if there are any men left; a sun more weary than the shrouded,
+moribund sky. Faint echo of its old image, Phoebus strove to pierce the ragged,
+ambiguous clouds as I awoke, at moments sending a wash of pale gold rippling
+across the northwestern interior of my house, at others waning till it was only a
+luminous ball, like some incredible plaything forgotten on the celestial lawn.
+After a while the falling rain - which must have continued throughout the
+previous night - succeeded in washing away those vestiges of purple cloud
+which had been like the ocean cliffs in an old fairy-tale. Cheated alike of the
+setting and rising sun, that day merged with the day before, as if the intervening
+storm had not ushered a long darkness into the world, but had swollen and
+subsided into one long afternoon. Gaining heart, the furtive sun exerted all his
+force in dispelling the old mist, streaked now like a dirty window, and cast it
+from his realm. The shallow blue day advanced as those grimy wisps retreated,
+and the loneliness which had encircled me welled back into a watchful place of
+retreat, whence it went no farther, but crouched and waited.
+
+The ancient brightness was now once more upon the sun, and the old glitter on
+the waves, whose playful blue shapes had flocked upon that coast ere man was
+born, and would rejoice unseen when he was forgotten in the sepulchre of time.
+Influenced by these thin assurances, like one who believes the smile of friendship
+on an enemy's features, I opened my door, and as it swung outward, a black spot
+upon the inward burst of light, I saw the beach washed clean of any track, as if
+no foot before mine had disturbed the smooth sand. With the quick lift of spirit
+that follows a period of uneasy depression, I felt - in a purely yielding fashion
+and without volition - that my own memory was washed clean of all the mistrust
+and suspicion and disease-like fear of a lifetime, just as the filth of the water's
+edge succumbs to a particularly high tide and is carried out of sight. There was a
+scent of soaked, brackish grass, like the mouldy pages of a book, commingled
+with a sweet odour born of the hot sunlight upon inland meadows, and these
+were borne into me like an exhilarating drink, seeping and tingling through my
+veins as if they would convey to me something of their own impalpable nature,
+and float me dizzily in the aimless breeze. And conspiring with these things, the
+
+
+
+
+sun continued to shower upon me, like the rain of yesterday, an incessant array
+of bright spears; as if it also wished to hide that suspected background presence
+which moved beyond my sight and was betrayed only by a careless rustle on the
+borders of my consciousness, or by the aspect of blank figures staring out of an
+ocean void. That sun, a fierce ball solitary in the whirlpool of infinity, was like a
+horde of golden moths against my upturned face. A bubbling white grail of fire
+divine and incomprehensible, it withheld from me a thousand promised mirages
+where it granted one. For the sun did actually seem to indicate realms, secure
+and fanciful, where if I but knew the path I might wander in this curious
+exultation. Such things come of our own natures, for life has never yielded for
+one moment her secrets, and it is only in our interpretation of their hinted images
+that we may find ecstasy or dullness, according to a deliberately induced mood.
+Yet ever and again we must succumb to her deceptions, believing for the
+moment that we may this time find the withheld joy. And in this way the fresh
+sweetness of the wind, on a morning following the haunted darkness (whose evil
+intimations had given me a greater uneasiness than any menace to my body),
+whispered to me of ancient mysteries only half-linked with earth, and of
+pleasures that were the sharper because I felt that I might experience only a part
+of them. The sun and wind and that scent that rose upon them told me of
+festivals of gods whose senses are a millionfold more poignant than man's and
+whose joys are a millionfold more subtle and prolonged. These things, they
+hinted, could be mine if I gave myself wholly into their bright deceptive power;
+and the sun, a crouching god with naked celestial flesh, an unknown, too-mighty
+furnace upon which no eye might look, seemed almost sacred in the glow of my
+newly sharpened emotions. The ethereal thunderous light it gave was something
+before which all things must worship astonished. The slinking leopard in his
+green- chasmed forest must have paused briefly to consider its leaf-scattered
+rays, and all things nurtured by it must have cherished its bright message on
+such a day. For when it is absent in the far reaches of eternity, earth will be lost
+and black against an illimitable void. That morning, in which I shared the fire of
+life, and whose brief moment of pleasure is secure against the ravenous years,
+was astir with the beckoning of strange things whose elusive names can never be
+written.
+
+As I made my way toward the village, wondering how it might look after a long-
+needed scrubbing by the industrious rain, I saw, tangled in a glimmer of sunlit
+moisture that was poured over it like a yellow vintage, a small object like a hand,
+some twenty feet ahead of me, and touched by the repetitious foam. The shock
+and disgust born in my startled mind when I saw that it was indeed a piece of
+rotten flesh overcame my new contentment, and engendered a shocked suspicion
+that it might actually be a hand. Certainly, no fish, or part of one, could assume
+that look, and I thought I saw mushy fingers wed in decay. I turned the thing
+over with my foot, not wishing to touch so foul an object, and it adhered stickily
+
+
+
+
+to the leather of the shoe, as if clutching with the grasp of corruption. The thing,
+whose shape was nearly lost, held too much resemblance to what I feared it
+might be, and I pushed it into the willing grasp of a seething wave, which took it
+from sight with an alacrity not often shown by those ravelled edges of the sea.
+
+Perhaps I should have reported my find, yet its nature was too ambiguous to
+make action natural. Since it had been partly eaten by some ocean-dwelling
+monstrousness, I did not think it identifiable enough to form evidence of an
+unknown but possible tragedy. The numerous drownings, of course, came into
+my mind - as well as other things lacking in wholesomeness, some of which
+remained only as possibilities. Whatever the storm-dislodged fragment may
+have been, and whether it were fish or some animal akin to man, I have never
+spoken of it until now. And after all, there was no proof that it had not merely
+been distorted by rottenness into that shape.
+
+I approached the town, sickened by the presence of such an object amid the
+apparent beauty of the clean beach, though it was horribly typical of the
+indifference of death in a nature which mingles rottenness with beauty, and
+perhaps loves the former more. In Ellston I heard of no recent drowning or other
+mishap of the sea, and found no reference to such in the columns of the local
+paper - the only one I read during my stay.
+
+It is difficult to describe the mental state in which succeeding days found me.
+Always susceptible to morbid emotions whose dark anguish might be induced
+by things outside myself, or might spring from the abysses of my own spirit, I
+was ridden by a feeling which was not fear or despair, or anything akin to these,
+but was rather a perception of the brief hideousness and underlying filth of life -
+a feeling partly a reflection of my internal nature and partly a result of breedings
+induced by that gnawed rotten object which may have been a hand. In those
+days my mind was a place of shadowed cliffs and dark moving figures, like the
+ancient unsuspected realm which the fairy-tale recalled to me. I felt, in brief
+agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe,
+in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars;
+a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted
+thing.
+
+The hours I had previously spent in something of regained health, contentment,
+and physical well-being were given now (as if those days of the previous week
+were something definitely ended) to an indolence like that of a man who no
+longer cares to live. I was engulfed by a piteous lethargic fear of some ineluctable
+doom which would be, I felt, the completed hate of the peering stars and of the
+black enormous waves that hoped to clasp my bones within them - the
+vengeance of all the indifferent, horrendous majesty of the night ocean.
+
+
+
+
+Something of the darkness and restlessness of the sea had penetrated my heart,
+so that I hved in an unreasoning, unperceiving torment; a torment none the less
+acute because of the subtlety of its origin and the strange, unmotivated quality of
+its vampiric existence. Before my eyes lay the phantasmagoria of the purpling
+clouds, the strange silver bauble, the recurrent stagnant foam, the loneliness of
+that bleak-eyed house, and the mockery of the puppet town. I no longer went to
+the village, for it seemed only a travesty of life. Like my own soul, it stood upon
+a dark enveloping sea - a sea grown slowly hateful to me. And among these
+images, corrupt and festering, dwelt that of an object whose human contours left
+ever smaller the doubt of what it once had been.
+
+These scribbled words can never tell of the hideous loneliness (something I did
+not even wish assuaged, so deeply was it embedded in my heart) which had
+insinuated itself within me, mumbling of terrible and unknown things stealthily
+circling nearer. It was not a madness: rather was it a too clear and naked
+perception of the darkness beyond this frail existence, lit by a momentary sun no
+more secure than ourselves; a realization of futility that few can experience and
+ever again touch the life about them; a knowledge that turn as I might, battle as I
+might with all the remaining power of my spirit, I could neither win an inch of
+ground from the inimical universe, nor hold for even a moment the life entrusted
+to me. Fearing death as I did life, burdened with a nameless dread, yet unwilling
+to leave the scene evoking it, I awaited whatever consummating horror was
+shifting itself in the immense region beyond the walls of consciousness.
+
+Thus autumn found me, and what I had gained from the sea was lost back into it.
+Autumn on the beaches - a drear time betokened by no scarlet leaf nor any other
+accustomed sign. A frightening sea which changes not, though man changes.
+There was only a chilling of the waters, in which I no longer cared to enter - a
+further darkening of the pall-like sky, as if eternities of snow were waiting to
+descend upon the ghastly waves. Once that descent began, it would never cease,
+but would continue beneath the white and the yellow and the crimson sun, and
+beneath that ultimate small ruby which shall yield only to the futilities of night.
+The once friendly waters babbled meaningfully at me, and eyed me with a
+strange regard, yet whether the darkness of the scene were a reflection of my
+own breedings or whether the gloom within me were caused by what lay
+without, I could not have told. Upon the beach and me alike had fallen a shadow,
+like that of a bird which flies silently overhead - a bird whose watching eyes we
+do not suspect till the image on the ground repeats the image in the sky, and we
+look suddenly upward to find that something has been circling above us hitherto
+unseen.
+
+The day was in late September, and the town had closed the resorts where mad
+frivolity ruled empty, fear- haunted lives, and where raddled puppets performed
+
+
+
+
+their summer antics. The puppets were cast aside, smeared with the painted
+smiles and frowns they had last assumed, and there were not a hundred people
+left in the town. Again the gaudy, stucco-fronted buildings lining the shore were
+permitted to crumble undisturbed in the wind. As the month advanced to the
+day of which I speak, there grew in me the light of a grey infernal dawn, wherein
+I felt some dark thaumaturgy would be completed. Since I feared such a
+thaumaturgy less than a continuance of my horrible suspicions -less than the
+too-elusive hints of something monstrous lurking behind the great stage - it was
+with more speculation than actual fear that I waited unendingly for the day of
+horror which seemed to be nearing. The day, I repeat, was late in September,
+though whether the 22nd or 23rd I am uncertain. Such details have fled before
+the recollection of those uncompleted happenings - episodes with which no
+orderly existence should be plagued, because of the damnable suggestions (and
+only suggestions) they contain. I knew the time with an intuitive distress of spirit
+- a recognition too deep for me to explain. Throughout those daylight hours I
+was expectant of the night; impatient, perhaps, so that the sunlight passed like a
+half-glimpsed reflection in rippled water - a day of whose events I recall nothing.
+
+It was long since that portentous storm had cast a shadow over the beach, and I
+had determined, after hesitations caused by nothing tangible, to leave EUston,
+since the year was chilling and there was no return to my earlier contentment.
+When a telegram came for me (lying two days in the Western Union office before
+I was located, so little was my name known) saying that my design had been
+accepted - winning above all others in the contest - 1 set a date for leaving. This
+news, which earlier in the year would have affected me strongly, I now received
+with a curious apathy. It seemed as unrelated to the unreality about me, as little
+pertinent to me, as if it were directed to another person whom I did not know,
+and whose message had come to me through some accident. None the less, it was
+that which forced me to complete my plans and leave the cottage by the shore.
+
+There were only four nights of my stay remaining when there occurred the last of
+those events whose meaning lies more in the darkly sinister impression
+surrounding them than in anything obviously threatening. Night had settled
+over Ellston and the coast, and a pile of soiled dishes attested both to my recent
+meal and to my lack of industry. Darkness came as I sat with a cigarette before
+the seaward window, and it was a liquid which gradually filled the sky, washing
+in a floating moon, monstrously elevated. The flat sea bordering upon the
+gleaming sand, the utter absence of tree or figure or life of any sort, and the
+regard of that high moon made the vastness of my surroundings abruptly clear.
+There were only a few stars pricking through, as if to accentuate by their
+smallness the majesty of the lunar orb and of the restless shifting tide.
+
+
+
+
+I had stayed indoors, fearing somehow to go out before the sea on such a night of
+shapeless portent, but I heard it mumbhng secrets of an incredible lore. Borne to
+me on a wind out of nowhere was the breath of some strange palpitant life - the
+embodiment of all I had felt and of all I had suspected - stirring now in the
+chasms of the sky or beneath the mute waves. In what place this mystery turned
+from an ancient, horrible slumber I could not tell, but like one who stands by a
+figure lost in sleep, knowing that it will awake in a moment, I crouched by the
+window, holding a nearly burnt-out cigarette, and faced the rising moon.
+
+Gradually there passed into that never-stirring landscape a brilliance intensified
+by the overhead glimmerings, and I seemed more and more under some
+compulsion to watch whatever might follow. The shadows were draining from
+the beach, and I felt that with them were all which might have been a harbour for
+my thoughts when the hinted thing should come. Where any of them did remain
+they were ebon and blank: still lumps of darkness sprawling beneath the cruel
+brilliant rays. The endless tableau of the lunar orb - dead now, whatever her past
+was, and cold as the unhuman sepulchres she bears amid the ruin of dusty
+centuries older than men - and the sea - astir, perhaps, with some unkenned life,
+some forbidden sentience - confronted me with a horrible vividness. I arose and
+shut the window; partly because of an inward prompting, but mostly, I think, as
+an excuse for transferring momentarily the stream of thought. No sound came to
+me now as I stood before the closed panes. Minutes or eternities were alike. I was
+waiting, like my own fearing heart and the motionless scene beyond, for the
+token of some ineffable life. I had set the lamp upon a box in the western corner
+of the room, but the moon was brighter, and her bluish rays invaded places
+where the lamplight was faint. The ancient glow of the round silent orb lay upon
+the beach as it had lain for aeons, and I waited in a torment of expectancy made
+doubly acute by the delay in fulfillment and the uncertainty of what strange
+completion was to come.
+
+Outside the crouching hut a white illumination suggested vague spectral forms
+whose unreal, phantasmal motions seemed to taunt my blindness, just as
+unheard voices mocked my eager listening. For countless moments I was still, as
+if Time and the tolling of her great bell were hushed into nothingness. And yet
+there was nothing which I might fear: the moon-chiselled shadows were
+unnatural in no contour, and veiled nothing from my eyes. The night was silent -
+I knew that despite my closed window - and all the stars were fixed mournfully
+in a listening heaven of dark grandeur. No motion from me then, or word now,
+could reveal my plight, or tell of the fear-racked brain imprisoned in flesh which
+dared not break the silence, for all the torture it brought. As if expectant of death,
+and assured that nothing could serve to banish the soul-peril I confronted I
+crouched with a forgotten cigarette in my hand. A silent world gleamed beyond
+the cheap, dirty windows, and in one corner of the room a pair of dirty oars.
+
+
+
+
+placed there before my arrival, shared the vigil of my spirit. The lamp burned
+endlessly, yielding a sick light hued like a corpse's flesh. Glancing at it now and
+again for the desperate distraction it gave, I saw that many bubbles
+unaccountably rose and vanished in the kerosene-filled base. Curiously enough,
+there was no heat from the wick. And suddenly I became aware that the night as
+a whole was neither warm nor cold, but strangely neutral - as if all physical
+forces were suspended, and all the laws of a calm existence disrupted.
+
+Then, with an unheard splash which sent from the silver water to the shore a line
+of ripples echoed in fear by my heart, a swimming thing emerged beyond the
+breakers. The figure may have been that of a dog, a human being, or something
+more strange. It could not have known that I watched - perhaps it did not care -
+but like a distorted fish it swam across the mirrored stars and dived beneath the
+surface. After a moment it came up again, and this time, since it was closer, I saw
+that it was carrying something across its shoulder. I knew, then, that it could be
+no animal, and that it was a man or something like a man, which came toward
+the land from a dark ocean. But it swam with a horrible ease.
+
+As I watched, dread-filled and passive, with the fixed stare of one who awaits
+death in another yet knows he cannot avert it, the swimmer approached the
+shore - though too far down the southward beach for me to discern its outlines or
+features. Obscurely loping, with sparks of moonlit foam scattered by its quick
+gait, it emerged and was lost among the inland dunes.
+
+Now I was possessed by a sudden recurrence of fear, which had died away in the
+previous moments. There was a tingling coldness all over me - though the room,
+whose window I dared not open now, was stuffy. I thought it would be very
+horrible if something were to enter a window which was not closed.
+
+Now that I could no longer see the figure, I felt that it lingered somewhere in the
+close shadows, or peered hideously at me from whatever window I did not
+watch. And so I turned my gaze, eagerly and frantically, to each successive pane;
+dreading that I might indeed behold an intrusive regarding face, yet unable to
+keep myself from the terrifying inspection. But though I watched for hours, there
+was no longer anything upon the beach.
+
+So the night passed, and with it began the ebbing of that strangeness - a
+strangeness which had surged up like an evil brew within a pot, had mounted to
+the very rim in a breathless moment, had paused uncertainly there, and had
+subsided, taking with it whatever unknown message it had borne. Like the stars
+that promise the revelation of terrible and glorious memories, goad us into
+worship by this deception, and then impart nothing, I had come frighteningly
+near to the capture of an old secret which ventured close to man's haunts and
+
+
+
+
+lurked cautiously just beyond the edge of the known. Yet in the end I had
+nothing. I was given only a glimpse of the furtive thing; a glimpse made obscure
+by the veils of ignorance. I cannot even conceive what might have shown itself
+had I been too close to that swimmer who went shoreward instead of into the
+ocean. I do not know what might have come if the brew had passed the rim of
+the pot and poured outward in a swift cascade of revelation. The night ocean
+withheld whatever it had nurtured. I shall know nothing more.
+
+Even yet I do not know why the ocean holds such a fascination for me. But then,
+perhaps none of us can solve those things - they exist in defiance of all
+explanation. There are men, and wise men, who do not like the sea and its
+lapping surf on yellow shores; and they think us strange who love the mystery of
+the ancient and unending deep. Yet for me there is a haunting and inscrutable
+glamour in all the ocean's moods. It is in the melancholy silver foam beneath the
+moon's waxen corpse; it hovers over the silent and eternal waves that beat on
+naked shores; it is there when all is lifeless save for unknown shapes that glide
+through sombre depths. And when I behold the awesome billows surging in
+endless strength, there comes upon me an ecstasy akin to fear; so that I must
+abase myself before this mightiness, that I may not hate the clotted waters and
+their overwhelming beauty.
+
+Vast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they
+return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth,
+nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters. And these shall beat on dark
+shores in thunderous foam, though none shall remain in that dying world to
+watch the cold light of the enfeebled moon playing on the swirling tides and
+coarse-grained sand. On the deep's margin shall rest only a stagnant foam,
+gathering about the shells and bones of perished shapes that dwelt within the
+waters. Silent, flabby things will toss and roll along empty shores, their sluggish
+life extinct. Then all shall be dark, for at last even the white moon on the distant
+waves shall wink out. Nothing shall be left, neither above nor below the sombre
+waters. And until that last millennium, and beyond the perishing of all other
+things, the sea will thunder and toss throughout the dismal night.
+
+
+
+
+The Thing in the Moonlight - with J.
+Chapman Miske
+
+Written November 24, 1927
+
+The following is based, in places word for word, on a letter Lovecraft wrote to
+Donald Wandrei on November 24, 1927. The first three and last five paragraphs
+were added by J. Chapman Miske; the remainder is almost verbatim Lovecraft.
+
+In the letter, Lovecraft reveals that his "dreams occasionally approach'd the
+phantastical in character, tho' falling somewhat short of coherence." Many of his
+stories were inspired by dreams.
+
+Morgan is not a literary man; in fact he cannot speak English with any degree of
+coherency. That is what makes me wonder about the words he wrote, though
+others have laughed.
+
+He was alone the evening it happened. Suddenly an unconquerable urge to write
+came over him, and taking pen in hand he wrote the following:
+
+My name is Howard Phillips. I live at 66 College Street, in Providence, Rhode
+Island. On November 24, 1927-for I know not even what the year may be now-, I
+fell asleep and dreamed, since when I have been unable to awaken.
+
+My dream began in a dank, reed-choked marsh that lay under a gray autumn
+sky, with a rugged cliff of lichen-crusted stone rising to the north. Impelled by
+some obscure quest, I ascended a rift or cleft in this beetling precipice, noting as I
+did so the black mouths of many fearsome burrows extending from both walls
+into the depths of the stony plateau.
+
+At several points the passage was roofed over by the choking of the upper parts
+of the narrow fissure; these places being exceeding dark, and forbidding the
+perception of such burrows as may have existed there. In one such dark space I
+felt conscious of a singular accession of fright, as if some subtle and bodiless
+emanation from the abyss were engulfing my spirit; but the blackness was too
+great for me to perceive the source of my alarm.
+
+At length I emerged upon a tableland of moss-grown rock and scanty soil, lit by
+a faint moonlight which had replaced the expiring orb of day. Casting my eyes
+about, I beheld no living object; but was sensible of a very peculiar stirring far
+below me, amongst the whispering rushes of the pestilential swamp I had lately
+quitted.
+
+
+
+
+After walking for some distance, I encountered the rusty tracks of a street
+railway, and the worm-eaten poles which still held the limp and sagging trolley
+wire. Following this line, I soon came upon a yellow, vestibuled car numbered
+1852-of a plain, double-trucked type common from 1900 to 1910. It was
+untenanted, but evidently ready to start; the trolley being on the wire and the air-
+brake now and then throbbing beneath the floor. I boarded it and looked vainly
+about for the light switch-noting as I did so the absence of the controller handle,
+which thus implied the brief absence of the motorman. Then I sat down in one of
+the cross seats of the vehicle. Presently I heard a swishing in the sparse grass
+toward the left, and saw the dark forms of two men looming up in the
+moonlight. They had the regulation caps of a railway company, and I could not
+doubt but that they were conductor and motorman. Then one of them sniffed
+with singular sharpness, and raised his face to howl to the moon. The other
+dropped on all fours to run toward the car.
+
+I leaped up at once and raced madly out of that car and across endless leagues of
+plateau till exhaustion forced me to stop-doing this not because the conductor
+had dropped on all fours, but because the face of the motorman was a mere
+white cone tapering to one blood- red- tentacle. . .
+
+I was aware that I only dreamed, but the very awareness was not pleasant. Since
+that fearful night, I have prayed only for awakening-it has not come!
+
+Instead I have found myself an inhabitant of this terrible dream-world! That first
+night gave way to dawn, and I wandered aimlessly over the lonely swamp-lands.
+When night came, I still wandered, hoping for awakening. But suddenly I parted
+the weeds and saw before me the ancient railway car-and to one side a cone-
+faced thing lifted its head and in the streaming moonlight howled strangely!
+
+It has been the same each day. Night takes me always to that place of horror. I
+have tried not moving, with the coming of nightfall, but I must walk in my
+slumber, for always I awaken with the thing of dread howling before me in the
+pale moonlight, and I turn and flee madly.
+
+God! when will I awaken?
+
+That is what Morgan wrote. I would go to 66 College Street in Providence, but I
+fear for what I might find there.
+
+
+
+
+The Trap - with Henry S. Whitehead
+
+Written late 1931
+
+It was on a certain Thursday morning in December that the whole thing began
+with that unaccountable motion I thought I saw in my antique Copenhagen
+mirror. Something, it seemed to me, stirred - something reflected in the glass,
+though I was alone in my quarters. I paused and looked intently, then, deciding
+that the effect must be a pure illusion, resumed the interrupted brushing of my
+hair.
+
+I had discovered the old mirror, covered with dust and cobwebs, in an
+outbuilding of an abandoned estate- house in Santa Cruz's sparsely settled
+Northside territory, and had brought it to the United States from the Virgin
+Islands. The venerable glass was dim from more than two hundred years'
+exposure to a tropical climate, and the graceful ornamentation along the top of
+the gilt frame had been badly smashed. I had had the detached pieces set back
+into the frame before placing it in storage with my other belongings.
+
+Now, several years later, I was staying half as a guest and half as a tutor at the
+private school of my old friend Browne on a windy Connecticut hillside -
+occupying an unused wing in one of the dormitories, where I had two rooms and
+a hallway to myself. The old mirror, stowed securely in mattresses, was the first
+of my possessions to be unpacked on my arrival; and I had set it up majestically
+in the living-room, on top of an old rosewood console which had belonged to my
+great-grandmother.
+
+The door of my bedroom was just opposite that of the living-room, with a
+hallway between; and I had noticed that by looking into my chiffonier glass I
+could see the larger mirror through the two doorways - which was exactly like
+glancing down an endless, though diminishing, corridor. On this Thursday
+morning I thought I saw a curious suggestion of motion down that normally
+empty corridor - but, as I have said, soon dismissed the notion.
+
+When I reached the dining-room I found everyone complaining of the cold, and
+learned that the school's heating-plant was temporarily out of order. Being
+especially sensitive to low temperatures, I was myself an acute sufferer; and at
+once decided not to brave any freezing schoolroom that day. Accordingly I
+invited my class to come over to my living-room for an informal session around
+my grate-fire - a suggestion which the boys received enthusiastically.
+
+
+
+
+After the session one of the boys, Robert Grandison, asked if he might remain;
+since he had no appointment for the second morning period. I told him to stay,
+and welcome. He sat down to study in front of the fireplace in a comfortable
+chair.
+
+It was not long, however, before Robert moved to another chair somewhat
+farther away from the freshly replenished blaze, this change bringing him
+directly opposite the old mirror. From my own chair in another part of the room
+I noticed how fixedly he began to look at the dim, cloudy glass, and, wondering
+what so greatly interested him, was reminded of my own experience earlier that
+morning. As time passed he continued to gaze, a slight frown knitting his brows.
+
+At last I quietly asked him what had attracted his attention. Slowly, and still
+wearing the puzzled frown, he looked over and replied rather cautiously:
+
+"It's the corrugations in the glass - or whatever they are, Mr. Canevin. I was
+noticing how they all seem to run from a certain point. Look - I'll show you what
+I mean."
+
+The boy jumped up, went over to the mirror, and placed his finger on a point
+near its lower left-hand corner.
+
+"It's right here, sir," he explained, turning to look toward me and keeping his
+finger on the chosen spot.
+
+His muscular action in turning may have pressed his finger against the glass.
+Suddenly he withdrew his hand as though with some slight effort, and with a
+faintly muttered "Ouch." Then he looked at the glass in obvious mystification.
+
+"What happened?" I asked, rising and approaching.
+
+"Why - it..." He seemed embarrassed. "It - I - felt - well, as though it were
+pulling my finger into it. Seems - er - perfectly foolish, sir, but - well - it was a
+most peculiar sensation." Robert had an unusual vocabulary for his fifteen years.
+
+I came over and had him show me the exact spot he meant.
+
+"You'll think I'm rather a fool, sir," he said shamefacedly, "but - well, from right
+here I can't be absolutely sure. From the chair it seemed to be clear enough."
+
+Now thoroughly interested, I sat down in the chair Robert had occupied and
+looked at the spot he selected on the mirror. Instantly the thing "jumped out at
+me." Unmistakably, from that particular angle, all the many whorls in the
+
+
+
+
+ancient glass appeared to converge like a large number of spread strings held in
+one hand and radiating out in streams.
+
+Getting up and crossing to the mirror, I could no longer see the curious spot.
+Only from certain angles, apparently, was it visible. Directly viewed, that portion
+of the mirror did not even give back a normal reflection - for I could not see my
+face in it. Manifestly I had a minor puzzle on my hands.
+
+Presently the school gong sounded, and the fascinated Robert Grandison
+departed hurriedly, leaving me alone with my odd little problem in optics. I
+raised several window-shades, crossed the hallway, and sought for the spot in
+the chiffonier mirror's reflection. Finding it readily, I looked very intently and
+thought I again detected something of the "motion." I craned my neck, and at
+last, at a certain angle of vision, the thing again "jumped out at me."
+
+The vague "motion" was now positive and definite - an appearance of torsional
+movement, or of whirling; much like a minute yet intense whirlwind or
+waterspout, or a huddle of autumn leaves dancing circularly in an eddy of wind
+along a level lawn. It was, like the earth's, a double motion - around and around,
+and at the same time inward, as if the whorls poured themselves endlessly
+toward some point inside the glass. Fascinated, yet realizing that the thing must
+be an illusion, I grasped an impression of quite distinct suction, and thought of
+Robert's embarrassed explanation: "I felt as though it were pulling my finger
+into it."
+
+A kind of slight chill ran suddenly up and down my backbone. There was
+something here distinctly worth looking into. And as the idea of investigation
+came to me, I recalled the rather wistful expression of Robert Grandison when
+the gong called him to class. I remembered how he had looked back over his
+shoulder as he walked obediently out into the hallway, and resolved that he
+should be included in whatever analysis I might make of this little mystery.
+
+Exciting events connected with that same Robert, however, were soon to chase
+all thoughts of the mirror from my consciousness for a time. I was away all that
+afternoon, and did not return to the school until the five-fifteen "Call-Over" - a
+general assembly at which the boys' attendance was compulsory. Dropping in at
+this function with the idea of picking Robert up for a session with the mirror, I
+was astonished and pained to find him absent - a very unusual and
+unaccountable thing in his case. That evening Browne told me that the boy had
+actually disappeared, a search in his room, in the gymnasium, and in all other
+accustomed places being unavailing, though all his belongings - including his
+outdoor clothing - were in their proper places.
+
+
+
+
+He had not been encountered on the ice or with any of the hiking groups that
+afternoon, and telephone calls to all the school-catering merchants of the
+neighborhood were in vain. There was, in short, no record of his having been
+seen since the end of the lesson periods at two-fifteen; when he had turned up
+the stairs toward his room in Dormitory Number Three.
+
+When the disappearance was fully realized, the resulting sensation was
+tremendous throughout the school. Browne, as headmaster, had to bear the
+brunt of it; and such an unprecedented occurrence in his well- regulated, highly
+organized institution left him quite bewildered. It was learned that Robert had
+not run away to his home in western Pennsylvania, nor did any of the searching-
+parties of boys and masters find any trace of him in the snowy countryside
+around the school. So far as could be seen, he had simply vanished.
+
+Robert's parents arrived on the afternoon of the second day after his
+disappearance. They took their trouble quietly, though, of course, they were
+staggered by this unexpected disaster. Browne looked ten years older for it, but
+there was absolutely nothing that could be done. By the fourth day the case had
+settled down in the opinion of the school as an insoluble mystery. Mr. and Mrs.
+Grandison went reluctantly back to their home, and on the following morning
+the ten days' Christmas vacation began.
+
+Boys and masters departed in anything but the usual holiday spirit; and Browne
+and his wife were left, along with the servants, as my only fellow-occupants of
+the big place. Without the masters and boys it seemed a very hollow shell
+indeed.
+
+That afternoon I sat in front of my grate-fire thinking about Robert's
+disappearance and evolving all sorts of fantastic theories to account for it. By
+evening I had acquired a bad headache, and ate a light supper accordingly. Then,
+after a brisk walk around the massed buildings, I returned to my living-room
+and took up the burden of thought once more.
+
+A little after ten o'clock I awakened in my armchair, stiff and chilled, from a doze
+during which I had let the fire go out. I was physically uncomfortable, yet
+mentally aroused by a peculiar sensation of expectancy and possible hope. Of
+course it had to do with the problem that was harassing me. For I had started
+from that inadvertent nap with a curious, persistent idea - the odd idea that a
+tenuous, hardly recognizable Robert Grandison had been trying desperately to
+communicate with me. I finally went to bed with one conviction unreasoningly
+strong in my mind. Somehow I was sure that young Robert Grandison was still
+alive.
+
+
+
+
+That I should be receptive of such a notion will not seem strange to those who
+know my long residence in the West Indies and my close contact with
+unexplained happenings there. It will not seem strange, either, that I fell asleep
+with an urgent desire to establish some sort of mental communication with the
+missing boy. Even the most prosaic scientists affirm, with Freud, Jung, and
+Adler, that the subconscious mind is most open to external impressions in sleep;
+though such impressions are seldom carried over intact into the waking state.
+
+Going a step further and granting the existence of telepathic forces, it follows
+that such forces must act most strongly on a sleeper; so that if I were ever to get a
+definite message from Robert, it would be during a period of profoundest
+slumber. Of course, I might lose the message in waking; but my aptitude for
+retaining such things has been sharpened by types of mental discipline picked up
+in various obscure corners of the globe.
+
+I must have dropped asleep instantaneously, and from the vividness of my
+dreams and the absence of wakeful intervals I judge that my sleep was a very
+deep one. It was six-forty-five when I awakened, and there still lingered with me
+certain impressions which I knew were carried over from the world of somnolent
+cerebration. Filling my mind was the vision of Robert Grandison strangely
+transformed to a boy of a dull greenish dark-blue color; Robert desperately
+endeavoring to communicate with me by means of speech, yet finding some
+almost insuperable difficulty in so doing. A wall of curious spatial separation
+seemed to stand between him and me - a mysterious, invisible wall which
+completely baffled us both.
+
+I had seen Robert as though at some distance, yet queerly enough he seemed at
+the same time to be just beside me. He was both larger and smaller than in real
+life, his apparent size varying directly, instead of inversely, with the distance as
+he advanced and retreated in the course of conversation. That is, he grew larger
+instead of smaller to my eye when he stepped away or backwards, and vice
+versa; as if the laws of perspective in his case had been wholly reversed. His
+aspect was misty and uncertain - as if he lacked sharp or permanent outlines; and
+the anomalies of his coloring and clothing baffled me utterly at first.
+
+At some point in my dream Robert's vocal efforts had finally crystallized into
+audible speech - albeit speech of an abnormal thickness and dullness. I could not
+for a time understand anything he said, and even in the dream racked my brain
+for a clue to where he was, what he wanted to tell, and why his utterance was so
+clumsy and unintelligible. Then little by little I began to distinguish words and
+phrases, the very first of which sufficed to throw my dreaming self into the
+wildest excitement and to establish a certain mental connection which had
+
+
+
+
+previously refused to take conscious form because of the utter incredibility of
+what it implied.
+
+I do not know how long I listened to those halting words amidst my deep
+slumber, but hours must have passed while the strangely remote speaker
+struggled on with his tale. There was revealed to me such a circumstance as I
+cannot hope to make others believe without the strongest corroborative evidence,
+yet which I was quite ready to accept as truth - both in the dream and after
+waking - because of my former contacts with uncanny things. The boy was
+obviously watching my face - mobile in receptive sleep - as he choked along; for
+about the time I began to comprehend him, his own expression brightened and
+gave signs of gratitude and hope.
+
+Any attempt to hint at Robert's message, as it lingered in my ears after a sudden
+awakening in the cold, brings this narrative to a point where I must choose my
+words with the greatest care. Everything involved is so difficult to record that
+one tends to flounder helplessly. I have said that the revelation established in my
+mind a certain connection which reason had not allowed me to formulate
+consciously before. This connection, I need no longer hesitate to hint, had to do
+with the old Copenhagen mirror whose suggestions of motion had so impressed
+me on the morning of the disappearance, and whose whorl-like contours and
+apparent illusions of suction had later exerted such a disquieting fascination on
+both Robert and me.
+
+Resolutely, though my outer consciousness had previously rejected what my
+intuition would have liked to imply, it could reject that stupendous conception
+no longer. What was fantasy in the tale of "Alice" now came to me as a grave and
+immediate reality. That looking-glass had indeed possessed a malign, abnormal
+suction; and the struggling speaker in my dream made clear the extent to which
+it violated all the known precedents of human experience and all the age-old
+laws of our three sane dimensions. It was more than a mirror - it was a gate; a
+trap; a link with spatial recesses not meant for the denizens of our visible
+universe, and realizable only in terms of the most intricate non-Euclidean
+mathematics. And in some outrageous fashion Robert Grandison had passed out
+of our ken into the glass and was there immured, waiting for release.
+
+It is significant that upon awakening I harbored no genuine doubt of the reality
+of the revelation. That I had actually held conversation with a transdimensional
+Robert, rather than evoked the whole episode from my broodings about his
+disappearance and about the old illusions of the mirror, was as certain to my
+utmost instincts as any of the instinctive certainties commonly recognized as
+valid.
+
+
+
+
+The tale thus unfolded to me was of the most incredibly bizarre character. As
+had been clear on the morning of his disappearance, Robert was intensely
+fascinated by the ancient mirror. All through the hours of school, he had it in
+mind to come back to my living-room and examine it further. When he did
+arrive, after the close of the school day, it was somewhat later than two-twenty,
+and I was absent in town. Finding me out and knowing that I would not mind,
+he had come into my living-room and gone straight to the mirror; standing
+before it and studying the place where, as we had noted, the whorls appeared to
+converge.
+
+Then, quite suddenly, there had come to him an overpowering urge to place his
+hand upon this whorl- center. Almost reluctantly, against his better judgment, he
+had done so; and upon making the contact had felt at once the strange, almost
+painful suction which had perplexed him that morning. Immediately thereafter -
+quite without warning, but with a wrench which seemed to twist and tear every
+bone and muscle in his body and to bulge and press and cut at every nerve - he
+had been abruptly drawn through and found himself inside.
+
+Once through, the excruciatingly painful stress upon his entire system was
+suddenly released. He felt, he said, as though he had just been born - a feeling
+that made itself evident every time he tried to do anything; walk, stoop, turn his
+head, or utter speech. Everything about his body seemed a misfit.
+
+These sensations wore off after a long while, Robert's body becoming an
+organized whole rather than a number of protesting parts. Of all the forms of
+expression, speech remained the most difficult; doubtless because it is
+complicated, bringing into play a number of different organs, muscles, and
+tendons. Robert's feet, on the other hand, were the first members to adjust
+themselves to the new conditions within the glass.
+
+During the morning hours I rehearsed the whole reason-defying problem;
+correlating everything I had seen and heard, dismissing the natural scepticism of
+a man of sense, and scheming to devise possible plans for Robert's release from
+his incredible prison. As I did so a number of originally perplexing points
+became clear - or at least, clearer - to me.
+
+There was, for example, the matter of Robert's coloring. His face and hands, as I
+have indicated, were a kind of dull greenish dark-blue; and I may add that his
+familiar blue Norfolk jacket had turned to a pale lemon-yellow while his trousers
+remained a neutral gray as before. Reflecting on this after waking, I found the
+circumstance closely allied to the reversal of perspective which made Robert
+seem to grow larger when receding and smaller when approaching. Here, too,
+was a physical reversal - for every detail of his coloring in the unknown
+
+
+
+
+dimension was the exact reverse or complement of the corresponding color detail
+in normal life. In physics the typical complementary colors are blue and yellow,
+and red and green. These pairs are opposites, and when mixed yield gray.
+Robert's natural color was a pinkish-buff, the opposite of which is the greenish-
+blue I saw. His blue coat had become yellow, while the gray trousers remained
+gray. This latter point baffled me until I remembered that gray is itself a mixture
+of opposites. There is no opposite for gray - or rather, it is its own opposite.
+
+Another clarified point was that pertaining to Robert's curiously dulled and
+thickened speech - as well as to the general awkwardness and sense of misfit
+bodily parts of which he complained. This, at the outset, was a puzzle indeed;
+though after long thought the clue occurred to me. Here again was the same
+reversal which affected perspective and coloration. Anyone in the fourth
+dimension must necessarily be reversed in just this way - hands and feet, as well
+as colors and perspectives, being changed about. It would be the same with all
+the other dual organs, such as nostrils, ears, and eyes. Thus Robert had been
+talking with a reversed tongue, teeth, vocal cords, and kindred speech-
+apparatus; so that his difficulties in utterance were little to be wondered at.
+
+As the morning wore on, my sense of the stark reality and maddening urgency of
+the dream-disclosed situation increased rather than decreased. More and more I
+felt that something must be done, yet realized that I could not seek advice or aid.
+Such a story as mine - a conviction based upon mere dreaming - could not
+conceivably bring me anything but ridicule or suspicions as to my mental state.
+And what, indeed, could I do, aided or unaided, with as little working data as
+my nocturnal impressions had provided? I must, I finally recognized, have more
+information before I could even think of a possible plan for releasing Robert. This
+could come only through the receptive conditions of sleep, and it heartened me
+to reflect that according to every probability my telepathic contact would be
+resumed the moment I fell into deep slumber again.
+
+I accomplished sleeping that afternoon, after a midday dinner at which, through
+rigid self-control, I succeeded in concealing from Browne and his wife the
+tumultuous thoughts that crashed through my mind. Hardly had my eyes closed
+when a dim telepathic image began to appear; and I soon realized to my infinite
+excitement that it was identical with what I had seen before. If anything, it was
+more distinct; and when it began to speak I seemed able to grasp a greater
+proportion of the words.
+
+During this sleep I found most of the morning's deductions confirmed, though
+the interview was mysteriously cut off long prior to my awakening. Robert had
+seemed apprehensive just before communication ceased, but had already told me
+that in his strange fourth-dimensional prison colors and spatial relationships
+
+
+
+
+were indeed reversed - black being white, distance increasing apparent size, and
+so on.
+
+He had also intimated that, notwithstanding his possession of full physical form
+and sensations, most human vital properties seemed curiously suspended.
+Nutriment, for example, was quite unnecessary - a phenomenon really more
+singular than the omnipresent reversal of objects and attributes, since the latter
+was a reasonable and mathematically indicated state of things. Another
+significant piece of information was that the only exit from the glass to the world
+was the entrance-way, and that this was permanently barred and impenetrably
+sealed, so far as egress was concerned.
+
+That night I had another visitation from Robert; nor did such impressions,
+received at odd intervals while I slept receptively minded, cease during the
+entire period of his incarceration. His efforts to communicate were desperate and
+often pitiful; for at times the telepathic bond would weaken, while at other times
+fatigue, excitement, or fear of interruption would hamper and thicken his speech.
+I may as well narrate as a continuous whole all that Robert told me throughout
+the whole series of transient mental contacts - perhaps supplementing it at
+certain points with facts directly related after his release. The telepathic
+information was fragmentary and often nearly inarticulate, but I studied it over
+and over during the waking intervals of three intense days; classifying and
+cogitating with feverish diligence, since it was all that I had to go upon if the boy
+were to be brought back into our world.
+
+The fourth-dimensional region in which Robert found himself was not, as in
+scientific romance, an unknown and infinite realm of strange sights and fantastic
+denizens; but was rather a projection of certain limited parts of our own
+terrestrial sphere within an alien and normally inaccessible aspect or direction of
+space. It was a curiously fragmentary, intangible, and heterogeneous world - a
+series of apparently dissociated scenes merging indistinctly one into the other;
+their constituent details having an obviously different status from that of an
+object drawn into the ancient mirror as Robert had been drawn. These scenes
+were like dream-vistas or magic -lantern images - elusive visual impressions of
+which the boy was not really a part, but which formed a sort of panoramic
+background or ethereal environment against which or amidst which he moved.
+
+He could not touch any of the parts of these scenes - walls, trees, furniture, and
+the like - but whether this was because they were truly non-material, or because
+they always receded at his approach, he was singularly unable to determine.
+Everything seemed fluid, mutable, and unreal. When he walked, it appeared to
+be on whatever lower surface the visible scene might have - floor, path,
+greensward, or such; but upon analysis he always found that the contact was an
+
+
+
+
+illusion. There was never any difference in the resisting force met by his feet -
+and by his hands when he would stoop experimentally - no matter what changes
+of apparent surface might be involved. He could not describe this foundation or
+limiting plane on which he walked as anything more definite than a virtually
+abstract pressure balancing his gravity. Of definite tactile distinctiveness it had
+none, and supplementing it there seemed to be a kind of restricted levitational
+force which accomplished transfers of altitude. He could never actually climb
+stairs, yet would gradually walk up from a lower level to a higher.
+
+Passage from one definite scene to another involved a sort of gliding through a
+region of shadow or blurred focus where the details of each scene mingled
+curiously. All the vistas were distinguished by the absence of transient objects,
+and the indefinite or ambiguous appearance of such semi-transient objects as
+furniture or details of vegetation. The lighting of every scene was diffuse and
+perplexing, and of course the scheme of reversed colors - bright red grass, yellow
+sky with confused black and gray cloud-forms, white tree-trunks, and green
+brick walls - gave to everything an air of unbelievable grotesquerie. There was an
+alteration of day and night, which turned out to be a reversal of the normal hours
+of light and darkness at whatever point on the earth the mirror might be
+hanging.
+
+This seemingly irrelevant diversity of the scenes puzzled Robert until he realized
+that they comprised merely such places as had been reflected for long continuous
+periods in the ancient glass. This also explained the odd absence of transient
+objects, the generally arbitrary boundaries of vision, and the fact that all exteriors
+were framed by the outlines of doorways or windows. The glass, it appeared,
+had power to store up these intangible scenes through long exposure; though it
+could never absorb anything corporeally, as Robert had been absorbed, except by
+a very different and particular process.
+
+But - to me at least - the most incredible aspect of the mad phenomenon was the
+monstrous subversion of our known laws of space involved in the relation of
+various illusory scenes to the actual terrestrial regions represented. I have spoken
+of the glass as storing up the images of these regions, but this is really an inexact
+definition. In truth, each of the mirror scenes formed a true and quasi-permanent
+fourth- dimensional projection of the corresponding mundane region; so that
+whenever Robert moved to a certain part of a certain scene, as he moved into the
+image of my room when sending his telepathic messages, he was actually in that
+place itself, on earth - though under spatial conditions which cut off all sensory
+communication, in either direction, between him and the present tri-dimensional
+aspect of the place.
+
+
+
+
+Theoretically speaking, a prisoner in the glass could in a few moments go
+anywhere on our planet - into any place, that is, which had ever been reflected in
+the mirror's surface. This probably applied even to places where the mirror had
+not hung long enough to produce a clear illusory scene; the terrestrial region
+being then represented by a zone of more or less formless shadow. Outside the
+definite scenes was a seemingly limitless waste of neutral gray shadow about
+which Robert could never be certain, and into which he never dared stray far lest
+he become hopelessly lost to the real and mirror worlds alike.
+
+Among the earliest particulars which Robert gave, was the fact that he was not
+alone in his confinement. Various others, all in antique garb, were in there with
+him - a corpulent middle-aged gentleman with tied queue and velvet knee-
+breeches who spoke English fluently though with a marked Scandinavian accent;
+a rather beautiful small girl with very blonde hair which appeared a glossy dark
+blue; two apparently mute Negroes whose features contrasted grotesquely with
+the pallor of their reversed-colored skins; three young men; one young woman; a
+very small child, almost an infant; and a lean, elderly Dane of extremely
+distinctive aspect and a kind of half-malign intellectuality of countenance.
+
+This last-named individual - Axel Holm, who wore the satin small-clothes,
+flared-skirted coat, and voluminous full-bottomed periwig of an age more than
+two centuries in the past - was notable among the little band as being the one
+responsible for the presence of them all. He it was who, skilled equally in the arts
+of magic and glass working, had long ago fashioned this strange dimensional
+prison in which himself, his slaves, and those whom he chose to invite or allure
+thither were immured unchangingly for as long as the mirror might endure.
+
+Holm was born early in the seventeenth century, and had followed with
+tremendous competence and success the trade of a glass-blower and molder in
+Copenhagen. His glass, especially in the form of large drawing-room mirrors,
+was always at a premium. But the same bold mind which had made him the first
+glazier of Europe also served to carry his interests and ambitions far beyond the
+sphere of mere material craftsmanship. He had studied the world around him,
+and chafed at the limitations of human knowledge and capability. Eventually he
+sought for dark ways to overcome those limitations, and gained more success
+than is good for any mortal. He had aspired to enjoy something like eternity, the
+mirror being his provision to secure this end. Serious study of the fourth
+dimension was far from beginning with Einstein in our own era; and Holm, more
+than erudite in all the methods of his day, knew that a bodily entrance into that
+hidden phase of space would prevent him from dying in the ordinary physical
+sense. Research showed him that the principle of reflection undoubtedly forms
+the chief gate to all dimensions beyond our familiar three; and chance placed in
+his hands a small and very ancient glass whose cryptic properties he believed he
+
+
+
+
+could turn to advantage. Once "inside" this mirror according to the method he
+had envisaged, he felt that "life" in the sense of form and consciousness would
+go on virtually forever, provided the mirror could be preserved indefinitely from
+breakage or deterioration.
+
+Holm made a magnificent mirror, such as would be prized and carefully
+preserved; and in it deftly fused the strange whorl-configured relic he had
+acquired. Having thus prepared his refuge and his trap, he began to plan his
+mode of entrance and conditions of tenancy. He would have with him both
+servitors and companions; and as an experimental beginning he sent before him
+into the glass two dependable Negro slaves brought from the West Indies. What
+his sensations must have been upon beholding this first concrete demonstration
+of his theories, only imagination can conceive.
+
+Undoubtedly a man of his knowledge realized that absence from the outside
+world, if deferred beyond the natural span of life of those within, must mean
+instant dissolution at the first attempt to return to that world. But, barring that
+misfortune or accidental breakage, those within would remain forever as they
+were at the time of entrance. They would never grow old, and would need
+neither food nor drink.
+
+To make his prison tolerable he sent ahead of him certain books and writing
+materials, a chair and table of stoutest workmanship, and a few other accessories.
+He knew that the images which the glass would reflect or absorb would not be
+tangible, but would merely extend around him like a background of dream. His
+own transition in 1687 was a momentous experience; and must have been
+attended by mixed sensations of triumph and terror. Had anything gone wrong,
+there were frightful possibilities of being lost in dark and inconceivable multiple
+dimensions.
+
+For over fifty years he had been unable to secure any additions to the little
+company of himself and slaves, but later on he had perfected his telepathic
+method of visualizing small sections of the outside world close to the glass, and
+attracting certain individuals in those areas through the mirror's strange
+entrance. Thus Robert, influenced into a desire to press upon the "door," had
+been lured within. Such visualizations depended wholly on telepathy, since no
+one inside the mirror could see out into the world of men.
+
+It was, in truth, a strange life that Holm and his company had lived inside the
+glass. Since the mirror had stood for fully a century with its face to the dusty
+stone wall of the shed where I found it, Robert was the first being to enter this
+limbo after all that interval. His arrival was a gala event, for he brought news of
+the outside world which must have been of the most startling impressiveness to
+
+
+
+
+the more thoughtful of those within. He, in his turn - young though he was - felt
+overwhelmingly the weirdness of meeting and talking with persons who had
+been alive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
+
+The deadly monotony of life for the prisoners can only be vaguely conjectured.
+As mentioned, its extensive spatial variety was limited to localities which had
+been reflected in the mirror for long periods; and many of these had become dim
+and strange as tropical climates had made inroads on the surface. Certain
+localities were bright and beautiful, and in these the company usually gathered.
+But no scene could be fully satisfying; since the visible objects were all unreal
+and intangible, and often of perplexingly indefinite outline. When the tedious
+periods of darkness came, the general custom was to indulge in memories,
+reflections, or conversations. Each one of that strange, pathetic group had
+retained his or her personality unchanged and unchangeable, since becoming
+immune to the time effects of outside space.
+
+The number of inanimate objects within the glass, aside from the clothing of the
+prisoners, was very small; being largely limited to the accessories Holm had
+provided for himself. The rest did without even furniture, since sleep and fatigue
+had vanished along with most other vital attributes. Such inorganic things as
+were present, seemed as exempt from decay as the living beings. The lower
+forms of animal life were wholly absent.
+
+Robert derived most of his information from Herr Thiele, the gentleman who
+spoke English with a Scandinavian accent. This portly Dane had taken a fancy to
+him, and talked at considerable length. The others, too, had received him with
+courtesy and goodwill; Holm himself, seeming well-disposed, had told him
+about various matters including the door of the trap.
+
+The boy, as he told me later, was sensible enough never to attempt
+communication with me when Holm was nearby. Twice, while thus engaged, he
+had seen Holm appear; and had accordingly ceased at once. At no time could I
+see the world behind the mirror's surface. Robert's visual image, which included
+his bodily form and the clothing connected with it, was - like the aural image of
+his halting voice and like his own visualization of myself - a case of purely
+telepathic transmission; and did not involve true interdimensional sight.
+However, had Robert been as trained a telepathist as Holm, he might have
+transmitted a few strong images apart from his immediate person.
+
+Throughout this period of revelation I had, of course, been desperately trying to
+devise a method for Robert's release. On the fourth day - the ninth after the
+disappearance - I hit on a solution. Everything considered, my laboriously
+formulated process was not a very complicated one; though I could not tell
+
+
+
+
+beforehand how it would work, while the possibility of ruinous consequences in
+case of a slip was appalling. This process depended, basically, on the fact that
+there was no possible exit from inside the glass. If Holm and his prisoners were
+permanently sealed in, then release must come wholly from outside. Other
+considerations included the disposal of the other prisoners, if any survived, and
+especially of Axel Holm. What Robert had told me of him was anything but
+reassuring; and I certainly did not wish him loose in my apartment, free once
+more to work his evil will upon the world. The telepathic messages had not
+made fully clear the effect of liberation on those who had entered the glass so
+long ago.
+
+There was, too, a final though minor problem in case of success - that of getting
+Robert back into the routine of school life without having to explain the
+incredible. In case of failure, it was highly inadvisable to have witnesses present
+at the release operations - and lacking these, I simply could not attempt to relate
+the actual facts if I should succeed. Even to me the reality seemed a mad one
+whenever I let my mind turn from the data so compellingly presented in that
+tense series of dreams.
+
+When I had thought these problems through as far as possible, I procured a large
+magnifying-glass from the school laboratory and studied minutely every square
+millimeter of that whorl-center which presumably marked the extent of the
+original ancient mirror used by Holm. Even with this aid I could not quite trace
+the exact boundary between the old area and the surface added by the Danish
+wizard; but after a long study decided on a conjectural oval boundary which I
+outlined very precisely with a soft blue pencil. I then made a trip to Stamford,
+where I procured a heavy glass-cutting tool; for my primary idea was to remove
+the ancient and magically potent mirror from its later setting.
+
+My next step was to figure out the best time of day to make the crucial
+experiment. I finally settled on two-thirty a.m. - both because it was a good
+season for uninterrupted work, and because it was the "opposite" of two-thirty
+p.m., the probable moment at which Robert had entered the mirror. This form of
+"oppositeness" may or may not have been relevant, but I knew at least that the
+chosen hour was as good as any - and perhaps better than most.
+
+I finally set to work in the early morning of the eleventh day after the
+disappearance, having drawn all the shades of my living-room and closed and
+locked the door into the hallway. Following with breathless care the elliptical line
+I had traced, I worked around the whorl-section with my steel-wheeled cutting
+tool. The ancient glass, half an inch thick, crackled crisply under the firm,
+uniform pressure; and upon completing the circuit I cut around it a second time,
+crunching the roller more deeply into the glass.
+
+
+
+
+Then, very carefully indeed, I lifted the heavy mirror down from its console and
+leaned it face-inward against the wall; prying off two of the thin, narrow boards
+nailed to the back. With equal caution I smartly tapped the cut-around space
+with the heavy wooden handle of the glass-cutter.
+
+At the very first tap the whorl-containing section of glass dropped out on the
+Bokhara rug beneath. I did not know what might happen, but was keyed up for
+anything, and took a deep involuntary breath. I was on my knees for
+convenience at the moment, with my face quite near the newly made aperture;
+and as I breathed there poured into my nostrils a powerful dusty odor - a smell
+not comparable to any other I have ever encountered. Then everything within
+my range of vision suddenly turned to a dull gray before my failing eyesight as I
+felt myself overpowered by an invisible force which robbed my muscles of their
+power to function.
+
+I remember grasping weakly and futilely at the edge of the nearest window
+drapery and feeling it rip loose from its fastening. Then I sank slowly to the floor
+as the darkness of oblivion passed over me.
+
+When I regained consciousness I was lying on the Bokhara rug with my legs held
+unaccountably up in the air. The room was full of that hideous and inexplicable
+dusty smell - and as my eyes began to take in definite images I saw that Robert
+Grandison stood in front of me. It was he - fully in the flesh and with his coloring
+normal - who was holding my legs aloft to bring the blood back to my head as
+the school's first-aid course had taught him to do with persons who had fainted.
+For a moment I was struck mute by the stifling odor and by a bewilderment
+which quickly merged into a sense of triumph. Then I found myself able to move
+and speak collectedly.
+
+I raised a tentative hand and waved feebly at Robert.
+
+"All right, old man," I murmured, "you can let my legs down now. Many thanks.
+I'm all right again, I think. It was the smell - I imagine - that got me. Open that
+farthest window, please - wide - from the bottom. That's it - thanks. No - leave
+the shade down the way it was."
+
+I struggled to my feet, my disturbed circulation adjusting itself in waves, and
+stood upright hanging to the back of a big chair. I was still "groggy," but a blast
+of fresh, bitterly cold air from the window revived me rapidly. I sat down in the
+big chair and looked at Robert, now walking toward me.
+
+"First," I said hurriedly, "tell me, Robert - those others - Holm? What happened
+to them, when I - opened the exit?"
+
+
+
+
+Robert paused half-way across the room and looked at me very gravely.
+
+"I saw them fade away - into nothingness - Mr. Canevin/' he said with
+solemnity; "and with them - everything. There isn't any more 'inside/ sir - thank
+God, and you, sir!"
+
+And young Robert, at last yielding to the sustained strain which he had borne
+through all those terrible eleven days, suddenly broke down like a little child and
+began to weep hysterically in great, stifling, dry sobs.
+
+I picked him up and placed him gently on my davenport, threw a rug over him,
+sat down by his side, and put a calming hand on his forehead.
+
+"Take it easy, old fellow," I said soothingly.
+
+The boy's sudden and very natural hysteria passed as quickly as it had come on
+as I talked to him reassuringly about my plans for his quiet restoration to the
+school. The interest of the situation and the need of concealing the incredible
+truth beneath a rational explanation took hold of his imagination as I had
+expected; and at last he sat up eagerly, telling the details of his release and
+listening to the instructions I had thought out. He had, it seems, been in the
+"projected area" of my bedroom when I opened the way back, and had emerged
+in that actual room - hardly realizing that he was "out." Upon hearing a fall in
+the living-room he had hastened thither, finding me on the rug in my fainting
+spell.
+
+I need mention only briefly my method of restoring Robert in a seemingly
+normal way - how I smuggled him out of the window in an old hat and sweater
+of mine, took him down the road in my quietly started car, coached him carefully
+in a tale I had devised, and returned to arouse Browne with the news of his
+discovery. He had, I explained, been walking alone on the afternoon of his
+disappearance; and had been offered a motor ride by two young men who, as a
+joke and over his protests that he could go no farther than Stamford and back,
+had begun to carry him past that town. Jumping from the car during a traffic
+stop with the intention of hitch-hiking back before Call-Over, he had been hit by
+another car just as the traffic was released - awakening ten days later in the
+Greenwich home of the people who had hit him. On learning the date, I added,
+he had immediately telephoned the school; and I, being the only one awake, had
+answered the call and hurried after him in my car without stopping to notify
+anyone.
+
+Browne, who at once telephoned to Robert's parents, accepted my story without
+question; and forbore to interrogate the boy because of the latter's manifest
+
+
+
+
+exhaustion. It was arranged that he should remain at the school for a rest, under
+the expert care of Mrs. Browne, a former trained nurse. I naturally saw a good
+deal of him during the remainder of the Christmas vacation, and was thus
+enabled to fill in certain gaps in his fragmentary dream-story.
+
+Now and then we would almost doubt the actuality of what had occurred;
+wondering whether we had not both shared some monstrous delusion born of
+the mirror's glittering hypnotism, and whether the tale of the ride and accident
+were not after all the real truth. But whenever we did so we would be brought
+back to belief by some monstrous and haunting memory; with me, of Robert's
+dream-figure and its thick voice and inverted colors; with him, of the whole
+fantastic pageantry of ancient people and dead scenes that he had witnessed.
+And then there was that joint recollection of that damnable dusty odor. . . . We
+knew what it meant: the instant dissolution of those who had entered an alien
+dimension a century and more ago.
+
+There are, in addition, at least two lines of rather more positive evidence; one of
+which comes through my researches in Danish annals concerning the sorcerer.
+Axel Holm. Such a person, indeed, left many traces in folklore and written
+records; and diligent library sessions, plus conferences with various learned
+Danes, have shed much more light on his evil fame. At present I need say only
+that the Copenhagen glass-blower - born in 1612 - was a notorious Luciferian
+whose pursuits and final vanishing formed a matter of awed debate over two
+centuries ago. He had burned with a desire to know all things and to conquer
+every limitation of mankind - to which end he had delved deeply into occult and
+forbidden fields ever since he was a child.
+
+He was commonly held to have joined a coven of the dreaded witch-cult, and the
+vast lore of ancient Scandinavian myth - with its Loki the Sly One and the
+accursed Fenris-Wolf - was soon an open book to him. He had strange interests
+and objectives, few of which were definitely known, but some of which were
+recognized as intolerably evil. It is recorded that his two Negro helpers,
+originally slaves from the Danish West Indies, had become mute soon after their
+acquisition by him; and that they had disappeared not long before his own
+disappearance from the ken of mankind.
+
+Near the close of an already long life the idea of a glass of immortality appears to
+have entered his mind. That he had acquired an enchanted mirror of
+inconceivable antiquity was a matter of common whispering; it being alleged
+that he had purloined it from a fellow-sorcerer who had entrusted it to him for
+polishing.
+
+
+
+
+This mirror - according to popular tales a trophy as potent in its way as the
+better-known Aegis of Minerva or Hammer of Thor - was a small oval object
+called "Loki's Glass/' made of some polished fusible mineral and having magical
+properties which included the divination of the immediate future and the power
+to show the possessor his enemies. That it had deeper potential properties,
+realizable in the hands of an erudite magician, none of the common people
+doubted; and even educated persons attached much fearful importance to
+Holm's rumored attempts to incorporate it in a larger glass of immortality. Then
+had come the wizard's disappearance in 1687, and the final sale and dispersal of
+his goods amidst a growing cloud of fantastic legendry. It was, altogether, just
+such a story as one would laugh at if possessed of no particular key; yet to me,
+remembering those dream messages and having Robert Grandison's
+corroboration before me, it formed a positive confirmation of all the bewildering
+marvels that had been unfolded.
+
+But as I have said, there is still another line of rather positive evidence - of a very
+different character - at my disposal. Two days after his release, as Robert, greatly
+improved in strength and appearance, was placing a log on my living-room fire,
+I noticed a certain awkwardness in his motions and was struck by a persistent
+idea. Summoning him to my desk I suddenly asked him to pick up an ink-stand -
+and was scarcely surprised to note that, despite lifelong right-handedness, he
+obeyed unconsciously with his left hand. Without alarming him, I then asked
+that he unbutton his coat and let me listen to his cardiac action. What I found
+upon placing my ear to his chest - and what I did not tell him for some time
+afterward - was that his heart was beating on his right side.
+
+He had gone into the glass right-handed and with all organs in their normal
+positions. Now he was left- handed and with organs reversed, and would
+doubtless continue so for the rest of his life. Clearly, the dimensional transition
+had been no illusion - for this physical change was tangible and unmistakable.
+Had there been a natural exit from the glass, Robert would probably have
+undergone a thorough re-reversal and emerged in perfect normality - as indeed
+the color-scheme of his body and clothing did emerge. The forcible nature of his
+release, however, undoubtedly set something awry; so that dimensions no longer
+had a chance to right themselves as chromatic wave-frequencies still did.
+
+I had not merely opened Holm's trap; I had destroyed it; and at the particular
+stage of destruction marked by Robert's escape some of the reversing properties
+had perished. It is significant that in escaping Robert had felt no pain comparable
+to that experienced in entering. Had the destruction been still more sudden, I
+shiver to think of the monstrosities of color the boy would always have been
+forced to bear. I may add that after discovering Robert's reversal I examined the
+rumpled and discarded clothing he had worn in the glass, and found, as I had
+
+
+
+
+expected, a complete reversal of pockets, buttons, and all other corresponding
+details.
+
+At this moment Loki's Glass, just as it fell on my Bokhara rug from the now
+patched and harmless mirror, weighs down a sheaf of papers on my writing-
+table here in St. Thomas, venerable capital of the Danish West Indies - now the
+American Virgin Islands. Various collectors of old Sandwich glass have mistaken
+it for an odd bit of that early American product - but I privately realize that my
+paper-weight is an antique of far subtler and more paleogean craftsmanship.
+Still, I do not disillusion such enthusiasts.
+
+
+
+
+The Tree On The Hill - with Duane W.
+Ritnel
+
+Written 1934
+
+Southeast of Hampden, near the tortuous Salmon River gorge, is a range of steep,
+rocky hills which have defied all efforts of sturdy homesteaders. The canyons are
+too deep and the slopes too precipitous to encourage anything save seasonal
+livestock grazing. The last time I visited Hampden the region - known as Hell's
+Acres - was part of the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve. There are no roads linking
+this inaccessible locality with the outside world, and the hillfolk will tell you that
+it is indeed a spot transplanted from his Satanic Majesty's front yard. There is a
+local superstition that the area is haunted - but by what or by whom no one
+seems to know. Natives will not venture within its mysterious depths, for they
+believe the stories handed down to them by the Nez Perce Indians, who have
+shunned the region for untold generations, because, according to them, it is a
+playground of certain giant devils from the Outside. These suggestive tales made
+me very curious.
+
+My first excursion - and my last, thank God! - into those hills occurred while
+Constantine Theunis and I were living in Hampden the summer of 1938. He was
+writing a treatise on Egyptian mythology, and I found myself alone much of the
+time, despite the fact that we shared a modest cabin on Beacon Street, within
+sight of the infamous Pirate House, built by Exer Jones over sixty years ago.
+
+The morning of June 23rd found me walking in those oddly shaped hills, which
+had, since seven o'clock, seemed very ordinary indeed. I must have been about
+seven miles south of Hampden before I noticed anything unusual. I was climbing
+a grassy ridge overlooking a particularly deep canyon, when I came upon an
+area totally devoid of the usual bunch-grass and greaseweed. It extended
+southward, over numerous hills and valleys. At first I thought the spot had been
+burned over the previous fall, but upon examining the turf, I found no signs of a
+blaze. The nearby slopes and ravines looked terribly scarred and seared, as if
+some gigantic torch had blasted them, wiping away all vegetation. And yet there
+was no evidence of fire. . .
+
+I moved on over rich, black soil in which no grass flourished. As I headed for the
+approximate center of this desolate area, I began to notice a strange silence. There
+were no larks, no rabbits, and even the insects seemed to have deserted the place.
+I gained the summit of a lofty knoll and tried to guess at the size of that bleak,
+inexplicable region. Then I saw the lone tree.
+
+
+
+
+It stood on a hill somewhat higher than its companions, and attracted the eye
+because it was so utterly unexpected. I had seen no trees for miles: thorn and
+hackberry bushes clustered the shallower ravines, but there had been no mature
+trees. Strange to find one standing on the crest of the hill.
+
+I crossed two steep canyons before I came to it; and a surprise awaited me. It was
+not a pine tree, nor a fir tree, nor a hackberry tree. I had never, in all my life, seen
+one to compare with it - and I never have to this day, for which I am eternally
+thankful!
+
+More than anything it resembled an oak. It had a huge, twisted trunk, fully a
+yard in diameter, and the large limbs began spreading outward scarcely seven
+feet from the ground. The leaves were round, and curiously alike in size and
+design. It might have been a tree painted on a canvas, but I will swear that it was
+real. I shall always know that it was real, despite what Theunis said later.
+
+I recall that I glanced at the sun and judged the time to be about ten o'clock a.m.,
+although I did not look at my watch. The day was becoming warm, and I sat for
+a while in the welcome shade of the huge tree. Then I regarded the rank grass
+that flourished beneath it - another singular phenomenon when I remembered
+the bleak terrain through which I had passed. A wild maze of hills, ravines, and
+bluffs hemmed me in on all sides, although the rise on which I sat was rather
+higher than any other within miles. I looked far to the east - and I jumped to my
+feet, startled and amazed. Shimmering through a blue haze of distance were the
+Bitterroot Mountains! There is no other range of snow-capped peaks within three
+hundred miles of Hampden; and I knew - at this altitude - that I shouldn't be
+seeing them at all. For several minutes I gazed at the marvel; then I became
+drowsy. I lay in the rank grass, beneath the tree. I unstrapped my camera, took
+off my hat, and relaxed, staring skyward through the green leaves. I closed my
+eyes.
+
+Then a curious phenomenon began to assail me - a vague, cloudy sort of vision -
+glimpsing or day- dreaming seemingly without relevance to anything familiar. I
+thought I saw a great temple by a sea of ooze, where three suns gleamed in a pale
+red sky. The vast tomb, or temple, was an anomalous color - a nameless blue-
+violet shade. Large beasts flew in the cloudy sky, and I seemed to hear the
+pounding of their scaly wings. I went nearer the stone temple, and a huge
+doorway loomed in front of me. Within that portal were swirling shadows that
+seemed to dart and leer and try to snatch me inside that awful darkness. I
+thought I saw three flaming eyes in the shifting void of a doorway, and I
+screamed with mortal fear. In that noisome depth, I knew, lurked utter
+destruction - a living hell even worse than death. I screamed again. The vision
+faded.
+
+
+
+
+I saw the round leaves and the sane earthly sky. I struggled to rise. I was
+trembling; cold perspiration beaded my brow. I had a mad impulse to flee; run
+insanely from that sinister tree on the hill - but I checked the absurd intuition and
+sat down, trying to collect my senses. Never had I dreamed anything so realistic;
+so horrifying. What had caused the vision? I had been reading several of
+Theunis' tomes on ancient Egypt. ... I mopped my forehead, and decided that it
+was time for lunch. But I did not feel like eating.
+
+Then I had an inspiration. I would take a few snapshots of the tree, for Theunis.
+They might shock him out of his habitual air of unconcern. Perhaps I would tell
+him about the dream. . . . Opening my camera, I took half a dozen shots of the
+tree, and every aspect of the landscape as seen from the tree. Also, I included one
+of the gleaming, snow-crested peaks. I might want to return, and these photos
+would help. . . .
+
+Folding the camera, I returned to my cushion of soft grass. Had that spot beneath
+the tree a certain alien enchantment? I know that I was reluctant to leave it. ...
+
+I gazed upward at the curious round leaves. I closed my eyes. A breeze stirred
+the branches, and their whispered music lulled me into tranquil oblivion. And
+suddenly I saw again the pale red sky and the three suns. The land of three
+shadows! Again the great temple came into view. I seemed to be floating on the
+air - a disembodied spirit exploring the wonders of a mad, multi-dimensional
+world! The temple's oddly angled cornices frightened me, and I knew that this
+place was one that no man on earth had ever seen in his wildest dreams.
+
+Again the vast doorway yawned before me; and I was sucked within that black,
+writhing cloud. I seemed to be staring at space unlimited. I saw a void beyond
+my vocabulary to describe; a dark, bottomless gulf teeming with nameless
+shapes and entities - things of madness and delirium, as tenuous as a mist from
+Shamballah.
+
+My soul shrank. I was terribly afraid. I screamed and screamed, and felt that I
+would soon go mad. Then in my dream I ran and ran in a fever of utter terror,
+but I did not know what I was running from. ... I left that hideous temple and
+that hellish void, yet I knew I must, barring some miracle, return. . . .
+
+At last my eyes flew open. I was not beneath the tree. I was sprawled on a rocky
+slope, my clothing torn and disordered. My hands were bleeding. I stood up,
+pain stabbing through me. I recognized the spot - the ridge where I had first seen
+the blasted area! I must have walked miles - unconscious! The tree was not in
+sight, and I was glad. . . . Even the knees of my trousers were torn, as if I had
+crawled part of the way. . . .
+
+
+
+
+I glanced at the sun. Late afternoon! Where had I been? I snatched out my watch.
+It had stopped at 10:34.
+
+II.
+
+"So you have the snapshots?" Theunis drawled. I met his gray eyes across the
+breakfast table. Three days had slipped by since my return from Hell's Acres. I
+had told him about the dream beneath the tree, and he had laughed.
+
+"Yes," I replied. "They came last night. Haven't had a chance to open them yet.
+Give 'em a good, careful study - if they aren't all failures. Perhaps you'll change
+your mind."
+
+Theunis smiled; sipped his coffee. I gave him the unopened envelope and he
+quickly broke the seal and withdrew the pictures. He glanced at the first one, and
+the smile faded from his leonine face. He crushed out his cigarette.
+
+"My God, man! Look at this!"
+
+I seized the glossy rectangle. It was the first picture of the tree, taken at a distance
+of fifty feet or so. The cause of Theunis' excitement escaped me. There it was,
+standing boldly on the hill, while below it grew the jungle of grass where I had
+lain. In the distance were my snow-capped mountains!
+
+"There you are," I cried. "The proof of my story. . . "
+
+"Look at it!" Theunis snapped. "The shadows... there are three for every rock,
+bush, and tree!"
+
+He was right... Below the tree, spread in fanlike incongruity, lay three
+overlapping shadows. Suddenly I realized that the picture held an abnormal and
+inconsistent element. The leaves on the thing were too lush for the work of sane
+nature, while the trunk was bulged and knotted in the most abhorrent shapes.
+Theunis dropped the picture on the table.
+
+"There is something wrong," I muttered. "The tree I saw didn't look as repulsive
+as that... "
+
+"Are you sure?" Theunis grated. "The fact is, you may have seen many things
+not recorded on this film."
+
+"It shows more than I saw!"
+
+
+
+
+"That's the point. There is something damnably out of place in this landscape;
+something I can't understand. The tree seems to suggest a thought - beyond my
+grasp. ... It is too misty; too uncertain; too unreal to be natural!" He rapped
+nervous fingers on the table. He snatched the remaining films and shuffled
+through them, rapidly.
+
+I reached for the snapshot he had dropped, and sensed a touch of bizarre
+uncertainty and strangeness as my eyes absorbed its every detail. The flowers
+and weeds pointed at varying angles, while some of the grass grew in the most
+bewildering fashion. The tree seemed too veiled and clouded to be readily
+distinguished, but I noted the huge limbs and the half-bent flower stems that
+were ready to fall over, yet did not fall. And the many, overlapping shadows. . . .
+They were, altogether, very disquieting shadows - too long or short when
+compared to the stems they fell below to give one a feeling of comfortable
+normality. The landscape hadn't shocked me the day of my visit. . . . There was a
+dark familiarity and mocking suggestion in it; something tangible, yet distant as
+the stars beyond the galaxy.
+
+Theunis came back to earth. "Did you mention three suns in your dreaming
+orgy?"
+
+I nodded, frankly puzzled. Then it dawned on me. My fingers trembled slightly
+as I stared at the picture again. My dream! Of course. . .
+
+"The others are just like it," Theunis said. "That same uncertainness; that
+suggestion. I should be able to catch the mood of the thing; see it in its real light,
+but it is too. . . . Perhaps later I shall find out, if I look at it long enough."
+
+We sat in silence for some time. A thought came to me, suddenly, prompted by a
+strange, inexplicable longing to visit the tree again. "Let's make an excursion. I
+think I can take you there in half a day."
+
+"You'd better stay away," replied Theunis, thoughtfully. "I doubt if you could
+find the place again if you wanted to."
+
+"Nonsense," I replied. "Surely, with these photos to guide us... "
+
+"Did you see any familiar landmarks in them?"
+
+His observation was uncanny. After looking through the remaining snaps
+carefully, I had to admit that there were none.
+
+
+
+
+Theunis muttered under his breath and drew viciously on his cigarette. "A
+perfectly normal - or nearly so - picture of a spot apparently dropped from
+nowhere. Seeing mountains at this low altitude is preposterous . . . but wait!"
+
+He sprang from the chair as a hunted animal and raced from the room. I could
+hear him moving about in our makeshift library, cursing volubly. Before long he
+reappeared with an old, leather-bound volume. Theunis opened it reverently,
+and peered over the odd characters.
+
+"What do you call that?" I inquired.
+
+"This is an early English translation of the Chronicle of Nath, written by Rudolf
+Yergler, a German mystic and alchemist who borrowed some of his lore from
+Hermes Trismegistus, the ancient Egyptian sorcerer. There is a passage here that
+might interest you - might make you understand why this business is even
+further from the natural than you suspect. Listen."
+
+"So in the year of the Black Goat there came unto Nath a shadow that should not
+be on Earth, and that had no form known to the eyes of Earth. And it fed on the
+souls of men; they that it gnawed being lured and blinded with dreams till the
+horror and the endless night lay upon them. Nor did they see that which gnawed
+them; for the shadow took false shapes that men know or dream of, and only
+freedom seemed waiting in the Land of the Three Suns. But it was told by priests
+of the Old Book that he who could see the shadow's true shape, and live after the
+seeing, might shun its doom and send it back to the starless gulf of its spawning.
+This none could do save through the Gem; wherefore did Ka-Nefer the High-
+Priest keep that gem sacred in the temple. And when it was lost with Phrenes, he
+who braved the horror and was never seen more, there was weeping in Nath. Yet
+did the Shadow depart sated at last, nor shall it hunger again till the cycles roll
+back to the year of the Black Goat."
+
+Theunis paused while I stared, bewildered. Finally he spoke. "Now, Single, I
+suppose you can guess how all this links up. There is no need of going deep into
+the primal lore behind this business, but I may as well tell you that according to
+the old legends this is the so-called 'Year of the Black Goat' - when certain
+horrors from the fathomless Outside are supposed to visit the earth and do
+infinite harm. We don't know how they'll be manifest, but there's reason to think
+that strange mirages and hallucinations will be mixed up in the matter. I don't
+like the thing you've run up against - the story or the pictures. It may be pretty
+bad, and I warn you to look out. But first I must try to do what old Yergler says -
+to see if I can glimpse the matter as it is. Fortunately the old Gem he mentions
+has been rediscovered - I know where I can get at it. We must use it on the
+photographs and see what we see.
+
+
+
+
+"It's more or less like a lens or prism, though one can't take photographs with it.
+Someone of peculiar sensitiveness might look through and sketch what he sees.
+There's a bit of danger, and the looker may have his consciousness shaken a
+trifle; for the real shape of the shadow isn't pleasant and doesn't belong on this
+earth. But it would be a lot more dangerous not to do anything about it.
+Meanwhile, if you value your life and sanity, keep away from that hill - and from
+the thing you think is a tree on it."
+
+I was more bewildered than ever. "How can there be organized beings from the
+Outside in our midst?" I cried. "How do we know that such things exist?"
+
+"You reason in terms of this tiny earth," Theunis said. "Surely you don't think
+that the world is a rule for measuring the universe. There are entities we never
+dream of floating under our very noses. Modern science is thrusting back the
+borderland of the unknown and proving that the mystics were not so far off the
+track. . . "
+
+Suddenly I knew that I did not want to look at the picture again; I wanted to
+destroy it. I wanted to run from it. Theunis was suggesting something beyond. . . .
+A trembling, cosmic fear gripped me and drew me away from the hideous
+picture, for I was afraid I would recognize some object in it. . . .
+
+I glanced at my friend. He was poring over the ancient book, a strange
+expression on his face. He sat up straight. "Let's call the thing off for today. I'm
+tired of this endless guessing and wondering. I must get the loan of the gem from
+the museum where it is, and do what is to be done."
+
+"As you say," I replied. "Will you have to go to Croydon?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Then we'll both go home," I said decisively.
+
+III.
+
+I need not chronicle the events of the fortnight that followed. With me they
+formed a constant and enervating struggle between a mad longing to return to
+the cryptic tree of dreams and freedom, and a frenzied dread of that selfsame
+thing and all connected with it. That I did not return is perhaps less a matter of
+my own will than a matter of pure chance. Meanwhile I knew that Theunis was
+desperately active in some investigation of the strangest nature - something
+which included a mysterious motor trip and a return under circumstances of the
+greatest secrecy. By hints over the telephone I was made to understand that he
+had somewhere borrowed the obscure and primal object mentioned in the
+
+
+
+
+ancient volume as "The Gem/' and that he was busy devising a means of
+applying it to the photographs I had left with him. He spoke fragmentarily of
+"refraction," "polarization," and "unknown angles of space and time," and
+indicated that he was building a kind of box or camera obscura for the study of
+the curious snapshots with the gem's aid.
+
+It was on the sixteenth day that I received the startling message from the hospital
+in Croydon. Theunis was there, and wanted to see me at once. He had suffered
+some odd sort of seizure; being found prone and unconscious by friends who
+found their way into his house after hearing certain cries of mortal agony and
+fear. Though still weak and helpless, he had now regained his senses and seemed
+frantic to tell me something and have me perform certain important duties. This
+much the hospital informed me over the wire; and within half an hour I was at
+my friend's bedside, marveling at the inroads which worry and tension had
+made on his features in so brief a time. His first act was to move away the nurses
+in order to speak in utter confidence.
+
+"Single - I saw it!" His voice was strained and husky. "You must destroy them all
+- those pictures. I sent it back by seeing it, but the pictures had better go. That
+tree will never be seen on the hill again - at least, I hope not - till thousands of
+eons bring back the Year of the Black Goat. You are safe now - mankind is safe."
+He paused, breathing heavily, and continued.
+
+"Take the Gem out of the apparatus and put it in the safe - you know the
+combination. It must go back where it came from, for there's a time when it may
+be needed to save the world. They won't let me leave here yet, but I can rest if I
+know it's safe. Don't look through the box as it is - it would fix you as it's fixed
+me. And burn those damned photographs . . . the one in the box and the others. .
+. ." But Theunis was exhausted now, and the nurses advanced and motioned me
+away as he leaned back and closed his eyes.
+
+In another half-hour I was at his house and looking curiously at the long black
+box on the library table beside the overturned chair. Scattered papers blew about
+in a breeze from the open window, and close to the box I recognized with a queer
+sensation the envelope of pictures I had taken. It required only a moment for me
+to examine the box and detach at one end my earliest picture of the tree, and at
+the other end a strange bit of amber-colored crystal, cut in devious angles
+impossible to classify. The touch of the glass fragment seemed curiously warm
+and electric, and I could scarcely bear to put it out of sight in Theunis' wall safe.
+The snapshot I handled with a disconcerting mixture of emotions. Even after I
+had replaced it in the envelope with the rest I had a morbid longing to save it
+and gloat over it and rush out and up the hill toward its original. Peculiar line-
+arrangements sprang out of its details to assault and puzzle my memory . . .
+
+
+
+
+pictures behind pictures . . . secrets lurking in half-familiar shapes. . . . But a
+saner contrary instinct, operating at the same time, gave me the vigor and avidity
+of unplaceable fear as I hastily kindled a fire in the grate and watched the
+problematic envelope burn to ashes. Somehow I felt that the earth had been
+purged of a horror on whose brink I had trembled, and which was none the less
+monstrous because I did not know what it was.
+
+Of the source of Theunis' terrific shock I could form no coherent guess, nor did I
+dare to think too closely about it. It is notable that I did not at any time have the
+least impulse to look through the box before removing the gem and photograph.
+What was shown in the picture by the antique crystal's lens or prism- like power
+was not, I felt curiously certain, anything that a normal brain ought to be called
+upon to face. Whatever it was, I had myself been close to it - had been completely
+under the spell of its allurement - as it brooded on that remote hill in the form of
+a tree and an unfamiliar landscape. And I did not wish to know what I had so
+narrowly escaped.
+
+Would that my ignorance might have remained complete! I could sleep better at
+night. As it was, my eye was arrested before I left the room by the pile of
+scattered papers rustling on the table beside the black box. All but one were
+blank, but that one bore a crude drawing in pencil. Suddenly recalling what
+Theunis had once said about sketching the horror revealed by the gem, I strove
+to turn away; but sheer curiosity defeated my sane design. Looking again almost
+furtively, I observed the nervous haste of the strokes, and the unfinished edge
+left by the sketcher's terrified seizure. Then, in a burst of perverse boldness, I
+looked squarely at the dark and forbidden design - and fell in a faint.
+
+I shall never describe fully what I saw. After a time I regained my senses, thrust
+the sheet into the dying fire, and staggered out through the quiet streets to my
+home. I thanked God that I had not looked through the crystal at the photograph,
+and prayed fervently that I might forget the drawing's terrible hint of what
+Theunis had beheld. Since then I have never been quite the same. Even the fairest
+scenes have seemed to hold some vague, ambiguous hint of the nameless
+blasphemies which may underlie them and form their masquerading essence.
+And yet the sketch was so slight. . . so little indicative of all that Theunis, to judge
+from his guarded accounts later on, must have discerned!
+
+Only a few basic elements of the landscape were in the thing. For the most part a
+cloudy, exotic-looking vapor dominated the view. Every object that might have
+been familiar was seen to be part of something vague and unknown and
+altogether un-terrestrial - something infinitely vaster than any human eye could
+grasp, and infinitely alien, monstrous, and hideous as guessed from the fragment
+within range.
+
+
+
+
+Where I had, in the landscape itself, seen the twisted, half-sentient tree, there was
+here visible only a gnarled, terrible hand or talon with fingers or feelers
+shockingly distended and evidently groping toward something on the ground or
+in the spectator's direction. And squarely below the writhing, bloated digits I
+thought I saw an outline in the grass where a man had lain. But the sketch was
+hasty, and I could not be sure.
+
+
+
+
+Through the Gates of the Silver Key -
+with E. Hoffmann Price
+
+Written Oct 1932- Apr 1933
+
+Published July 1934 ii\ Weird Tales, Vol. 24, No. 1, p. 60-85.
+
+In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bonkhata
+rugs of impressive age and workmanship, four men were sitting around a
+document-strewn table. From the far corners, where odd tripods of wrought iron
+were now and then replenished by an incredibly aged Negro in somber livery,
+came the hypnotic fumes of olibanum; while in a deep niche on one side there
+ticked a curious, coffin- shaped clock whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and
+whose four hands did not move in consonance with any time system known on
+this planet. It was a singular and disturbing room, but well fitted to the business
+then at hand. For there, in the New Orleans home of this continent's greatest
+mystic, mathematician and orientalist, there was being settled at last the estate of
+a scarcely less great mystic, scholar, author and dreamer who had vanished from
+the face of the earth four years before.
+
+Randolph Carter, who had all his life sought to escape from the tedium and
+limitations of waking reality in the beckoning vistas of dreams and fabled
+avenues of other dimensions, disappeared from the sight of man on the seventh
+of October, 1928, at the age of fifty-four. His career had been a strange and lonely
+one, and there were those who inferred from his curious novels many episodes
+more bizarre than any in his recorded history. His association with Harley
+Warren, the South Carolina mystic whose studies in the primal Naacal language
+of the Himalayan priests had led to such outrageous conclusions, had been close.
+Indeed, it was he who - one mist-mad, terrible night in an ancient graveyard -
+had seen Warren descend into a dank and nitrous vault, never to emerge. Carter
+lived in Boston, but it was from the wild, haunted hills behind hoary and witch-
+accursed Arkham that all his forebears had come. And it was amid these ancient,
+cryptically brooding hills that he had ultimately vanished.
+
+His old servant. Parks - who died early in 1930 - had spoken of the strangely
+aromatic and hideously carven box he had found in the attic, and of the
+indecipherable parchments and queerly figured silver key which that box had
+contained: matters of which Carter had also written to others. Carter, he said,
+had told him that this key had come down from his ancestors, and that it would
+help him to unlock the gates to his lost boyhood, and to strange dimensions and
+fantastic realms which he had hitherto visited only in vague, brief, and elusive
+
+
+
+
+dreams. Then one day Carter took the box and its contents and rode away in his
+car, never to return.
+
+Later on, people found the car at the side of an old, grass-grown road in the hills
+behind crumbling Arkham - the hills where Carter's forebears had once dwelt,
+and where the ruined cellar of the great Carter homestead still gaped to the sky.
+It was in a grove of tall elms near by that another of the Carters had mysteriously
+vanished in 1781, and not far away was the half-rotted cottage where Goody
+Fowler, the witch, had brewed her ominous potions still earlier. The region had
+been settled in 1692 by fugitives from the witchcraft trials in Salem, and even
+now it bore a name for vaguely ominous things scarcely to be envisaged.
+Edmund Carter had fled from the shadow of Gallows Hill just in time, and the
+tales of his sorceries were many. Now, it seemed, his lone descendant had gone
+somewhere to join him!
+
+In the car they found the hideously carved box of fragrant wood, and the
+parchment which no man could read. The silver key was gone - presumably with
+Carter. Further than that there was no certain clue. Detectives from Boston said
+that the fallen timbers of the old Carter place seemed oddly disturbed, and
+somebody found a handkerchief on the rock-ridged, sinisterly wooded slope
+behind the ruins near the dreaded cave called the Snake Den.
+
+It was then that the country legends about the Snake Den gained a new vitality.
+Farmers whispered of the blasphemous uses to which old Edmund Carter the
+wizard had put that horrible grotto, and added later tales about the fondness
+which Randolph Carter himself hid had for it when a boy. In Carter's boyhood
+the venerable gambrel-roofed homestead was still standing and tenanted by his
+great-uncle Christopher. He had visited there often, and had talked singularly
+about the Snake Den. People remembered what he had said about a deep fissure
+and an unknown inner cave beyond, and speculated on the change he had
+shown after spending one whole memorable day in the cavern when he was
+nine. That was in October, too - and ever after that he had seemed to have a
+uncanny knack at prophesying future events.
+
+It had rained late in the night that Carter vanished, and no one was quite able to
+trace his footprints from the car. Inside the Snake Den all was amorphous liquid
+mud, owing to the copious seepage. Only the ignorant rustics whispered about
+the prints they thought they spied where the great elms overhang the road, and
+on the sinister hillside near the Snake Den, where the handkerchief was found.
+Who could pay attention to whispers that spoke of stubby little tracks like those
+which Randolph Carter's square-toed boots made when he was a small boy? It
+was as crazy a notion as that other whisper - that the tracks of old Benijah
+Corey's peculiar heelless boots had met the stubby little tracks in the road. Old
+
+
+
+
+Benijah had been the Carters' hired man when Randolph was young; but he had
+died thirty years ago.
+
+It must have been these whispers plus Carter's own statement to Parks and
+others that the queerly arabesqued silver key would help him unlock the gates of
+his lost boyhood - which caused a number of mystical students to declare that
+the missing man had actually doubled back on the trail of time and returned
+through forty-five years to that other October day in 1883 when he had stayed in
+the Snake Den as a small boy. When he came out that night, they argued, he had
+somehow made the whole trip to 1928 and back; for did he not thereafter know
+of things which were to happen later? And yet he had never spoken of anything
+to happen after 1928.
+
+One student - an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island, who had enjoyed
+a long and close correspondence with Carter - had a still more elaborate theory,
+and believed that Carter had not only returned to boyhood, but achieved a
+further liberation, roving at will through the prismatic vistas of boyhood dream.
+After a strange vision this man published a tale of Carter's vanishing in which he
+hinted that the lost one now reigned as king on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that
+fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight
+sea wherein the bearded and finny Gniorri build their singular labyrinths.
+
+It was this old man. Ward Phillips, who pleaded most loudly against the
+apportionment of Carter's estate to his heirs - all distant cousins - on the ground
+that he was still alive in another time-dimension and might well return some
+day. Against him was arrayed the legal talent of one of the cousins, Ernest K.
+Aspinwall of Chicago, a man ten years Carter's senior, but keen as a youth in
+forensic battles. For four years the contest had raged, but now the time for
+apportionment had come, and this vast, strange room in New Orleans was to be
+the scene of the arrangement.
+
+It was the home of Carter's literary and financial executor - the distinguished
+Creole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny.
+Carter had met de Marigny during the war, when they both served in the French
+Foreign Legion, and had at once cleaved to him because of their similar tastes
+and outlook. When, on a memorable joint furlough, the learned young Creole
+had taken the wistful Boston dreamer to Bayonne, in the south of France, and
+had shown him certain terrible secrets in the nighted and immemorial crypts that
+burrow beneath that brooding, eon-weighted city, the friendship was forever
+sealed. Carter's will had named de Marigny as executor, and now that avid
+scholar was reluctantly presiding over the settlement of the estate. It was sad
+work for him, for like the old Rhode Islander he did not believe that Carter was
+
+
+
+
+dead. But what weight had the dreams of mystics against the harsh wisdom of
+the world?
+
+Around the table in that strange room in the old French Quarter sat the men who
+claimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been the usual legal
+advertisements of the conference in papers wherever Carter's heirs were thought
+to live; yet only four now sat listening to the abnormal ticking of that coffin-
+shaped clock which told no earthly time, and to the bubbling of the courtyard
+fountain beyond half-curtained, fan- lighted windows. As the hours wore on, the
+faces of the four were half shrouded in the curling fumes from the tripods,
+which, piled recklessly with fuel, seemed to need less and less attention from the
+silently gliding and increasingly nervous old Negro.
+
+There was Etienne de Marigny himself - slim, dark, handsome, mustached, and
+still young. Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired, apoplectic-
+faced, side-whiskered, and portly. Phillips, the Providence mystic, was lean,
+gray, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and stoop-shouldered. The fourth man was non-
+committal in age - lean, with a dark, bearded, singularly immobile face of very
+regular contour, bound with the turban of a high-caste Brahman and having
+night-black, burning, almost irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast
+distance behind the features. He had announced himself as the Swami
+Chandraputra, an adept from Benares, with important information to give; and
+both de Marigny and Phillips - who had corresponded with him - had been quick
+to recognize the genuineness of his mystical pretensions. His speech had an
+oddly forced, hollow, metallic quality, as if the use of English taxed his vocal
+apparatus; yet his language was as easy, correct and idiomatic as any native
+Anglo- Saxon's. In general attire he was the normal European civilian, but his
+loose clothes sat peculiarly badly on him, while his bushy black beard. Eastern
+turban, and large, white mittens gave him an air of exotic eccentricity.
+
+De Marigny, fingering the parchment found in Carter's car, was speaking.
+
+"No, I have not been able to make anything of the parchment. Mr. Phillips, here,
+also gives it up. Colonel Churchward declares it is not Naacal, and it looks
+nothing at all like the hieroglyphics on that Easter Island war-club. The carvings
+on that box, though, do strangely suggest Easter Island images. The nearest thing
+I can recall to these parchment characters - notice how all the letters seem to hang
+down from horizontal word-bar - is the writing in a book poor Harley Warren
+once had. It came from India while Carter and I were visiting him in 1919, and he
+never would tell us anything about it - said it would be better if we didn't know,
+and hinted that it might have come originally from some place other than the
+Earth. He took it with him in December, when he went down into the vault in
+that old graveyard - but neither he nor the book ever came to the surface again.
+
+
+
+
+Some time ago I sent our friend here - the Swami Chandraputra - a memory-
+sketch of some of those letters, and also a photostatic copy of the Carter
+parchment. He believes he may be able to shed light on them after certain
+references and consultations.
+
+"But the key - Carter sent me a photograph of that. Its curious arabesques were
+not letters, but seem to have belonged to the same culture-tradition as the
+parchment Carter always spoke of being on the point of solving the mystery,
+though he never gave details. Once he grew almost poetic about the whole
+business. That antique silver key, he said, would unlock the successive doors that
+bar our free march down the mighty corridors of space and time to the very
+Border which no man has crossed since Shaddad with his terrific genius built
+and concealed in the sands of Arabia Pettraea the prodigious domes and
+uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half-starved dervishes - wrote
+Carter - and thirst-crazed nomads have returned to tell of that monumental
+portal, and of the hand that is sculptured above the keystone of the arch, but no
+man has passed and retraced his steps to say that his footprints on the garnet-
+strewn sands within bear witness to his visit. The key, he surmised, was that for
+which the Cyclopean sculptured hand vainly grasps.
+
+"Why Carter didn't take the parchment as well as the key, we can not say.
+Perhaps he forgot it - or perhaps he forbore to take it through recollection of one
+who had taken a book of like characters into a vault and never returned. Or
+perhaps it was really immaterial to what he wished to do."
+
+As de Marigny paused, old Mr. Phillips spoke a harsh, shrill voice.
+
+"We can know of Randolph Carter's wandering only what we dream. I have
+been to many strange places in dreams, and have heard many strange and
+significant things in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai. It does not appear that the
+parchment was needed, for certainly Carter reentered the world of his boyhood
+dreams, and is now a king in Ilek-Vad."
+
+Mr. Aspinwall grew doubly apoplectic-looking as he sputtered: "Can't
+somebody shut the old fool up? We've had enough of these moonings. The
+problem is to divide the property, and it's about time we got to it."
+
+For the first time Swami Chandraputra spoke in his queerly alien voice.
+
+"Gentlemen, there is more to this matter than you think. Mr. Aspinwall does not
+do well to laugh at the evidence of dreams. Mr. Phillips has taken an incomplete
+view - perhaps because he has not dreamed enough. I, myself, have done much
+dreaming. We in India have always done that, just as all the Carters seem to have
+
+
+
+
+done it. You, Mr. Aspinwall, as a maternal cousin, are naturally not a Carter. My
+own dreams, and certain other sources of information, have told me a great deal
+which you still find obscure. For example, Randolph Carter forgot that
+parchment which he couldn't decipher - yet it would have been well for him had
+he remembered to take it. You see, I have really learned pretty much what
+happened to Carter after he left his car with the silver key at sunset on that
+seventh of October, four years ago."
+
+Aspinwall audibly sneered, but the others sat up with heightened interest. The
+smoke from the tripods increased, and the crazy ticking of that coffin-shaped
+clock seemed to fall into bizarre patterns like the dots and dashes of some alien
+and insoluble telegraph message from outer space. The Hindoo leaned back, half
+closed his eyes, and continued in that oddly labored yet idiomatic speech, while
+before his audience there began to float a picture of what had happened to
+Randolph Carter.
+
+Chapter Two
+
+The hills beyond Arkham are full of a strange magic - something, perhaps, which
+the old wizard Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the
+crypts of nether earth when he fled there from Salem in 1692. As soon as
+Randolph Carter was back among them he knew that he was close to one of the
+gates which a few audacious, abhorred and alien-souled men have blasted
+through titan walls betwixt the world and the outside absolute. Here, he felt, and
+on this day of the year, he could carry out with success the message he had
+deciphered months before from the arabesques of that tarnished and incredibly
+ancient silver key. He knew now how it must be rotated, and how it must be held
+up to the setting sun, and what syllables of ceremony must be intoned into the
+void at the ninth and last turning. In a spot as close to a dark polarity and
+induced gate as this, it could not fail in its primary functions Certainly, he would
+rest that night in the lost boyhood for which he had never ceased to mourn.
+
+He got out of the car with the key in his pocket, walking up-hill deeper and
+deeper into the shadowy core of that brooding, haunted countryside of winding
+road, vine-grown stone wall, black woodland, gnarled, neglected orchard,
+gaping-windowed, deserted farm-house, and nameless nun. At the sunset hour,
+when the distant spires of Kingsport gleamed in the ruddy blaze, he took out the
+key and made the needed turnings and intonations. Only later did he realize
+how soon the ritual had taken effect.
+
+Then in the deepening twilight he had heard a voice out of the past: Old Benijah
+Corey, his great-uncle's hired man. Had not old Benijah been dead for thirty
+years? Thirty years before when. What was time? Where had he been? Why was
+
+
+
+
+it strange that Benijah should be caUing him on this seventh of October 1883?
+Was he not out later than Aunt Martha had told him to stay? What was this key
+in his blouse pocket, where his little telescope - given him by his father on his
+ninth birthday, two months before - ought to be? Had he found it in the attic at
+home? Would it unlock the mystic pylon which his sharp eye had traced amidst
+the jagged rocks at the back of that inner cave behind the Snake Den on the hill?
+That was the place they always coupled with old Edmund Carter the wizard.
+People wouldn't go there, and nobody but him had ever noticed or squirmed
+through the root-choked fissure to that great black inner chamber with the pylon.
+Whose hands had carved that hint of a pylon out of the living rock? Old Wizard
+Edmund's - or others that he had conjured up and commanded?
+
+That evening little Randolph ate supper with Uncle Chris and Aunt Martha in
+the old gambrel-roofed farm-house.
+
+Next morning he was up early and out through the twisted-boughed apple
+orchard to the upper timber lot where the mouth of the Snake Den lurked black
+and forbidding amongst grotesque, overnourished oaks. A nameless expectancy
+was upon him, and he did not even notice the loss of his handkerchief as he
+fumbled in his blouse pocket to see if the queer silver key was safe. He crawled
+through the dark orifice with tense, adventurous assurance, lighting his way
+with matches taken from the sitting-room. In another moment he had wriggled
+through the root-choked fissure at the farther end, and was in the vast, unknown
+inner grotto whose ultimate rock wall seemed half like a monstrous and
+consciously shapen pylon. Before that dank, dripping wall he stood silent and
+awestruck, lighting one match after another as he gazed. Was that stony bulge
+above the keystone of the imagined arch really a gigantic sculptured hand? Then
+he drew forth the silver key, and made motions and intonations whose source he
+could only dimly remember. Was anything forgotten? He knew only that he
+wished to cross the barrier to the untrammeled land of his dreams and the gulfs
+where all dimensions dissolved in the absolute.
+
+Chapter Three
+
+What happened then is scarcely to be described in words. It is full of those
+paradoxes, contradictions and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but
+which fill our more fantastic dreams and are taken as matters of course till we
+return to our narrow, rigid, objective world of limited causation and tri-
+dimensional logic. As the Hindoo continued his tale, he had difficulty in
+avoiding what seemed - even more than the notion of a man transferred through
+the years to boyhood - an air of trivial, puerile extravagance. Mr. Aspinwall, in
+disgust, gave an apoplectic snort and virtually stopped listening.
+
+
+
+
+For the rite of the silver key, as practiced by Randolph Carter in that black,
+haunted cave within a cave, did not prove unavailing. From the first gesture and
+syllable an aura of strange, awesome mutation was apparent - a sense of
+incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and space, yet one which held no
+hint of what we recognize as motion and duration. Imperceptibly, such things as
+age and location ceased to have any significance whatever. The day before,
+Randolph Carter had miraculously leaped a gulf of years. Now there was no
+distinction between boy and man. There was only the entity Randolph Carter,
+with a certain store of images which had lost all connection with terrestrial
+scenes and circumstances of acquisition. A moment before, there had been an
+inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured
+hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave;
+neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so
+much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter
+experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet
+without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.
+
+By the time the rite was over. Carter knew that he was in no region whose place
+could be told by Earth's geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix;
+for the nature of what was happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him. There
+were hints of it in the cryptical Pnakotic fragments, and a whole chapter in the
+forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, had taken on
+significance when he had deciphered the designs graven on the silver key. A gate
+had been unlocked - not, indeed, the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from Earth
+and time to that extension of Earth which is outside time, and from which in turn
+the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the last Void which is
+outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.
+
+There would be a Guide - and a very terrible one; a Guide who had been an
+entity of Earth millions of years before, when man was undreamed of, and when
+forgotten shapes moved on a steaming planet building strange cities among
+whose last, crumbling ruins the first mammals were to play. Carter remembered
+what the monstrous Necronomicon had vaguely and disconcertingly
+adumbrated concerning that Guide:
+
+"And while there are those," the mad Arab had written, "who have dared to seek
+glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as guide, they would have been
+more prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book
+of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse. Nor may those who pass
+ever return, for in the vastnesses transcending our world are shapes of darkness
+that seize and bind. The Affair that shambleth about in the night, the evil that
+defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is
+known to have and that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants thereof: -
+
+
+
+
+all these Blacknesses are lesser than HE WHO guardeth the Gateway: HE WHO
+will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable
+devourers. For He is 'UMR AT- TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe
+rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE."
+
+Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines
+amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and
+imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his
+consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which
+surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was
+capable of grasping. For no mind of Earth may grasp the extensions of shape
+which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.
+
+There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he
+somehow linked with Earth's primal, eon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things
+moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream
+ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains
+and masonry of no human pattern. There were cities under the sea, and denizens
+thereof; and towers in great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless
+winged entities shot off into space, or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter
+grasped, though the images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He
+himself had no stable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and
+position as his whirling fancy supplied.
+
+He had wished to find the enchanted regions of his boyhood dreams, where
+galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, and elephant
+caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kied, beyond forgotten palaces
+with veined ivory columns that sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.
+Now, intoxicated with wider visions, he scarcely knew what he sought.
+Thoughts of infinite and blasphemous daring rose in his mind, and he knew he
+would face the dreaded Guide without fear, asking monstrous and terrible things
+of him.
+
+All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of
+stabilization. There were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and
+incomprehensible designs and disposed according to the laws of some unknown,
+inverse geometry. Light filtered from a sky of no assignable colour in baffling,
+contradictory directions, and played almost sentiently over what seemed to be a
+curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise,
+and surmounted by cloaked, ill-defined shapes.
+
+There was another shape, too, which occupied no pedestal, but which seemed to
+glide or float over the cloudy, floor-like lower level. It was not exactly permanent
+
+
+
+
+in outline, but held transient suggestions of something remotely preceding or
+paralleling the human form, though half as large again as an ordinary man. It
+seemed to be heavily cloaked, like the shapes on the pedestals, with some
+neutral-coloured fabric; and Carter could not detect any eye-holes through which
+it might gaze. Probably it did not need to gaze, for it seemed to belong to an
+order of beings far outside the merely physical in organization and faculties.
+
+A moment later Carter knew that this was so, for the Shape had spoken to his
+mind without sound or language. And though the name it uttered was a dreaded
+and terrible one, Randolph Carter did not flinch in fear.
+
+Instead, he spoke back, equally without sound or language, and made those
+obeisances which the hideous Necronomicon had taught him to make. For this
+shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose
+out of the sea, and the Children of the Fire Mist came to Earth to teach the Elder
+Lore to man. It was indeed the frightful Guide and Guardian of the Gate - 'UMR
+AT-TAWIL, the ancient one, which the scribe rendereth the PROLONGED OF
+LIFE.
+
+The Guide knew, as he knew all things, of Carter's quest and coming, and that
+this seeker of dreams and secrets stood before him unafraid. There was no horror
+or malignity in what he radiated, and Carter wondered for a moment whether
+the mad Arab's terrific blasphemous hints came from envy and a baffled wish to
+do what was now about to be done. Or perhaps the Guide reserved his horror
+and malignity for those who feared. As the radiations continued. Carter
+eventually interpreted them in the form of words.
+
+"I am indeed that Most Ancient One," said the Guide, "of whom you know. We
+have awaited you - the Ancient Ones and I. You are welcome, even though long
+delayed. You have the key, and have unlocked the First Gate. Now the Ultimate
+Gate is ready for your trial. If you fear, you need not advance. You may still go
+back unharmed, the way you came. But if you chose to advance -"
+
+The pause was ominous, but the radiations continued to be friendly. Carter
+hesitated not a moment, for a burning curiosity drove him on.
+
+"I will advance," he radiated back, "and I accept you as my Guide."
+
+At this reply the Guide seemed to make a sign by certain motions of his robe
+which may or may not have involved the lifting of an arm or some homologous
+member. A second sign followed, and from his well- learned lore Carter knew
+that he was at last very close to the Ultimate Gate. The light now changed to
+another inexplicable colour, and the shapes on the quasi-hexagonal pedestals
+
+
+
+
+became more clearly defined. As they sat more erect, their outlines became more
+like those of men, though Carter knew that they could not be men. Upon their
+cloaked heads there now seemed to rest tall, uncertainly coloured miters,
+strangely suggestive of those on certain nameless figures chiseled by a forgotten
+sculptor along the living cliffs of a high, forbidden mountain in Tartary; while
+grasped in certain folds of their swathings were long sceptres whose carven
+heads bodied forth a grotesque and archaic mystery.
+
+Carter guessed what they were and whence they came, and Whom they served;
+and guessed, too, the price of their service. But he was still content, for at one
+mighty venture he was to learn all. Damnation, he reflected, is but a word
+bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to condemn all who can see,
+even with a single eye. He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had
+babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their
+everlasting dreams to wreack a wrath on mankind. As well, he might a
+mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm. Now the whole
+assemblage on the vaguely hexagonal pillars was greeting him with a gesture of
+those oddly carven sceptres and radiating a message which he understood:
+
+"We salute you. Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, whose daring has
+made you one of us."
+
+Carter saw now that one of the pedestals was vacant, and a gesture of the Most
+Ancient One told him it was reserved for him. He saw also another pedestal,
+taller than the rest, and at the center of the oddly curved line - neither semicircle
+nor ellipse, parabola nor hyperbola - which they formed. This, he guessed, was
+the Guide's own throne. Moving and rising in a manner hardly definable. Carter
+took his seat; and as he did so he saw that the Guide had seated himself.
+
+Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was
+holding something - some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if
+for the sight, or what answered for sight, of the cloaked Companions. It was a
+large sphere, or apparent sphere, of some obscurely iridescent metal, and as the
+Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and
+fall in intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even though they followed no
+rhythm of Earth. There was a suggestion of chanting or what human imagination
+might interpret as chanting. Presently the quasi-sphere began to grow luminous,
+and as it gleamed up into a cold, pulsating light of unassignable colour. Carter
+saw that its flickerings conformed to the alien rhythm of the chant. Then all the
+mitered, scepter-bearing Shapes on the pedestals commenced a slight, curious
+swaying in the same inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of unclassifiable light -
+resembling that of the quasi-sphere - played around their shrouded heads.
+
+
+
+
+The Hindoo paused in his tale and looked curiously at the tall, coffin-shaped
+clock with the four hands and hieroglyphed dial, whose crazy ticking followed
+no known rhythm of Earth.
+
+"You, Mr. de Marigny," he suddenly said to his learned host, "do not need to be
+told the particularly alien rhythm to which those cowled Shapes on the
+hexagonal pillars chanted and nodded. You are the only one else - in America -
+who has had a taste of the Outer Extension. That clock - 1 suppose it was sent to
+you by the Yogi poor Harley Warren used to talk about — the seer who said that
+he alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho, the hidden legacy of eon-old Leng,
+and had borne certain things away from that dreadful and forbidden city. I
+wonder how many of its subtler properties you know? If my dreams and
+readings be correct, it was made by those who knew much of the First Gateway.
+But let me go on with my tale."
+
+At last, continued the Swami, the swaying and the suggestion of chanting ceased,
+the lambent nimbuses around the now drooping and motionless heads faded,
+while the cloaked shapes slumped curiously on their pedestals. The quasi-
+sphere, however, continued to pulsate with inexplicable light. Carter felt that the
+Ancient Ones were sleeping as they had been when he first saw them, and he
+wondered out of what cosmic dreams his coming had aroused them. Slowly
+there filtered into his mind the truth that this strange chanting ritual had been
+one of instruction, and that the Companions had been chanted by the Most
+Ancient One into a new and peculiar kind of sleep in order that their dreams
+might open the Ultimate Gate to which the silver key was a passport. He knew
+that in the profundity of this deep sleep they were contemplating unplumbed
+vastnesses of utter and absolute outsideness, and that they were to accomplish
+that which his presence had demanded.
+
+The Guide did not share this sleep, but seemed still to be giving instructions in
+some subtle, soundless way. Evidently he was implanting images of those things
+which he wished the Companions to dream: and Carter knew that as each of the
+Ancient Ones pictured the prescribed thought, there would be born the nucleus
+of a manifestation visible to his earthly eyes. When the dreams of all the Shapes
+had achieved a oneness, that manifestation would occur, and everything he
+required be materialized, through concentration. He had seen such things on
+Earth - in India, where the combined, projected will of a circle of adepts can
+make a thought take tangible substance, and in hoary Atlaanat, of which few
+even dare speak.
+
+Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed. Carter could not
+be certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious
+of having a kind of body, and of holding the fateful silver key in his hand. The
+
+
+
+
+masses of towering stone opposite him seemed to possess the evenness of a wall,
+toward the centre of which his eyes were irresistibly drawn. And then suddenly
+he felt the mental currents of the Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.
+
+For the first time Carter realized how terrific utter silence, mental and physical,
+may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible
+rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse of the Earth's dimensional extension, but
+now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything. Despite his
+intimations of body, he had no audible breath, and the glow of 'Umr at-Tawil's
+quasi-sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and unpulsating. A potent nimbus,
+brighter than those which had played round the heads of the Shapes, blazed
+frozenly over the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide.
+
+A dizziness assailed Carter, and his sense of lost orientation waxed a
+thousandfold. The strange lights seemed to hold the quality of the most
+impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blacknesses while about the Ancient
+Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal thrones, there hovered an air of the
+most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself wafted into immeasurable
+depths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping against his face. It was as if he
+floated in a torrid, rose-tinctured sea; a sea of drugged wine whose waves broke
+foaming against shores of brazen fire. A great fear clutched him as he half saw
+that vast expanse of surging sea lapping against its far off coast. But the moment
+of silence was broken - the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was
+not of physical sound or articulate words.
+
+"The Man of Truth is beyond good and evil," intoned the voice that was not a
+voice. 'The Man of Truth has ridden to AU-Is-One. The Man of Truth has learned
+that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor."
+
+And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so irresistibly
+drawn, there appeared the outline of a titanic arch not unlike that which he
+thought he had glimpsed so long ago in that cave within a cave, on the far,
+unreal surface of the three-dimensioned Earth. He realized that he had been
+using the silver key - moving it in accord with an unlearned and instinctive ritual
+closely akin to that which had opened the Inner Gate. That rose-drunken sea
+which lapped his cheeks was, he realized, no more or less than the adamantine
+mass of the solid wall yielding before his spell, and the vortex of thought with
+which the Ancient Ones had aided his spell. Still guided by instinct and blind
+determination, he floated forward - and through the Ultimate Gate.
+
+Chapter Four
+
+
+
+
+Randolph Carter's advance through the cyclopean bulk of masonry was like a
+dizzy precipitation through the measureless gulfs between the stars. From a
+great distance he felt triumphant, godlike surges of deadly sweetness, and after
+that the rustling of great wings, and impressions of sound like the chirpings and
+murmurings of objects unknown on Earth or in the solar system. Glancing
+backward, he saw not one gate alone but a multiplicity of gates, at some of which
+clamoured Forms he strove not to remember.
+
+And then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the Forms
+could give - a terror from which he could not flee because it was connected with
+himself. Even the First Gateway had taken something of stability from him,
+leaving him uncertain about his bodily form and about his relationship to the
+mistily defined objects around him, but it had not disturbed his sense of unity.
+He had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed point in the dimensional seething.
+Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he realized in a moment of consuming
+fright that he was not one person, but many persons.
+
+He was in many places at the same time. On Earth, on October 7, 1883, a little
+boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake Den in the hushed evening
+light and running down the rocky slope, and through the twisted-boughed
+orchard toward his Uncle Christopher's house in the hills beyond Arkham; yet at
+that same moment, which was also somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague
+shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient
+Ones in Earth's transdimensional extension. Here, too, was a third Randolph
+Carter, in the unknown and formless cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate.
+And elsewhere, in a chaos of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and monstrous
+diversity brought him close to the brink of madness, were a limitless confusion of
+beings which he knew were as much himself as the local manifestation now
+beyond the Ultimate Gate.
+
+There were Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of
+Earth's history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending knowledge,
+suspicion, and credibility; Carters of forms both human and non-human,
+vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And
+more, there were Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but
+moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and
+galaxies and cosmic continua; spores of eternal life drifting from world to world,
+universe to universe, yet all equally himself. Some of the glimpses recalled
+dreams - both faint and vivid, single and persistent - which he had had through
+the long years since he first began to dream; and a few possessed a haunting,
+fascinating and almost horrible familiarity which no earthly logic could explain.
+
+
+
+
+Faced with this reahzation, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch of supreme
+horror - horror such as had not been hinted even at the climax of that hideous
+night when two had ventured into an ancient and abhorred necropolis under a
+waning moon and only one had emerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can
+arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with
+nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know
+that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings - that one
+no longer has a self - that is the nameless summit of agony and dread.
+
+He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could not be sure
+whether he - the fragment or facet of an entity beyond the Ultimate Gate - had
+been that one or some other. His self had been annihilated; and yet he - if indeed
+there could, in view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be such a thing
+as he - was equally aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves.
+It was as though his body had been suddenly transformed into one of those
+many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and he
+contemplated the aggregation in a bewildered attempt to discern which was the
+original and which the additions - if indeed (supremely monstrous thought!)
+there were any original as distinguished from other embodiments.
+
+Then, in the midst of these devastating reflections. Carter's beyond-the-gate
+fragment was hurled from what had seemed the nadir of horror to black,
+clutching pits of a horror still more profound. This time it was largely external - a
+force of personality which at once confronted and surrounded and pervaded
+him, and which in addition to its local presence, seemed also to be a part of
+himself, and likewise to be co- existent with all time and conterminous with all
+space. There was no visual image, yet the sense of entity and the awful concept
+of combined localism and identity and infinity lent a paralyzing terror beyond
+anything which any Carter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable of existing.
+
+In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror of destroyed
+individuality. It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self -
+not merely a thing of one space-time continuum, but allied to the ultimate
+animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep - the last, utter sweep
+which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was
+perhaps that which certain secret cults of Earth had whispered of as Yog-Sothoth,
+and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of
+Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the
+spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable sign - yet in a flash the Carter-facet
+realized how slight and fractional all these conceptions are.
+
+And now the Being was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves that
+smote and burned and thundered - a concentration of energy that blasted its
+
+
+
+
+recipient with well-nigh unendurable violence, and that paralleled in an
+unearthly rhythm the curious swaying of the Ancient Ones, and the flickering of
+the monstrous lights, in that baffling region beyond the First Gate. It was as
+though suns and worlds and universes had converged upon one point whose
+very position in space they had conspired to annihilate with an impact of
+resistless fury. But amidst the greater terror one lesser terror was diminished; for
+the searing waves appeared somehow to isolate the Beyond-the-Gate Carter from
+his infinity of duplicates - to restore, as it were, a certain amount of the illusion of
+identity. After a time the hearer began to translate the waves into speech-forms
+known to him, and his sense of horror and oppression waned. Fright became
+pure awe, and what had seemed blasphemously abnormal seemed now only
+ineffably majestic.
+
+"Randolph Carter," it seemed to say, "my manifestations on your planet's
+extension, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would lately have
+returned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet who with greater
+freedom has risen to greater and nobler desires and curiosities. You wished to
+sail up golden Oukranos, to search out forgotten ivory cities in orchid-heavy
+Kied, and to reign on the opal throne of Ilek- Vad, whose fabulous towers and
+numberless domes rise mighty toward a single red star in a firmament alien to
+your Earth and to all matter. Now, with the passing of two Gates, you wish
+loftier things. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a dream
+beloved, but would plunge like a man into that last and inmost of secrets which
+lies behind all scenes and dreams.
+
+"What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have
+granted eleven times only to beings of your planet - five times only to those you
+call men, or those resembling them. I am ready to show you the Ultimate
+Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you gaze full at
+that last and first of secrets you may still wield a free choice, and return if you
+will through the two Gates with the Veil still unrent before our eyes."
+
+Chapter Five
+
+A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and awesome silence
+full of the spirit of desolation. On every hand pressed the illimitable vastness of
+the void; yet the seeker knew that the Being was still there. After a moment he
+thought of words whose mental substance he flung into the abyss: "I accept. I
+will not retreat."
+
+The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the Being had heard. And
+now there poured from that limitless Mind a flood of knowledge and
+explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for such a
+
+
+
+
+grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He was told how childish
+and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of
+directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-
+backward, right-left. He was shown the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the
+little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and connections - their
+hatreds, rages, loves and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their
+demands for faiths contrary to reason and nature.
+
+While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words there
+were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and
+perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a region of dimensions
+beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man. He saw now, in the
+brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of power and then an
+illimitable void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his senses. From some
+inconceivable vantagepoint he looked upon prodigious forms whose multiple
+extensions transcended any conception of being, size and boundaries which his
+mind had hitherto been able to hold, despite a lifetime of cryptical study. He
+began to understand dimly why there could exist at the same time the little boy
+Randolph Carter in the Arkham farm-house in 1883, the misty form on the
+vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond the First Gate, the fragment now facing the
+Presence in the limitless abyss, and all the other Carters his fancy or perception
+envisaged.
+
+Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his understanding,
+reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an
+infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the
+intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension - as
+a square is cut from a cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of
+three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions,
+which men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut
+from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of
+archetypal infinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an
+infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing - the three-dimensional phase of that
+small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where 'Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams
+to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality, and band thoughts of its
+many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That
+which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we
+call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.
+
+Time, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it
+has motion and is the cause of change is an illusion. Indeed, it is itself really an
+illusion, for except to the narrow sight of beings in limited dimensions there are
+no such things as past, present and future. Men think of time only because of
+
+
+
+
+what they call change, yet that too is illusion. All that was, and is, and is to be,
+exists simultaneously.
+
+These revelations came with a god like solemnity which left Carter unable to
+doubt. Even though they lay almost beyond his comprehension, he felt that they
+must be true in the light of that final cosmic reality which belies all local
+perspectives and narrow partial views; and he was familiar enough with
+profound speculations to be free from the bondage of local and partial
+conceptions. Had his whole quest not been based upon a faith in the unreality of
+the local and partial?
+
+After an impressive pause the waves continued, saying that what the denizens of
+few-dimensioned zones call change is merely a function of their consciousness,
+which views the external world from various cosmic angles. As the Shapes
+produced by the cutting of a cone seem to vary with the angles of cutting - being
+circle, ellipse, parabola or hyperbola according to that angle, yet without any
+change in the cone itself - so do the local aspects of an unchanged - and endless
+reality seem to change with the cosmic angle of regarding. To this variety of
+angles Of consciousness the feeble beings of the inner worlds are slaves, since
+with rare exceptions they can not learn to control them. Only a few students of
+forbidden things have gained inklings of this control, and have thereby
+conquered time and change. But the entities outside the Gates command all
+angles, and view the myriad parts of the cosmos in terms of fragmentary change-
+involving perspective, or of the changeless totality beyond perspective, in
+accordance with their will.
+
+As the waves paused again. Carter began to comprehend, vaguely and
+terrifiedly, the ultimate background of that riddle of lost individuality which had
+at first so horrified him. His intuition pieced together the fragments of revelation,
+and brought him closer and closer to a grasp of the secret. He understood that
+much of the frightful revelation would have come upon him - splitting up his ego
+amongst myriads of earthly counterparts inside the First Gate, had not the magic
+of 'Umr at-Tawil kept it from him in order that he might use the silver key with
+precision for the Ultimate Gate's opening. Anxious for clearer knowledge, he
+sent out waves of thought, asking more of the exact relationship between his
+various facets - the fragment now beyond the Ultimate Gate, the fragment still on
+the quasi-hexagonal pedestal beyond the First Gate, the boy of 1883, the man of
+1928, the various ancestral beings who had formed his heritage and the bulwark
+of his ego, amid the nameless denizens of the other eons and other worlds which
+that first hideous flash ultimate perception had identified with him. Slowly the
+waves of the Being surged out in reply, trying to make plain what was almost
+beyond the reach of an earthly mind.
+
+
+
+
+All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and
+all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one
+archetypal and eternal being in the space outside dimensions. Each local being -
+son, father, grandfather, and so on - and each stage of individual being - infant,
+child, boy, man - is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and
+eternal being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane
+which cuts it. Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors,
+both human and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only
+phases of one ultimate, eternal "Carter" outside space and time - phantom
+projections differentiated only by the angle at which the plane of consciousness
+happened to cut the eternal archetype in each case.
+
+A slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the child of
+yesterday; could turn Randolph Carter into that wizard, Edmund Carter who
+fled from Salem to the hills behind Arkham in 1692, or that Pickman Carter who
+in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from
+Australia; could turn a human Carter into one of those earlier entities which had
+dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after
+flying down from Kythamil, the double planet that once revolved around
+Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully
+shaped dweller on Kythamil itself, or a still remoter creature of trans-galactic
+Stronti, or a four- dimensioned gaseous consciousness in an older space-time
+continuum, or a vegetable brain of the future on a dark, radioactive comet of
+inconceivable orbit - so on, in endless cosmic cycle.
+
+The archetype, throbbed the waves, are the people of the Ultimate Abyss -
+formless, ineffable, and guessed at only by rare dreamers on the low-
+dimensioned worlds. Chief among such was this informing Being itself. . . which
+indeed was Carter's own archetype. The gutless zeal of Carter and all his
+forebears for forbidden cosmic secrets was a natural result of derivation from the
+Supreme Archetype. On every world all great wizards, all great thinkers, all
+great artists, are facets of It.
+
+Almost stunned with awe, and with a kind of terrifying delight, Randolph
+Carter's consciousness did homage to that transcendent Entity from which it was
+derived. As the waves paused again he pondered in the mighty silence, thinking
+of strange tributes, stranger questions, and still stranger requests. Curious
+concepts flowed conflictingly through a brain dazed with unaccustomed vistas
+and unforeseen disclosures. It occurred to him that, if these disclosures were
+literally true, he might bodily visit all those infinitely distant ages and parts of
+the universe which he had hitherto known only in dreams, could he but
+command the magic to change the angle of his consciousness-plane. And did not
+the silver key supply that magic? Had it not first changed him from a man in
+
+
+
+
+1928 to a boy in 1883, and then to something quite outside time? Oddly, despite
+his present apparent absence of body; he knew that the key was still with him.
+
+While the silence still lasted, Randolph Carter radiated forth the thoughts and
+questions which assailed him. He knew that in this ultimate abyss he was
+equidistant from every facet of his archetype - human or non-human, terrestrial
+or ertra-terrestrial, galactic or tran-galactic; and his curiosity regarding the other
+phases of his being - especially those phases which were farthest from an earthly
+1928 in time and space, or which had most persistently haunted his dreams
+throughout life - was at fever beat He felt that his archetypal Entity could at will
+send him bodily to any of these phases of bygone and distant life by changing his
+consciousness-plane and despite the marvels he had undergone he burned for
+the further marvel of walking in the flesh through those grotesque and incredible
+scenes which visions of the night had fragmentarily brought him.
+
+Without definite intention be was asking the Presence for access to a dim,
+fantastic world whose five multi-coloured suns, alien constellations, dizzily black
+crags, clawed, tapir-snouted denizens, bizarre metal towers, unexplained
+tunnels, and cryptical floating cylinders had intruded again and again upon his
+slumbers. That world, he felt vaguely, was in all the conceivable cosmos the one
+most freely in touch with others; and he longed to explore the vistas whose
+beginnings he had glimpsed, and to embark through space to those still remoter
+worlds with which the clawed, snouted denizens trafficked. There was no time
+for fear. As at all crises of his strange life, sheer cosmic curiosity triumphed over
+everything else.
+
+When the waves resumed their awesome pulsing. Carter knew that his terrible
+request was granted. The Being was telling him of the nighted gulfs through
+which he would have to pass of the unknown quintuple star in an unsuspected
+galaxy around which the alien world revolved, and of the burrowing inner
+horrors against which the clawed, snouted race of that world perpetually fought.
+It told him, too, of how the angle of his personal consciousness-plane, and the
+angle of his consciousness-plane regarding the space-time elements of the
+sought-for world, would have to be tilted simultaneously in order to restore to
+that world the Carter-facet which had dwelt there.
+
+The Presence wanted him to be sure of his symbols if he wished ever to return
+from the remote and alien world he had chosen, and he radiated back an
+impatient affirmation; confident that the silver key, which he felt was with him
+and which he knew had tilted both world and personal planes in throwing him
+back to 1883, contained those symbols which were meant. And now the Being,
+grasping his impatience signified its readiness to accomplish the monstrous
+
+
+
+
+precipitation. The waves abruptly ceased, and there supervened a momentary
+stillness tense with nameless and dreadful expectancy.
+
+Then, without warning, came a whirring and drumming that swelled to a terrific
+thundering. Once again Carter felt himself the focal point of an intense
+concentration of energy which smote and hammered and seared unbearably in
+the now -familiar rhythm of outer space, and which he could not classify as either
+the blasting heat of a blazing star, or the all-petrifying cold of the ultimate abyss.
+Bands and rays of colour utterly foreign to any spectrum of our universe played
+and wove and interlaced before him, and he was conscious of a frightful velocity
+of motion. He caught one fleeting glimpse of a figure sitting alone upon a cloudy
+throne more hexagonal than otherwise. . .
+
+Chapter Six
+
+As the Hindoo paused in his story he saw that de Marigny and Phillips were
+watching him absorbedly. Aspinwall pretended to ignore the narrative and kept
+his eyes ostentatiously on the papers before him. The alien-rhythmed ticking of
+the coffin-shaped clock took on a new and portentous meaning, while the fumes
+from the choked, neglected tripods wove themselves into fantastic and
+inexplicable shapes, and formed disturbing combinations with the grotesque
+figures of the draft-swayed tapestries. The old Negro who had tended them was
+gone - perhaps some growing tension had frightened him out of the house. An
+almost apologetic hesitancy hampered the speaker as he resumed in his oddly
+labored yet idiomatic voice.
+
+"You have found these things of the abyss hard to believe," he said, "but you
+will find the tangible and material things ahead still barer. That is the way of our
+minds. Marvels are doubly incredible when brought into three dimensions from
+the vague regions of possible dream. I shall not try to tell you much - that would
+be another and very different story. I will tell only what you absolutely have to
+know."
+
+Carter, after that final vortex of alien and polychromatic rhythm, had found
+himself in what for a moment he thought was his old insistent dream. He was, as
+many a night before, walking amidst throngs of clawed, snouted beings through
+the streets of a labyrinth of inexplicably fashioned metal under a plate of diverse
+solar colour; and as he looked down he saw that his body was like those of the
+others - rugose, partly squamous, and curiously articulated in a fashion mainly
+insect-like yet not without a caricaturish resemblance to the human outline. The
+silver key was still in his grasp, though held by a noxious-looking claw.
+
+
+
+
+In another moment the dream-sense vanished, and he feh rather as one just
+awakened from a dream. The ultimate abyss - the Being - the entity of absurd,
+outlandish race called Randolph Carter on a world of the future not yet born -
+some of these things were parts of the persistent recurrent dreams of the wizard
+Zkauba on the planet Yaddith. They were too persistent - they interfered with his
+duties in weaving spells to keep the frightful Dholes in their burrows, and
+became mixed up with his recollections of the myriad real worlds he had visited
+in light-beam envelopes. And now they had become quasi-real as never before.
+This heavy, material silver key in his right upper claw, exact image of one he had
+dreamt about meant no good. He must rest and reflect, and consult the tablets of
+Nhing for advice on what to do. Climbing a metal wall in a lane off the main
+concourse, he entered his apartment and approached the rack of tablets.
+
+Seven day -fractions later Zkauba squatted on his prism in awe and half despair,
+for the truth had opened up a new and conflicting set of memories. Nevermore
+could he know the peace of being one entity. For all time and space he was two:
+Zkauba the wizard of Yaddith, disgusted with the thought of the repellent earth-
+mammal Carter that he was to be and had been, and Randolph Carter, of Boston
+on the Earth, shivering with fright at the clawed, mantel thing which he had once
+been, and had become again.
+
+The time units spent on Yaddith, croaked the Swami - whose laboured voice was
+beginning to show signs of fatigue - made a tale in themselves which could not
+be related in brief compass. There were trips to Stronti and Mthura and Kath,
+and other worlds in the twenty-eight galaxies accessible to the light-beam
+envelopes of the creatures of Yaddith, and trips back and forth through eons of
+time with the aid of the silver key and various other symbols known to Yaddith's
+wizards. There were hideous struggles with the bleached viscous Dholes in the
+primal tunnels that honeycombed the planet. There were awed sessions in
+libraries amongst the massed lore of ten thousand worlds living and dead. There
+were tense conferences with other minds of Yaddith, including that of the Arch-
+Ancient Buo. Zkauba told no one of what had befallen his personality, but when
+the Randolph Carter facet was uppermost he would study furiously every
+possible means of returning to the Earth and to human form, and would
+desperately practice human speech with the alien throat-organs so ill adapted to
+it.
+
+The Carter-facet had soon learned with horror that the silver key was unable to
+effect his return to human form. It was, as he deduced too late from things he
+remembered, things he dreamed, and things he inferred from the lore of Yaddith,
+a product of Hyperborea on Earth; with power over the personal consciousness-
+angles of human beings alone. It could, however, change the planetary angle and
+send the user at will through time in an unchanged body. There had been an
+
+
+
+
+added spell which gave it limitless powers it otherwise lacked; but this, too, was
+a human discovery - peculiar to a spatially unreachable region, and not to be
+duplicated by the wizards of Yaddith. It had been written on the undecipherable
+parchment in the hideously carven box with the silver key, and Carter bitterly
+lamented that he had left it behind. The now inaccessible Being of the abyss had
+warned him to be sure of his symbols, and had doubtless thought he lacked
+nothing.
+
+As time wore on he strove harder and harder to utilize the monstrous lore of
+Yaddith in finding a way back to the abyss and the omnipotent Entity. With his
+new knowledge be could have done much toward reading the cryptic
+parchment; but that power, under present conditions, was merely ironic. There
+were times, however, when the Zkauba-facet was uppermost and when he strove
+to erase the conflicting Carter- memories which troubled him.
+
+Thus long spaces of time wore on - ages longer than the brain of man could
+grasp, since the beings of Yaddith die only after prolonged cycles. After many
+hundreds of revolutions the Carter-facet seemed to gain on the Zkauba-facet, and
+would spend vast periods calculating the distance of Yaddith in space and time
+from the human Earth that was to be. The figures were staggering eons of light-
+years beyond counting but the immemorial lore of Yaddith fitted Carter to grasp
+such things. He cultivated the power of dreaming himself momentarily
+Earthward, and learned many things about our planet that he had never known
+before. But he could not dream the needed formula on the missing parchment.
+
+Then at last he conceived a wild plan of escape from Yaddith - which began
+when be found a drug that would keep his Zkauba-facet always dormant, yet
+with out dissolution of the knowledge and memories of Zkauba. He thought that
+his calculations would let him perform a voyage with a light-wave envelope such
+as no being of Yaddidi had ever performed - a bodily voyage through nameless
+eons and across incredible galactic reaches to the solar system and the Earth
+itself.
+
+Once on Earth, though in the body of a clawed, snouted thing, he might be able
+somehow to find and finish deciphering-the strangely hieroglyphed parchment
+he had left in the car at Arkham; and with its aid - and the key's - resume his
+normal terrestrial semblance.
+
+He was not blind to the perils of the attempt. He knew that when he had brought
+the planet-angle to the right eon (a thing impossible to do while hurtling through
+space), Yaddith would be a dead world dominated by triumphant Dholes, and
+that his escape in the light-wave envelope would be a matter of grave doubt.
+Likewise was he aware of how he must achieve suspended animation, in the
+
+
+
+
+manner of an adept, to endure the eon long flight through fathomless abysses.
+He knew, too, that - assuming his voyage succeeded - he must immunize himself
+to the bacterial and other earthly conditions hostile to a body from Yaddith.
+Furthermore, he must provide a way of feigning human shape on Earth until he
+might recover and decipher the parchment and resume that shape in truth.
+Otherwise he would probably be discovered and destroyed by the people in
+horror as a thing that should not be. And there must be some gold - luckily
+obtainable on Yaddid - to tide him over that period of quest
+
+Slowly Carter's plans went forward. He prepared a light-wave envelope of
+abnormal toughness, able to stand both the prodigious time-transition and the
+unexampled flight through space. He tested all his calculations, and sent forth
+his Earthward dreams again and again, bringing them as close as possible to
+1928. He practiced suspended animation with marvelous success. He discovered
+just the bacterial agent he needed, and worked out the varying gravity-stress to
+which he must become used. He artfully fashioned a waxen mask and loose
+costume enabling him to pass among men as a human being of a sort, and
+devised a doubly potent spell with which to hold back the Dholes at the moment
+of his starting from the dead, black Yaddith of the inconceivable future. He took
+care, too, to assemble a large supply of the drugs - unobtainable on Earth - which
+would keep his Zkauba-facet in abeyance till he might shed the Yaddith body,
+nor did he neglect a small store of gold for earthly use.
+
+The starting-day was a time of doubt and apprehension. Carter climbed up to his
+envelope-platform, on the pretext of sailing for the triple star Nython, and
+crawled into the sheath of shining metal. He had just room to perform the ritual
+of the silver key, and as he did so he slowly started the levitation of his envelope.
+There was an appalling seething and darkening of the day, and hideous racking
+of pain. The cosmos seemed to reel irresponsibly, and the other constellations
+danced in a black sky.
+
+All at once Carter felt a new equilibrium. The cold of interstellar gulfs gnawed at
+the outside of his envelope, and he could see that he floated free in space - the
+metal building from which he had started having decayed years before. Below
+him the ground was festering with gigantic Dholes; and even as he looked, one
+reared up several hundred feet and leveled a bleached, viscous end at him. But
+his spells were effective, and in another moment he was ailing away from
+Yaddith, unharmed.
+
+Chapter Seven
+
+In that bizarre room in New Orleans, from which the old black servant had
+instinctively fled, the odd voice of Swami Chandraputta grew hoarser still.
+
+
+
+
+"Gentlemen," he continued, "I will not ask you to believe these things until I
+have shown you special proof. Accept it, then, as a myth, when I tell you of the
+thousands of light-years - thousands of years of time, and uncounted billions of
+miles that Randolph Carter hurtled through space as a nameless, alien entity in a
+thin envelope of electron-activated metal. He timed his period of suspended
+animation with utmost care, planning to have it end only a few years before the
+time of landing on the Earth in or near 1928.
+
+"He will never forget that awakening. Remember, gentlemen, that before that
+eon long sleep he had lived consciously for thousands of terrestrial years amidst
+the alien and horrible wonders of Yaddith. There was a hideous gnawing of cold,
+a cessation of menacing dreams, and a glance through the eye-plates of the
+envelope. Stars, clusters, nebulae, on every hand - and at last their outline bore
+some kinship to the constellations of Earth that he knew.
+
+"Some day his descent into the solar system may be told. He saw Kynath and
+Yuggoth on the rim, passed close to Neptune and glimpsed the hellish white
+fungi that spot it, learned an untellable secret from the close glimpsed mists of
+Jupiter, and saw the horror on one of the satellites, and gazed at the cyclopean
+ruins that sprawl over Mars' ruddy disc. When the Earth drew near he saw it as a
+thin crescent which swelled alarmingly in size. He slackened speed, though his
+sensations of homecoming made him wish to lose not a moment. I will not try to
+tell you of these sensations as I learned them from Carter.
+
+"Well, toward the last Carter hovered about in the Earth's upper air waiting till
+daylight came over the Western Hemisphere. He wanted to land where he had
+left - near the Snake Den in the hills behind Arkham. If any of you have been
+away from home long - and I know one of you has - I leave it to you how the
+sight of New England's rolling hills and great elms and gnarled orchards and
+ancient stone walls must have affected him.
+
+"He came down at dawn in the lower meadow of the old Carter place, and was
+thankful for the silence and solitude. It was autumn, as when he had left, and the
+smell of the hills was balm to his soul. He managed to drag the metal envelope
+up the slope of the timber lot into the Snake Den, though it would not go through
+the weed-choked fissure to the inner cave. It was there also that he covered his
+alien body with the human clothing and waxen mask which would be necessary.
+He kept the envelope here for over a year, till certain circumstances made a new
+hiding-place necessary.
+
+"He walked to Arkham - incidentally practicing the management of his body in
+human posture and against terrestrial gravity - and his gold changed to money at
+a bank. He also made some inquiries - posing as a foreigner ignorant of much
+
+
+
+
+English - and found that the year was 1930, only two years after the goal he had
+aimed at.
+
+"Of course, his position was horrible. Unable to assert his identity, forced to live
+on guard every moment, with certain difficulties regarding food, and with a
+need to conserve the alien drug which kept his Zkauba- facet dormant, he felt
+that he must act as quickly as possible. Going to Boston and taking a room in the
+decaying West End, where he could live cheaply and inconspicuously, he at once
+established inquiries concerning Randolph Carter's estate and effects. It was then
+that he learned how anxious Mr. Aspinwall, here, was to have the estate divided,
+and how valiantly Mr. de Marigny and Mr. Phillips strove to keep it intact."
+
+The Hindoo bowed, though no expression crossed his dark, tranquil, and thickly
+bearded face.
+
+"Indirectly," he continued, "Carter secured a good copy of the missing
+parchment and began working on its deciphering. I am glad to say that I was
+able to help in all this - for he appealed to me quite early, and through me came
+in touch with other mystics throughout the world. I went to live with him in
+Boston - a wretched place in Chambers Street. As for the parchment - I am
+pleased to help Mr. de Marigny in his perplexity. To him let me say that the
+language of those hieroglyphics is not Naacal, but R'lyehian, which was brought
+to Earth by the spawn of Cthulhu countless ages ago. It is, of coarse, a translation
+- there was an Hyperborean original millions of years earlier in the primal
+tongue of Tsath-yo.
+
+"There was more to decipher than Carter had looked for, but at no time did he
+give up hope. Early this year he made great strides through a book he imported
+from Nepal, and there is no question but that he will win before long.
+Unfortunately, however, one handicap has developed - the exhaustion of the
+alien drug which keeps the Zkauba-facet dormant. This is not, however, as great
+a calamity as was feared. Carter's personality is gaining in the body, and when
+Zkauba comes upper most - for shorter and shorter periods, and now only when
+evoked by some unusual excitement - he is generally too dazed to undo any of
+Carter's work. He can not find the metal envelope that would take him hack to
+Yaddith, for although he almost did, once. Carter hid it anew at a time when the
+Zkanba-facet was wholly latent. All the harm he has done is to frighten a few
+people and create certain nightmare rumors among the Poles and Lithuanians of
+Boston's West End. So far, he had never injured the careful disguise prepared by
+the Carter-facet, though he sometimes throws it off so that parts have to be
+replaced. I have seen what lies beneath - and it is not good to see.
+
+
+
+
+"A month ago Carter saw the advertisement of this meeting, and knew that he
+must act quickly to save his estate. He could not wait to decipher the parchment
+and resume his human form. Consequently he deputed me to act for him.
+
+"Gentlemen, I say to you that Randolph Carter is not dead; that he is temporarily
+in an anomalous condition, but that within two or three months at the outside he
+will be able to appear in proper form and demand the custody of his estate. I am
+prepared to offer proof if necessary. Therefore I beg that you will adjourn this
+meeting for an indefinite period."
+
+Chapter Eight
+
+De Marigny and Phillips stared at the Hindoo as if hypnotized, while Aspinwall
+emitted a series of snorts and bellows. The old attorney's disgust had by now
+surged into open rage and he pounded the table with an apoplectically veined fit
+When he spoke, it was in a kind of bark.
+
+"How long is this foolery to be borne? I've listened an hour to this madman - this
+faker - and now he has the damned effrontery to say Randolph Carter is alive - to
+ask us to postpone the settlement for no good reason! Why don't you throw the
+scoundrel out, de Marigny? Do you mean to make us all the butts of a charlatan
+or idiot?"
+
+De Marigny quietly raised his hand and spoke softly.
+
+"Let us think slowly and dearly. This has been a very singular tale, and there are
+things in it which I, as a mystic not altogether ignorant, recognize as far from
+impossible. Furthermore - since 1930 I have received letters from the Swami
+which tally with his account."
+
+As he paused, old Mr. Phillips ventured a word.
+
+"Swami Chandraputra spoke of proofs. I, too, recognize much that is significant
+in this story, and I have myself had many oddly corroborative letters from the
+Swami during the last two years; but some of these statements are very extreme.
+Is there not something tangible which can be shown?"
+
+At last the impassive-faced Swami replied, slowly and hoarsely, and drawing an
+object from the pocket of his loose coat as he spoke.
+
+"While none of you here has ever seen the silver key itself, Messrs. de Marigny
+and Phillips have seen photographs of it. Does this look familiar to you?"
+
+
+
+
+He fumblingly laid on the table, with his large, white-mittened hand, a heavy
+key of tarnished silver - nearly five inches long, of unknown and utterly exotic
+workmanship, and covered from end to end with hieroglyphs of the most bizarre
+description. De Marigny and Phillips gasped.
+
+"That's it!" cried de Marigny. "The camera doesn't lie I couldn't be mistaken!"
+
+But Aspinwall had already launched a reply.
+
+"Fools! What does it prove? If that's really the key that belonged to my cousin,
+it's up to this foreigner - this damned nigger - to explain how he got it! Randolph
+Carter vanished with the key four years ago. How do we know he wasn't robbed
+and murdered? He was half crazy himself, and in touch with still crazier people.
+
+"Look here, you nigger - where did you get that key? Did you kill Randolph
+Carter?"
+
+The Swami's features, abnormally placid, did not change; but the remote, irisless
+black eyes behind them blazed dangerously. He spoke with great difficulty.
+
+"Please control yourself, Mr. Aspinwall. There is another form of poof that I
+could give, but its effect upon everybody would not be pleasant. Let us be
+reasonable. Here are some papers obviously written since 1930, and in the
+unmistakable style of Randolph Carter."
+
+He clumsily drew a long envelope from inside his loose coat and handed it to the
+sputtering attorney as de Marigny and Phillips watched with chaotic thoughts
+and a dawning feeling of supernal wonder.
+
+"Of course the handwriting is almost illegible - but remember that Randolph
+Carter now has no hands well adapted to forming human script."
+
+Aspinwall looked through the papers hurriedly, and was visibly perplexed, but
+he did not change his demeanor. The room was tense with excitement and
+nameless dread and the alien rhythm of the coffin- shaped clock had an utterly
+diabolic sound to de Marigny and Phillips, though the lawyer seemed affected
+not at all.
+
+Aspinwall spoke again. "These look like clever forgeries. If they aren't, they may
+mean that Randolph Carter has been brought under the control of people with no
+good purpose. There's only one thing to do - have this faker arrested. De
+Marigny, will you telephone for the police?"
+
+
+
+
+"Let us wait/' answered their host. "I do not think this case calls for the police. I
+have a certain idea. Mr. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a mystic of real attainments.
+He says he is in the confidence of Randolph Carter. Will it satisfy you if he can
+answer certain questions which could be answered only by one in such
+confidence? I know Carter, and can ask such questions. Let me get a book which
+I think will make a good test."
+
+He turned toward the door to the library, Phillips dazedly following in a kind of
+automatic way. Aspinwall remained where he was, studying closely the Hindoo
+who confronted him with abnormally impassive face. Suddenly, as
+Chandraputra clumsily restored the silver key to his pocket the lawyer emitted a
+guttural shout.
+
+"Hey, by Heaven I've got it! This rascal is in disguise. I don't believe he's an East
+Indian at all. That face - it isn't a face, but a mask! I guess his story put that into
+my head, but it's true. It never moves, and that turban and beard hide the edges.
+This fellow's a common crook! He isn't even a foreigner - I've been watching his
+language. He's a Yankee of some sort. And look at those mittens - he knows his
+fingerprints could be spotted. Damn you, I'll pull that thing off -"
+
+"Stop!" The hoarse, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tone beyond all mere
+earthly fright "I told you there was another form of proof which I could give if
+necessary, and I warned you not to provoke me to it. This red-faced old meddler
+is right; I'm not really an East Indian. This face is a mask, and what it covers is
+not human. You others have guessed - I felt that minutes ago. It wouldn't be
+pleasant if I took that mask off - let it alone. Ernest, I may as well tell you that I
+am Randolph Carter."
+
+No one moved. Aspinwall snorted and made vague motions. De Marigny and
+Phillips, across the room, watched the workings of the red face and studied the
+back of the turbaned figure that confronted him. The clock's abnormal ticking
+was hideous and the tripod fumes and swaying arras danced a dance of death.
+The half-choking lawyer broke the silence.
+
+"No you don't, you crook - you can't scare me! You've reasons of your own for
+not wanting that mask off. Maybe we'd know who you are. Off with it - "
+
+As he reached forward, the Swami seized his hand with one of his own clumsily
+mittened members, evoking a curious cry of mixed pain and surprise. De
+Marigny started toward the two, but paused confused as the pseudo-Hindoo's
+shout of protest changed to a wholly inexplicable rattling and buzzing sound.
+Aspinwall's red face was furious, and with his free hand he made another lunge
+at his opponent's bushy beard. This time he succeeded in getting a hold, and at
+
+
+
+
+his frantic tug the whole waxen visage came loose from the turban and clung to
+the lawyer's apoplectic fist.
+
+As it did so, Aspinwall uttered a frightful gurgling cry, and Phillips and de
+Maigny saw his face convulsed with a wilder, deep and more hideous epilepsy
+of stark panic than ever they had seen on human countenance before. The
+pseudo-Swami had meanwhile released his other hand and was standing as if
+dazed, making buzzing noises of a most abnormal quality. Then the turbaned
+figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious,
+fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock that ticked out its
+cosmic and abnormal rhythm. His now uncovered face was turned away, and de
+Marigny and Phillips could not see what the lawyer's act had disclosure. Then
+their attention was turned to Aspinwall, who was sinking ponderously to the
+floor. The spell was broken-but when they reached the old man he was dead.
+
+Turning quickly to the shuffling Swami's receding back, de Marigny saw one of
+the great white mittens drop listlessly off a dangling arm. The fumes of the
+olibanum were thick, and all that could be glimpsed of the revealed hand was
+something long and black... Before the Creole could reach the retreating figure,
+old Mr. Phillips laid a hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Don't!" he whispered, "We don't know what we're up against. That other facet,
+you know - Zkauba, the wizard of Yaddith. . . "
+
+The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw
+though the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall,
+hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure
+entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it.
+
+De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and opened the
+clock it was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic
+rhythm which underlies all mystical gate- openings. On the floor the great white
+mitten, and the dead man with a bearded mask clutched in his hand, had
+nothing further to reveal.
+
+
+
+A year passed, and nothing has been heard of Randolph Carter. His estate is still
+unsettled. The Boston address from which one "Swami Chandraputra" sent
+inquiries to various mystics in 1930-31-32 was indeed tenanted by a strange
+Hindoo, but he left shortly before the date of the New Orleans conference and
+has never been seen since. He was said to be dark, expressionless, and bearded,
+and his landlord thinks the swarthy mask - which was duly exhibited - looked
+
+
+
+
+very much like him. He was never, however, suspected of any connection with
+the nightmare apparitions whispered of by local Slavs. The hills behind Arkham
+were searched for the "metal envelope," but nothing of the sort was ever found.
+However, a clerk in Arkham's First National Bank does recall a queer turbaned
+man who cashed an odd bit of gold bullion in October, 1930.
+
+De Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business. After all,
+what was proved?
+
+There was a story. There was a key which might have been forged from one of
+the pictures Carter had freely distributed in 1928. There were papers - all
+indecisive. There was a masked stranger, but who now living saw behind the
+mask? Amidst the strain and the olibanum fumes that act of vanishing in the
+clock might easily have been a dual hallucination. Hindoos know much of
+hypnotism. Reason proclaims the "Swami" a criminal with designs on Randolph
+Carter's estate. But the autopsy said that Aspinwall had died of shock. Was it
+rage alone which caused it? And some things in that story. . .
+
+In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and filled with olibanum
+fumes, Etienne Laurent de Marigny often sits listening with vague sensations to
+the abnormal rhythm of that hieroglyphed, coffin- shaped clock.
+
+
+
+
+Till A' the Seas - with R. H Barlow
+
+Written Jan 1935
+
+Published Summer 1935 in The Californian, 3, No. 1, 3-7.
+
+
+Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus,
+he could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible
+motion. Nothing stirred the dusty plain, the disintegrated sand of long-dry river-
+beds, where once coursed the gushing streams of Earth's youth. There was little
+greenery in this ultimate world, this final stage of mankind's prolonged presence
+upon the planet. For unnumbered aeons the drought and sandstorms had
+ravaged all the lands. The trees and bushes had given way to small, twisted
+shrubs that persisted long through their sturdiness; but these, in turn, perished
+before the onslaught of coarse grasses and stringy, tough vegetation of strange
+evolution.
+
+The ever-present heat, as Earth drew nearer to the sun, withered and killed with
+pitiless rays. It had not come at once; long aeons had gone before any could feel
+the change. And all through those first ages man's adaptable form had followed
+the slow mutation and modelled itself to fit the more and more torrid air. then
+the day had come when men could bear their hot cities but ill, and a gradual
+recession began, slow yet deliberate. Those towns and settlements closest to the
+equator had been first, of course, but later there were others. Man, softened and
+exhausted, could cope no longer with the ruthlessly mounting heat. It seared him
+as he was, and evolution was too slow to mould new resistances in him.
+
+Yet not at first were the great cities of the equator left to the spider and the
+scorpion. In the early years there were many who stayed on, devising curious
+shields and armours against the heat and the deadly dryness. These fearless
+souls, screening certain buildings against the encroaching sun, made miniature
+worlds of marvellously ingenious things, so that for a while men persisted in the
+rusting towers, hoping thereby to cling to old lands till the searing should be
+over. For many would not believe what the astronomers said, and looked for a
+coming of the mild olden world again. But one day the men of Dath, from the
+new city of Niyara, made signals to Yuanario, their immemorially ancient capital,
+and gained no answer from the few who remained therein. And when explorers
+reached that millennial city of bridge- linked towers they found only silence.
+There was not even the horror of corruption, for the scavenger lizards had been
+swift.
+
+
+
+
+Only then did the people fully realize that these cities were lost to them; know
+that they must forever abandon them to nature. The other colonists in the hot
+lands fled from their brave posts, and total silence reigned within the high basalt
+walls of a thousand empty towns. Of the denser throngs and multitudinous
+activities of the past, nothing finally remained. There now loomed against the
+rainless deserts only the blistered towers of vacant houses, factories, and
+structures of every sort, reflecting the sun's dazzling radiance and parching in
+the more and more intolerable heat.
+
+Many lands, however, had still escaped the scorching blight, so that the refugees
+were soon absorbed in the life of a newer world. During strangely prosperous
+centuries the hoary deserted cities of the equator grew half-forgotten and
+entwined with fantastic fables. Few thought of those spectral, rotting
+towers... those huddles of shabby walls and cactus-choked streets, darkly silent
+and abandoned. . .
+
+Wars came, sinful and prolonged, but the times of peace were greater. Yet always
+the swollen sun increased its radiance as Earth drew closer to its fiery parent. It
+was as if the planet meant to return to that source whence it was snatched, aeons
+ago, through the accidents of cosmic growth.
+
+After a time the blight crept outward from the central belt. Southern Yarat
+burned as a tenantless desert - and then the north. In Perath and Baling, those
+ancient cities where brooding centuries dwelt, there moved only the scaly shapes
+of the serpent and the salamander, and at last Loron echoed only to the fitful
+falling of tottering spires and crumbling domes.
+
+Steady, universal, and inexorable was the great eviction of man from the realms
+he had always known. No land within the widening stricken belt was spared; no
+people left unrouted. It was an epic, a titan tragedy whose plot was unrevealed
+to the actors - this wholesale desertion of the cities of men. It took not years or
+even centuries, but millennia of ruthless change. And still it kept on - sullen,
+inevitable, savagely devastating.
+
+Agriculture was at a standstill, the world fast became too arid for crops. This was
+remedied by artificial substitutes, soon universally used. And as the old places
+that had known the great things of mortals were left, the loot salvaged by the
+fugitives grew smaller and smaller. Things of the greatest value and importance
+were left in dead museums - lost amid the centuries - and in the end the heritage
+of the immemorial past was abandoned. A degeneracy both physical and cultural
+set in with the insidious heat. For man had so long dwelt in comfort and security
+that this exodus from past scenes was difficult. Nor were these events received
+phlegmatically; their very slowness was terrifying. Degradation and debauchery
+
+
+
+
+were soon common; government was disorganized, and the civilization aimlessly
+slid back toward barbarism.
+
+When, forty-nine centuries after the blight from the equatorial belt, the whole
+western hemisphere was left unpeopled, chaos was complete. There was no trace
+of order or decency in the last scenes of this titanic, wildly impressive migration.
+Madness and frenzy stalked through them, and fanatics screamed of an
+Armageddon close at hand.
+
+Mankind was now a pitiful remnant of the elder races, a fugitive not only from
+the prevailing conditions, but from his own degeneracy. Into the northland and
+the antarctic went those who could; the rest lingered for years in an incredible
+saturnalia, vaguely doubting the forthcoming disasters. In the city of Borligo a
+wholesale execution of the new prophets took place, after months of unfulfilled
+expectations. They thought the flight to the northland unnecessary, and no
+longer looked for the threatened ending.
+
+How they perished must have been terrible indeed - those vain, foolish creatures
+who thought to defy the universe. But the blackened, scorched towers are
+mute...
+
+These events, however, must not be chronicled - for there are larger things to
+consider then this complex and unhastening downfall of a lost civilization.
+During a long period morale was at lowest ebb among the courageous few who
+settled upon the alien arctic and antarctic shores, now mild as were those of
+southern Yarat in the long-dead past. But here there was respite. The soil was
+fertile, and forgotten pastoral arts were called into use anew. There was, for a
+long time, a contented little epitome of the lost lands; though here were no vast
+throngs or great buildings. Only a sparse remnant of humanity survived the
+aeons of change and peopled those scattered villages of the later world.
+
+How many millenia this continued is not known. The sun was slow in invading
+this last retreat; and as the eras passed there developed a sound, sturdy race,
+bearing no memories or legends of the old, lost lands. Little navigation was
+practiced by this new people, and the flying machine was wholly forgotten. Their
+devices were of the simplest type, and their culture was simple and primitive.
+Yet they were contented, and accepted the warm climate as something natural
+and accustomed.
+
+But unknown to these simple peasant-folk, still further rigours of nature were
+slowly preparing themselves. As the generations passed, the waters of the vast
+and unplumbed ocean wasted slowly away; enriching the air and the desiccated
+soil, but sinking lower and lower each century. The splashing surf still glistened
+
+
+
+
+bright, and the swirhng eddies were still there, but a doom of dryness hung over
+the whole watery expanse. However, the shrinkage could not have been detected
+save by instruments more delicate than any then known to the race. Even had the
+people realized the ocean's contraction, it is not likely that any vast alarm or
+great disturbace would have resulted, for the losses were so slight, and the sea so
+great... Only a few inches during many centuries - but in many centuries;
+increasing -
+
+
+
+So at last the oceans went, and water became a rarity on a globe of sun-baked
+drought. Man had slowly spread over all the arctic and antarctic lands; the
+equatorial cities, and many of later habitation, were forgotten even to legend.
+
+And now again the peace was disturbed, for water was scarce, and found only in
+deep caverns. There was little enough, even of this; and men died of thirst
+wandering in far places. Yet so slow were those deadly changes, that each new
+generation of man was loath to believe what it heard from its parents. None
+would admit that the heat had been less or the water more plentiful in the old
+days, or take warning that days of bitterer burning and drought were to come.
+Thus it was even at the end, when only a few hundred human creatures panted
+for breath beneath the cruel sun; a piteous huddled handful out of all the
+unnumbered millions who had once dwelt on the doomed planet.
+
+And the hundreds became small, till man was to be reckoned only in tens. These
+tens clung to the shrinking dampness of the caves, and knew at last at the end
+was near. So slight was their range that none had ever seen the tiny, fabled spots
+of ice left close to the parent's poles - if indeed such remained. Even had they
+existed and been known to man, none could have reached them across the
+trackless and formidable deserts. And so the last pathetic few dwindled...
+
+It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole
+Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture or encompass. Of the
+people of Earth's fortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and
+madmen could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped
+visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have
+doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow
+of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master
+of natural things. . .
+
+
+When he had eased the dying pangs of the old woman, Ull wandered in a fearful
+daze out into the dazzling sands. She had been a fearsome thing, shrivelled and
+so dry; like withered leaves. Her face had been the colour of the sickly yellow
+grasses that rustled in the hot wind, and she was loathsomely old.
+
+But she had been a companion; someone to stammer out vague fears to, to talk to
+about this incredible thing; a comrade to share one's hopes for succour from
+those silent other colonies beyond the mountains. He could not believe none
+lived elsewhere, for Ull was young, and not certain as are the old.
+
+For many years he had known none but the old woman - her name was
+Mladdna. She had come that day in his eleventh year, when all the hunters went
+to seek food, and did not return. Ull had no mother that he could remember, and
+there were few women in the tiny group. When the men had vanished, those
+three women, the young one and the two old, had screamed fearfully, and
+moaned long. Then the young one had gone mad, and killed herself with a sharp
+stick. The old ones buried her in a shallow hole dug with their nails, so Ull had
+been alone when this still older Mladdna came.
+
+She walked with the aid of a knotty pole, a priceless relique of the old forests,
+hard and shiny with years of use. She did not say whence she came, but
+stumbled into the cabin while the young suicide was being buried. There she
+waited till the two returned, and they accepted her incuriously.
+
+That was the way it had been for many weeks, until the two fell sick, and
+Mladdna could not cure them, strange that those younger two should have been
+stricken, while she, infirm and ancient, lived on. Mladdna had cared for them
+many days, and at length they died, so that Ull was left with only the stranger.
+He screamed all the night, so she became at length out of patience, and
+threatened to die too. Then, hearkening, he became quiet at once; for he was not
+desirous of complete solitude. After that he lived with Mladdna and they
+gathered roots to eat.
+
+Mladdna's rotten teeth were ill suited to the food they gathered, but they
+continued to chop it up till she could manage it. This weary routine of seeking
+and eating was Ull's childhood.
+
+Now he was strong, and firm, in his nineteenth year, and the old woman was
+dead. There was naught to stay for, so he determined at once to seek out those
+fabled huts beyond the mountains, and live with the people there. There was
+nothing to take on the journey. Ull closed the door of his cabin - why, he could
+not have told, for no animals had been there for many years - and left the dead
+woman within. Half- dazed, and fearful at his own audacity, he walked long
+
+
+
+
+hours in the dry grasses, and at length reached the first of the foothills. The
+afternoon came, and he climbed until he was weary, and lay down on the
+grasses. Sprawled there, he thought of many things. He wondered at the strange
+life, passionately anxious to seek out the lost colony beyond the mountains; but
+at last he slept.
+
+When he awoke there was starlight on his face, and he felt refreshed. Now that
+the sun was gone for a time, he travelled more quickly, eating little, and
+determining to hasten before the lack of water became difficult to bear. He had
+brought none; for the last people, dwelling in one place and never having
+occasion to bear their precious water away, made no vessels of any kind. UU
+hoped to reach his goal within a day, and thus escape thirst; so he hurried on
+beneath the bright stars, running at times in the warm air, and at other times
+lapsing into a dogtrot.
+
+So he continued until the sun arose, yet still he was within the small hills, with
+three great peaks looming ahead. In their shade he rested again, then he climbed
+all the morning, and at mid-day surmounted the first peak, where he lay for a
+time, surveying the space before the next range.
+
+Upon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus
+he could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible
+motion. . .
+
+The second night came, and found UU amid the rough peaks, the valley and the
+place where he had rested far behind. He was nearly out of the second range
+now, and hurrying still. Thirst had come upon him that day, and he regretted his
+folly. Yet he could not have stayed there with the corpse, alone in the grasslands.
+He sought to convince himself thus, and hastened ever on, tiredly straining.
+
+And now there only a few steps before the cliff wall would part and allow a view
+of the land beyond. UU stumbled wearily down the stony way, tumbling and
+bruising himself even more. It was nearly before him, this land of which he had
+heard tales in his youth. The way was long, but the goal was great. A boulder of
+giant circumference cut off his view; upon this he scrambled anxiously. Now at
+last he could behold by the sinking orb his long-sought destination, and his thirst
+and aching muscles were forgotten as he saw joyfully that a small huddle of
+buildings clung to the base of the farther cliff.
+
+UU rested not; but, spurred on by what he saw, ran and staggered and crawled
+the half mile remaining. He fancied that he could detect forms among the rude
+cabins. The sun was nearly gone; the hateful, devastating sun that had slain
+humanity. He could not be sure of details, but soon the cabins were near.
+
+
+
+
+They were very old, for clay blocks lasted long in the still dryness of the dying
+world. Little, indeed, changed but the living things - the grasses and these last
+men.
+
+Before him an open door swung upon rude pegs. In the fading ligh Ull entered,
+weary unto death, seeking painfully the expected faces.
+
+Then he fell upon the floor and wept, for at the table was propped a dry and
+ancient skeleton.
+
+
+
+He rose at last, crazed by thirst, aching unbearably, and suffering the greatest
+disappointment nay mortal could know. He was, then, the last living thing upon
+the globe. His the heritage of the Earth... all the lands, and all to him equally
+useless. He staggered upo, not looking at the dim white form in the reflected
+moonlight, and went through the door. About the empty village he wandered,
+searching for water and sadly inspecting this long-empty place so spectrally
+preserved by the changeless air. here there was a dwelling, there a rude place
+where things had been made - clay vessels holding only dust, and nowhere any
+liquid to quench his burning thirst.
+
+Then, in the centre of the little town, Ull saw a well-curb. He knew what it was,
+for he had heard tales of such thing from Mladdna. With pitiful joy, he reeled
+forward and leaned upon the edge. There, at last, was the end of his search.
+Water - slimy, stagnant, and shallow, but water - before his sight.
+
+Ull cried out in the voice of a tortured animal, groping for the chain and bucket.
+His hand slipped on the slimy edge; and he fell upon his chest across the brink.
+For a moment he lay there - then soundlessly his body was precipitated down
+the black shaft.
+
+There was a slight splash in the murky shallowness as he struck some long-
+sunken stone, dislodged aeons ago from the massive coping. The disturbed
+water subsided into quietness.
+
+And now at last the Earth was dead. The final, pitiful survivor had perished. All
+the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind
+were summed up in this poor twisted form - and how titanically meaningless it
+all had been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of
+humanity - how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor
+complacent fools of the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know
+the thunderous rampaging of human millions - or even the crawling of lizards
+
+
+
+
+and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone, now was come the reign of
+sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold,
+imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever.
+
+The stars whirred on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities
+unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae
+or to suns new-born, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and
+momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To
+such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led.
+
+But when the deadly sun's first rays darted across the valley, a light found its
+way to the weary face of a broken figure that lay in the slime.
+
+
+
+
+Two Black Bottles - with Wilfred
+Blanch Talman
+
+Not all of the few remaining inhabitants of Daalbergen, that dismal little village
+in the Ramapo Mountains, believe that my uncle, old Dominie Vanderhoof, is
+really dead. Some of them believe he is suspended somewhere between heaven
+and hell because of the old sexton's curse. If it had not been for that old magician,
+he might still be preaching in the little damp church across the moor.
+
+After what has happened to me in Daalbergen, I can almost share the opinion of
+the villagers. I am not sure that my uncle is dead, but I am very sure that he is
+not alive upon this earth. There is no doubt that the old sexton buried him once,
+but he is not in that grave now. I can almost feel him behind me as I write,
+impelling me to tell the truth about those strange happenings in Daalbergen so
+many years ago.
+
+It was the fourth day of October when I arrived at Daalbergen in answer to a
+summons. The letter was from a former member of my uncle's congregation,
+who wrote that the old man had passed away and that there should be some
+small estate which I, as his only living relative, might inherit. Having reached the
+secluded little hamlet by a wearying series of changes on branch railways, I
+found my way to the grocery store of Mark Haines, writer of the letter, and he,
+leading me into a stuffy back room, told me a peculiar tale concerning Dominie
+Vanderhoof's death.
+
+"Y' should be careful, Hoffman," Haines told me, "when y' meet that old sexton,
+Abel Foster. He's in league with the devil, sure's you're alive 'Twa'n't two weeks
+ago Sam Pryor, when he passed the old graveyard, beared him mumblin' t' the
+dead there. 'Twa'n't right be should talk that way - an' Sam does vow that there
+was a voice answered him - a kind o' half-voice, hollow and muffled-like, as
+though it come out o' th' ground. There's others, too, as could tell y' about seein'
+him standin' afore old Dominie Slott's grave - that one right agin' the church wall
+- a-wringin' his hands an' a-talkin' t' th' moss on th' tombstone as though it was
+the old Dominie himself."
+
+Old Foster, Haines said, had come to Daalbergen about ten years before, and had
+been immediately engaged by Vanderhoof to take care of the damp stone church
+at which most of the villagers worshipped. No one but Vanderhoof seemed to
+like him, for his presence brought a suggestion almost of the uncanny. He would
+sometimes stand by the door when the people came to church, and the men
+would coldly return his servile bow while the women brushed past in haste.
+
+
+
+
+holding their skirts aside to avoid touching him. He could be seen on week days
+cutting the grass in the cemetery and tending the flowers around the graves, now
+and then crooning and muttering to himself. And few failed to notice the
+particular attention he paid to the grave of the Reverend Guilliam Slott, first
+pastor of the church in 1701.
+
+It was not long after Foster's establishment as a village fixture that disaster began
+to lower. First came the failure of the mountain mine where most of the men
+worked. The vein of iron had given out, and many of the people moved away to
+better localities, while those who had large holdings of land in the vicinity took
+to farming and managed to wrest a meager living from the rocky hillsides. Then
+came the disturbances in the church. It was whispered about that the Reverend
+Johannes Vanderhoof had made a compact with the devil, and was preaching his
+word in the house of God. His sermons had become weird and grotesque -
+redolent with sinister things which the ignorant people of Daalbergen did not
+understand. He transported them back over ages of fear and superstition to
+regions of hideous, unseen spirits, and peopled their fancy with night-haunting
+ghouls. One by one the congregation dwindled, while the elders and deacons
+vainly pleaded with Vanderhoof to change the subject of his sermons. Though
+the old man continually promised to comply, he seemed to be enthralled by
+some higher power which forced him to do its will.
+
+A giant in stature, Johannes Vanderhoof was known to be weak and timid at
+heart, yet even when threatened with expulsion he continued his eerie sermons,
+until scarcely a handful of people remained to listen to him on Sunday morning.
+Because of weak finances, it was found impossible to call a new pastor, and
+before long not one of the villagers dared venture near the church or the
+parsonage which adjoined it. Everywhere there was fear of those spectral wraiths
+with whom Vanderhoof was apparently in league.
+
+My uncle, Mark Haines told me, had continued to live in the parsonage because
+there was no one with sufficient courage to tell him to move out of it. No one
+ever saw him again, but lights were visible in the parsonage at night, and were
+even glimpsed in the church from time to time. It was whispered about the town
+that Vanderhoof preached regularly in the church every Sunday morning,
+unaware that his congregation was no longer there to listen. He had only the old
+sexton, who lived in the basement of the church, to take care of him, and Foster
+made a weekly visit to what remained of the business section of the village to
+buy provisions. He no longer bowed servilely to everyone he met, but instead
+seemed to harbor a demoniac and ill-concealed hatred. He spoke to no one
+except as was necessary to make his purchases, and glanced from left to right out
+of evil-filled eyes as he walked the street with his cane tapping the uneven
+pavements. Bent and shriveled with extreme age, his presence could actually be
+
+
+
+
+felt by anyone near him, so powerful was that personality which, said the
+townspeople, had made Vanderhoof accept the devil as his master. No person in
+Daalbergen doubted that Abel Foster was at the bottom of all the town's ill luck,
+but not a one dared lift a finger against him, or could even approach him without
+a tremor of fear. His name, as well as Vanderhoof s, was never mentioned aloud.
+Whenever the matter of the church across the moor was discussed, it was in
+whispers; and if the conversation chanced to be nocturnal, the whisperers would
+keep glancing over their shoulders to make sure that nothing shapeless or
+sinister crept out of the darkness to bear witness to their words.
+
+The churchyard continued to be kept just as green and beautiful as when the
+church was in use, and the flowers near the graves in the cemetery were tended
+just as carefully as in times gone by. The old sexton could occasionally be seen
+working there, as if still being paid for his services, and those who dared venture
+near said that he maintained a continual conversation with the devil and with
+those spirits which lurked within the graveyard walls.
+
+One morning, Haines went on to say, Foster was seen digging a grave where the
+steeple of the church throws its shadow in the afternoon, before the sun goes
+down behind the mountain and puts the entire village in semi-twilight. Later, the
+church bell, silent for months, tolled solemnly for a half-hour. And at sun-down
+those who were watching from a distance saw Foster bring a coffin from the
+parsonage on a wheelbarrow, dump it into the grave with slender ceremony, and
+replace the earth in the hole.
+
+The sexton came to the village the next morning, ahead of his usual weekly
+schedule, and in much better spirits than was customary. He seemed willing to
+talk, remarking that Vanderhoof had died the day before, and that he had buried
+his body beside that of Dominie Slott near the church wall. He smiled from time
+to time, and rubbed his hands in an untimely and unaccountable glee. It was
+apparent that he took a perverse and diabolic delight in Vanderhoof's death. The
+villagers were conscious of an added uncanniness in his presence, and avoided
+him as much as they could. With Vanderhoof gone they felt more insecure than
+ever, for the old sexton was now free to cast his worst spells over the town from
+the church across the moor. Muttering something in a tongue which no one
+understood, Foster made his way back along the road over the swamp.
+
+It was then that Mark Haines remembered having heard Dominie Vanderhoof
+speak of me as his nephew. Haines accordingly sent for me, in the hope that I
+might know something which would clear up the mystery of my uncle's last
+years. I assured my summoner, however, that I knew nothing about my uncle or
+his past, except that my mother had mentioned him as a man of gigantic
+physique but with little courage or power of will.
+
+
+
+
+Having heard all that Haines had to tell me, I lowered the front legs of my chair
+to the floor and looked at my watch. It was late afternoon.
+
+"How far is it out to the church?" I inquired. "Think I can make it before sunset?"
+
+"Sure, lad, y' ain't goin' out there t' night! Not t' that place!" The old man
+trembled noticeably in every limb and half rose from his chair, stretching out a
+lean, detaining hand, "Why, it's plumb foolishness!" he exclaimed.
+
+I laughed aside his fears and informed him that, come what may, I was
+determined to see the old sexton that evening and get the whole matter over as
+soon as possible. I did not intend to accept the superstitions of ignorant country
+folk as truth, for I was convinced that all I had just heard was merely a chain of
+events which the over-imaginative people of Daalbergen had happened to link
+with their ill-luck. I felt no sense of fear or horror whatever.
+
+Seeing that I was determined to reach my uncle's house before nightfall, Haines
+ushered me out of his office and reluctantly gave me the few required directions,
+pleading from time to time that I change my mind. He shook my hand when I
+left, as though he never expected to see me again.
+
+"Take keer that old devil, Foster, don't git ye!" he warned again and again. "I
+wouldn't go near him after dark fer love n'r money. No siree!" He re-entered his
+store, solemnly shaking his head, while I set out along a road leading to the
+outskirts of the town.
+
+I had walked barely two minutes before I sighted the moor of which Haines had
+spoken. The road, flanked by a whitewashed fence, passed over the great
+swamp, which was overgrown with clumps of underbrush dipping down into
+the dank, slimy ooze. An odor of deadness and decay filled the air, and even in
+the sunlit afternoon little wisps of vapor could be seen rising from the
+unhealthful spot.
+
+On the opposite side of the moor I turned sharply to the left, as I had been
+directed, branching from the main road. There were several houses in the
+vicinity, I noticed; houses which were scarcely more than huts, reflecting the
+extreme poverty of their owners. The road here passed under the drooping
+branches of enormous willows which almost completely shut out the rays of the
+sun. The miasmal odor of the swamp was still in my nostrils, and the air was
+damp and chilly. I hurried my pace to get out of that dismal tunnel as soon as
+possible.
+
+
+
+
+Presently I found myself in the light again. The sun, now hanging like a red ball
+upon the crest of the mountain, was beginning to dip low, and there, some
+distance ahead of me, bathed in its bloody iridescence, stood the lonely church. I
+began to sense that uncanniness which Haines had mentioned, that feeling of
+dread which made all Daalbergen shun the place. The squat, stone hulk of the
+church itself, with its blunt steeple, seemed like an idol to which the tombstones
+that surrounded it bowed down and worshipped, each with an arched top like
+the shoulders of a kneeling person, while over the whole assemblage the dingy,
+gray parsonage hovered like a wraith.
+
+I had slowed my pace a trifle as I took in the scene. The sun was disappearing
+behind the mountain very rapidly now, and the damp air chilled me. Turning
+my coat collar up about my neck, I plodded on. Something caught my eye as I
+glanced up again. In the shadow of the church wall was something white - a
+thing which seemed to have no definite shape. Straining my eyes as I came
+nearer, I saw that it was a cross of new timber, surmounting a mound of freshly-
+turned earth. The discovery sent a new chill through me. I realized that this must
+be my uncle's grave, but something told me that it was not like the other graves
+near it. It did not seem like a dead grave. In some intangible way it appeared to
+be living, if a grave can be said to live. Very close to it, I saw as I came nearer,
+was another grave - an old mound with a crumbling stone about it. Dominie
+Slott's tomb, I thought, remembering Haines' story.
+
+There was no sign of life anywhere about the place. In the semi-twilight I
+climbed the low knoll upon which the parsonage stood, and hammered upon the
+door. There was no answer. I skirted the house and peered into the windows.
+The whole place seemed deserted.
+
+The lowering mountains had made night fall with disarming suddenness the
+minute the sun was fully hidden. I realized that I could see scarcely more than a
+few feet ahead of me. Feeling my way carefully, I rounded a corner of the house
+and paused, wondering what to do next.
+
+Everything was quiet. There was not a breath of wind, nor were there even the
+usual noises made by animals in their nocturnal ramblings. All dread had been
+forgotten for a time, but in the presence of that sepulchral calm my
+apprehensions returned. I imagined the air peopled with ghastly spirits that
+pressed around me, making the air almost unbreathable. I wondered, for the
+hundredth time, where the old sexton might be.
+
+As I stood there, half expecting some sinister demon to creep from the shadows, I
+noticed two lighted windows glaring from the belfry of the church. I then
+remembered what Haines had told me about Foster's living in the basement of
+
+
+
+
+the building. Advancing cautiously through the blackness, I found a side door of
+the church ajar.
+
+The interior had a musty and mildewed odor. Everything I touched was covered
+with a cold, clammy moistore. I struck a match and began to explore, to discover,
+if I could, how to get into the belfry. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks.
+
+A snatch of song, loud and obscene, sung in a voice that was guttural and thick
+with drink, came from above me. The match burned my fingers, and I dropped
+it. Two pin-points of light pierced the darkness of the farther wall of the church,
+and below them, to one side, I could see a door outlined where light filtered
+through its cracks. The song stopped as abruptly as it had commenced, and there
+was absolute silence again. My heart was thumping and blood raced through my
+temples. Had I not been petrified with fear, I should have fled immediately.
+
+Not caring to light another match, I felt my way among the pews until I stood in
+front of the door. So deep was the feeling of depression which had come over me
+that I felt as though I were acting in a dream. My actions were almost
+involuntary.
+
+The door was locked, as I found when I turned the knob. I hammered upon it for
+some time, but there was no answer. The silence was as complete as before.
+Feeling around the edge of the door, I found the hinges, removed the pins from
+them, and allowed the door to fall toward me. Dim light flooded down a steep
+flight of steps. There was a sickening odor of whiskey. I could now hear someone
+stirring in the belfry room above. Venturing a low halloo, I thought I heard a
+groan in reply, and cautiously climbed the stairs.
+
+My first glance into that unhallowed place was indeed startling. Strewn about
+the little room were old and dusty books and manuscripts - strange things that
+bespoke almost unbelievable age. On rows of shelves which reached to the
+ceiling were horrible things in glass jars and bottles - snakes and lizards and bats.
+Dust and mold and cobwebs encrusted everything. In the center, behind a table
+upon which was a lighted candle, a nearly empty bottle of whisky, and a glass,
+was a motionless figure with a thin, scrawny, wrinkled face and wild eyes that
+stared blankly through me. I recognized Abel Foster the old sexton, in an instant.
+He did not move or speak as I came slowly and fearfully toward him.
+
+"Mr. Foster?" I asked, trembling with unaccountable fear when I heard my voice
+echo within the close confines of the room. There was no reply, and no
+movement from the figure behind the table. I wondered if he had not drunk
+himself to insensibility, and went behind the table to shake him.
+
+
+
+
+At the mere touch of my arm upon his shoulder, the strange old man started
+from his chair as though terrified. His eyes, still having in them that same blank
+stare, were fixed upon me. Swinging his arms like flails, he backed away.
+
+"Don't!" he screamed. "Don't touch me! Go back - go back!"
+
+I saw that he was both drunk and struck with some kind of a nameless terror.
+Using a soothing tone, I told him who I was and why I had come. He seemed to
+understand vaguely and sank back into his chair, sitting limp and motionless.
+
+"I thought ye was him," he mumbled. "I thought ye was him come back fer it.
+He's been a-tryin' t' get out - a-tryin' t' get out sence I put him in there." His
+voice again rose to a scream and he clutched his chair. "Maybe he's got out now!
+Maybe he's out!"
+
+I looked about, half expecting to see some spectral shape coming up the stairs.
+
+"Maybe who's out?" I inquired.
+
+"Vanderhoof!" he shrieked. "Th' cross over his grave keeps fallin' down in th'
+night! Every morning the earth is loose, and gets harder t' pat down. He'll come
+out an' I won't be able t' do nothin'."
+
+Forcing him back into the chair, I seated myself on a box near him. He was
+trembling in mortal terror, with the saliva dripping from the corners of his
+mouth. From time to time I felt that sense of horror which Haines had described
+when he told me of the old sexton. Truly, there was something uncanny about
+the man. His head had now sunk forward upon his breast, and he seemed
+calmer, mumbling to himself.
+
+I quietly arose and opened a window to let out the fumes of whisky and the
+musty odor of dead things. Light from a dim moon, just risen, made objects
+below barely visible. I could just see Dominie Vanderhoof's grave from my
+position in the belfry, and blinked my eyes as I gazed at it. That cross was tilted! I
+remembered that it had been vertical an hour ago. Fear took possession of me
+again. I turned quickly. Foster sat in his chair watching me. His glance was saner
+than before.
+
+"So y're Vanderhoof's nephew," he mumbled in a nasal tone. "Waal, ye might's
+well know it all. He'll be back after me afore long, he will jus' as soon as he can
+get out o' that there grave. Ye might's well know all about it now."
+
+
+
+
+His terror appeared to have left him. He seemed resigned to some horrible fate
+which he expected any minute. His head dropped down upon his chest again,
+and he went on muttering in that nasal monotone.
+
+"Ye see all them there books and papers? Waal, they was once Dominie Slott's -
+Dominie Slott, who was here years ago. All them things is got t' do with magic -
+black magic that th' old dominie knew afore he come t' this country. They used t'
+burn 'em an' boil 'em in oil fer knowing' that over there, they did. But old Slott
+knew, and he didn't go fer t' tell nobody. No sir, old Slott used to preach here
+generations ago, an' he used to come up here an' study them books, an' use all
+them dead things in jars, an' pronounce magic curses an' things, but he didn't let
+nobody know it No, nobody knowed it but Dominie Slott an' me."
+
+"You?" I ejaculated, leaning across the table toward him.
+
+"That is, me after I learned it." His face showed lines of trickery as he answered
+me. "I found all this stuff here when I come t' be church sexton, an' I used t' read
+it when I wa'n't at work. An' I soon got t' know all about it."
+
+The old man droned on, while I listened, spellbound. He told about learning the
+difficult formulae of demonology, so that, by means of incantations, he could cast
+spells over human beings. He had performed horrible occult rites of his hellish
+creed, calling down anathema upon the town and its inhabitants. Crazed by his
+desires, he tried to bring the church under his spell, but the power of God was
+too strong. Finding Johannes Vanderhoof very weak-willed, he bewitched him so
+that he preached strange and mystic sermons which struck fear into the simple
+hearts of the country folk. From his position in the belfry room, he said, behind a
+painting of the temptation of Christ which adorned the rear wall of the church,
+he would glare at Vanderhoof while he was preaching, through holes which
+were the eyes of the Devil in the picture. Terrified by the uncanny things which
+were happening in their midst, the congregation left one by one, and Foster was
+able to do what he pleased with the church and with Vanderhoof.
+
+"But what did you do with him?" I asked in a hollow voice as the old sexton
+paused in his confession. He burst into a cackle of laughter, throwing back his
+head in drunken glee.
+
+"I took his soul!" he howled in a tone that set me trembling. "I took his soul and
+put it in a bottle - in a little black bottle! And I buried him! Bui he ain't got his
+soul, an' he can't go neither t' heaven n'r hell! But he's a-comm' back after it.
+He's a-trying' t' get out o' his grave now. I can hear him pushin' his way up
+through the ground, he's that strong!"
+
+
+
+
+As the old man had proceeded with his story, I had become more and more
+convinced that he must be telHng me the truth, and not merely gibbering in
+drunkenness. Every detail fitted what Haines had told me. Fear was growing
+upon me by degrees. With the old wizard now shouting with demoniac laughter,
+I was tempted to bolt down the narrow stairway and leave that accursed
+neighborhood. To calm myself, I rose and again looked out of the window. My
+eyes nearly started from their sockets when I saw that the cross above
+Vanderhoof's grave had fallen perceptibly since I had last looked at it. It was
+now tilted to an angle of forty-five degrees!
+
+"Can't we dig up Vanderhoof and restore his soul?" I asked almost breathlessly,
+feeling that something must be done in a hurry. The old man rose from his chair
+in terror.
+
+"No, no, no!" he screamed. "He'd kill me! I've fergot th' formula, an' if he gets
+out he'll be alive, without a soul. He'd kill us both!"
+
+"Where is the bottle that contains his soul?" I asked, advancing threateningly
+toward him. I felt that some ghastly thing was about to happen, which I must do
+all in my power to prevent.
+
+"I won't tell ye, ye young whelp!" he snarled. I felt, rather than saw, a queer light
+in his eyes as he backed into a corner. "An' don't ye touch me, either, or ye'U
+wish ye hadn't!"
+
+I moved a step forward, noticing that on a low stool behind him there were two
+black bottles. Foster muttered some peculiar words in a low, singsong voice.
+Everything began to turn gray before my eyes, and something within me seemed
+to be dragged upward, trying to get out at my throat I felt my knees become
+weak.
+
+Lurching forward, I caught the old sexton by the throat, and with my free arm
+reached for the bottles on the stool. But the old man fell backward, striking the
+stool with his foot, and one bottle fell to the floor as I snatched the other. There
+was a flash of blue flame, and a sulfurous smell filled the room. From the little
+heap of broken glass a white vapor rose and followed the draft out the window.
+
+"Curse ye, ye rascal!" sounded a voice that seemed faint and far away. Foster,
+whom I had released when the bottle broke, was crouching against the wall,
+looking smaller and more shriveled than before. His face was slowly turning
+greenish-black.
+
+
+
+
+"Curse ye!" said the voice again, hardly sounding as though it came from his
+hps. "I'm done fer! That one in there was mine! Dominie Slott took it out two
+hundred years ago!"
+
+He shd slowly toward the floor, gazing at me with hatred in eyes that were
+rapidly dimming. His flesh changed from white to black, and then to yellow. I
+saw with horror that his body seemed to be crumbling away and his clothing
+falling into limp folds.
+
+The bottle in my hand was growing warm. I glanced at it, fearfully. It glowed
+with a faint phosphorescence. Stiff with fright, I set it upon the table, but could
+not keep my eyes from it There was an ominous moment of silence as its glow
+became brighter, and then there came distinctly to my ears the sound of sliding
+earth. Gasping for breath, I looked out of the window. The moon was now well
+up in the sky, and by its light I could see that the fresh cross above Vanderhoof's
+grave had completely fallen. Once again there came the sound of trickling gravel,
+and no longer able to control myself, I stumbled down the stairs and found my
+way out of doors. Falling now and then as I raced over the uneven ground, I ran
+on in abject terror. When I had reached the foot of the knoll, at the entrance to
+that gloomy tunnel beneath the willows, I heard a horrible roar behind me.
+Turning, I glanced back toward the church. Its wall reflected the light of the
+moon, and silhouetted against it was a gigantic, loathsome, black shadow
+climbing from my uncle's grave and floundering gruesomely toward the church.
+
+I told my story to a group of villagers in Haines' store the next morning. They
+looked from one to the other with little smiles during the tale, I noticed, but
+when I suggested that they accompany me to the spot, gave various excuses for
+not caring to go. Though there seemed to be a limit to their credulity, they cared
+to run no risks. I informed them that I would go alone, though I must confess
+that the project did not appeal to me.
+
+As I left the store, one old man with a long, white beard hurried after me and
+caught my arm.
+
+"I'll go wi' ye, lad," he said, "It do seem that I once beared my gran'pap tell o'
+su'thin' o' the sort concernin' old Dominie Slott. A queer old man I've beared he
+were, but Vanderhoof's been worse."
+
+Dominie Vanderhoof's grave was open and deserted when we arrived. Of course
+it could have been grave- robbers, the two of us agreed, and yet. . . In the belfry
+the bottle which I had left upon the table was gone, though the fragments of the
+broken one were found on the floor. And upon the heap of yellow dust and
+
+
+
+
+crumpled clothing that had once been Abel Foster were certain immense
+footprints.
+
+After glancing at some of the books and papers strewn about the belfry room, we
+carried them down the stairs and burned them, as something unclean and
+unholy. With a spade which we found in the church basement we filled in the
+grave of Johannes Vanderhoof, and, as an afterthought, flung the fallen cross
+upon the flames.
+
+Old wives say that now, when the moon is full, there walks about the
+churchyard a gigantic and bewildered figure clutching a bottle and seeking some
+unremembered goal.
+
+
+
+
+Within the Walls of Eryx - with
+Kenneth Sterling
+
+Written Jan 1936
+
+Published October 1939 in Weird Tales, Vol. 34, No. 4, p. 50-68.
+
+Before I try to rest I will set down these notes in preparation for the report I must
+make. What I have found is so singular, and so contrary to all past experience
+and expectations, that it deserves a very careful description.
+
+I reached the main landing on Venus, March 18, terrestrial time; VI, 9 of the
+planet's calendar. Being put in the main group under Miller, I received my
+equipment - watch tuned to Venus's slightly quicker rotation - and went through
+the usual mask drill. After two days I was pronounced fit for duty.
+
+Leaving the Crystal Company's post at Terra Nova around dawn, VI, 12, I
+followed the southerly route which Anderson had mapped out from the air. The
+going was bad, for these jungles are always half impassable after a rain. It must
+be the moisture that gives the tangled vines and creepers that leathery toughness;
+a toughness so great that a knife has to work ten minutes on some of them. By
+noon it was dryer - the vegetation getting soft and rubbery so that my knife went
+through it easily - but even then I could not make much speed. These Carter
+oxygen masks are too heavy - just carrying one half wears an ordinary man out.
+A Dubois mask with sponge-reservoir instead of tubes would give just as good
+air at half the weight.
+
+The crystal-detector seemed to function well, pointing steadily in a direction
+verifying Anderson's report. It is curious how that principle of affinity works -
+without any of the fakery of the old 'divining rods' back home. There must be a
+great deposit of crystals within a thousand miles, though I suppose those
+damnable man-lizards always watch and guard it. Possibly they think we are just
+as foolish for coming to Venus to hunt the stuff as we think they are for
+grovelling in the mud whenever they see a piece of it, or for keeping that great
+mass on a pedestal in their temple. I wish they'd get a new religion, for they have
+no use for the crystals except to pray to. Barring theology, they would let us take
+all we want - and even if they learned to tap them for power there'd be more
+than enough for their planet and the earth besides. I for one am tired of passing
+up the main deposits and merely seeking separate crystals out of jungle river-
+beds. Sometime I'll urge the wiping out of these scaly beggars by a good stiff
+army from home. About twenty ships could bring enough troops across to turn
+
+
+
+
+the trick. One can't call the damned things men for all their 'cities' and towers.
+They haven't any skill except building - and using swords and poison darts - and
+I don't believe their so-called 'cities' mean much more than ant-hills or beaver-
+dams. I doubt if they even have a real language - all the talk about psychological
+communication through those tentacles down their chests strikes me as bunk.
+What misleads people is their upright posture; just an accidental physical
+resemblance to terrestrial man.
+
+I'd like to go through a Venus jungle for once without having to watch out for
+skulking groups of them or dodge their cursed darts. They may have been all
+right before we began to take the crystals, but they're certainly a bad enough
+nuisance now - with their dart-shooting and their cutting of our water pipes.
+More and more I come to believe that they have a special sense like our crystal-
+detectors. No one ever knew them to bother a man - apart from long-distance
+sniping - who didn't have crystals on him.
+
+Around 1 P.M. a dart nearly took my helmet off, and I thought for a second one
+of my oxygen tubes was punctured. The sly devils hadn't made a sound, but
+three of them were closing in on me. I got them all by sweeping in a circle with
+my flame pistol, for even though their colour blended with the jungle, I could
+spot the moving creepers. One of them was fully eight feet tall, with a snout like
+a tapir's. The other two were average seven-footers. All that makes them hold
+their own is sheer numbers - even a single regiment of flame throwers could
+raise hell with them. It is curious, though, how they've come to be dominant on
+the planet. Not another living thing higher than the wriggling akmans and
+skorahs, or the flying tukahs of the other continent - unless of course those holes
+in the Dionaean Plateau hide something.
+
+About two o'clock my detector veered westward, indicating isolated crystals
+ahead on the right. This checked up with Anderson, and I turned my course
+accordingly. It was harder going - not only because the ground was rising, but
+because the animal life and carnivorous plants were thicker. I was always
+slashing ugrats and stepping on skorahs, and my leather suit was all speckled
+from the bursting darohs which struck it from all sides. The sunlight was all the
+worse because of the mist, and did not seem to dry up the mud in the least.
+Every time I stepped my feet sank down five or six inches, and there was a
+sucking sort of blup every time I pulled them out. I wish somebody would
+invent a safe kind of suiting other than leather for this climate. Cloth of course
+would rot; but some thin metallic tissue that couldn't tear - like the surface of this
+revolving decay-proof record scroll - ought to be feasible sometime.
+
+I ate about 3:30 - if slipping these wretched food tablets through my mask can be
+called eating. Soon after that I noticed a decided change in the landscape - the
+
+
+
+
+bright, poisonous-looking flowers shifting in colour and getting wraith-like. The
+outlines of everything shimmered rhythmically, and bright points of light
+appeared and danced in the same slow, steady tempo. After that the temperature
+seemed to fluctuate in unison with a peculiar rhythmic drumming.
+
+The whole universe seemed to be throbbing in deep, regular pulsations that filled
+every corner of space and flowed through my body and mind alike. I lost all
+sense of equilibrium and staggered dizzily, nor did it change things in the least
+when I shut my eyes and covered my ears with my hands. However, my mind
+was still clear, and in a very few minutes I realized what had happened.
+
+I had encountered at last one of those curious mirage-plants about which so
+many of our men told stories. Anderson had warned me of them, and described
+their appearance very closely - the shaggy stalk, the spiky leaves, and the
+mottled blossoms whose gaseous, dream-breeding exhalations penetrate every
+existing make of mask.
+
+Recalling what happened to Bailey three years ago, I fell into a momentary panic,
+and began to dash and stagger about in the crazy, chaotic world which the
+plant's exhalations had woven around me. Then good sense came back, and I
+realized all I need do was retreat from the dangerous blossoms - heading away
+from the source of the pulsations, and cutting a path blindly - regardless of what
+might seem to swirl around me - until safely out of the plant's effective radius.
+
+Although everything was spinning perilously, I tried to start in the right
+direction and hack my way ahead. My route must have been far from straight,
+for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage- plant's pervasive influence.
+Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral
+scenery began to assume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I
+looked at my watch and was astonished to find that the time was only 4:20.
+Though eternities had seemed to pass, the whole experience could have
+consumed little more than a half-hour.
+
+Every delay, however, was irksome, and I had lost ground in my retreat from the
+plant. I now pushed ahead in the uphill direction indicated by the crystal-
+detector, bending every energy toward making better time. The jungle was still
+thick, though there was less animal life. Once a carnivorous blossom engulfed
+my right foot and held it so tightly that I had to hack it free with my knife;
+reducing the flower to strips before it let go.
+
+In less than an hour I saw that the jungle growths were thinning out, and by five
+o'clock - after passing through a belt of tree-ferns with very little underbrush - I
+emerged on a broad mossy plateau. My progress now became rapid, and I saw
+
+
+
+
+by the wavering of my detector-needle that I was getting relatively close to the
+crystal I sought. This was odd, for most of the scattered, egg-like spheroids
+occurred in jungle streams of a sort not likely to be found on this treeless upland.
+
+The terrain sloped upward, ending in a definite crest. I reached the top about
+5:30 and saw ahead of me a very extensive plain with forests in the distance.
+This, without question, was the plateau mapped by Matsugawa from the air fifty
+years ago, and called on our maps 'Eryx' or the 'Erycinian Highland.' But what
+made my heart leap was a smaller detail, whose position could not have been far
+from the plain's exact centre. It was a single point of light, blazing through the
+mist and seeming to draw a piercing, concentrated luminescence from the
+yellowish, vapour-dulled sunbeams. This, without doubt, was the crystal I
+sought - a thing possibly no larger than a hen's egg, yet containing enough
+power to keep a city warm for a year. I could hardly wonder, as I glimpsed the
+distant glow, that those miserable man-lizards worship such crystals. And yet
+they have not the least notion of the powers they contain.
+
+Breaking into a rapid run, I tried to reach the unexpected prize as soon as
+possible; and was annoyed when the firm moss gave place to a thin, singularly
+detestable mud studded with occasional patches of weeds and creepers. But I
+splashed on heedlessly - scarcely thinking to look around for any of the skulking
+man-lizards. In this open space I was not very likely to be waylaid. As I
+advanced, the light ahead seemed to grow in size and brilliancy, and I began to
+notice some peculiarity in its situation. Clearly, this was a crystal of the very
+finest quality, and my elation grew with every spattering step.
+
+It is now that I must begin to be careful in making my report, since what I shall
+henceforward have to say involves unprecedented - though fortunately verifiable
+- matters. I was racing ahead with mounting eagerness, and had come within a
+hundred yards or so of the crystal - whose position on a sort of raised place in the
+omnipresent slime seemed very odd - when a sudden, overpowering force struck
+my chest and the knuckles of my clenched fists and knocked me over backward
+into the mud. The splash of my fall was terrific, nor did the softness of the
+ground and the presence of some slimy weeds and creepers save my head from a
+bewildering jarring. For a moment I lay supine, too utterly startled to think. Then
+I half mechanically stumbled to my feet and began to scrape the worst of the
+mud and scum from my leather suit.
+
+Of what I had encountered I could not form the faintest idea. I had seen nothing
+which could have caused the shock, and I saw nothing now. Had I, after all,
+merely slipped in the mud? My sore knuckles and aching chest forbade me to
+think so. Or was this whole incident an illusion brought on by some hidden
+mirage-plant? It hardly seemed probable, since I had none of the usual
+
+
+
+
+symptoms, and since there was no place near by where so vivid and typical a
+growth could lurk unseen. Had I been on the earth, I would have suspected a
+barrier of N-force laid down by some government to mark a forbidden zone, but
+in this humanless region such a notion would have been absurd.
+
+Finally pulling myself together, I decided to investigate in a cautious way.
+Holding my knife as far as possible ahead of me, so that it might be first to feel
+the strange force, I started once more for the shining crystal - preparing to
+advance step by step with the greatest deliberation. At the third step I was
+brought up short by the impact of the knife - point on an apparently solid surface
+
+- a solid surface where my eyes saw nothing.
+
+After a moment's recoil I gained boldness. Extending my gloved left hands I
+verified the presence of invisible solid matter - or a tactile illusion of solid matter
+
+- ahead of me. Upon moving my hand I found that the barrier was of substantial
+extent, and of an almost glassy smoothness, with no evidence of the joining of
+separate blocks. Nerving myself for further experiments, I removed a glove and
+tested the thing with my bare hand. It was indeed hard and glassy, and of a
+curious coldness as contrasted with the air around. I strained my eyesight to the
+utmost in an effort to glimpse some trace of the obstructing substance, but could
+discern nothing whatsoever. There was not even any evidence of refractive
+power as judged by the aspect of the landscape ahead. Absence of reflective
+power was proved by the lack of a glowing image of the sun at any point.
+
+Burning curiosity began to displace all other feelings, and I enlarged my
+investigations as best I could. Exploring with my hands, I found that the barrier
+extended from the ground to some level higher than I could reach, and that it
+stretched off indefinitely on both sides. It was, then, a wall of some kind - though
+all guesses as to its materials and its purpose were beyond me. Again I thought
+of the mirage-plant and the dreams it induced, but a moment's reasoning put
+this out of my head.
+
+Knocking sharply on the barrier with the hilt of my knife, and kicking at it with
+my heavy boots, I tried to interpret the sounds thus made. There was something
+suggestive of cement or concrete in these reverberations, though my hands had
+found the surface more glassy or metallic in feel. Certainly, I was confronting
+something strange beyond all previous experience.
+
+The next logical move was to get some idea of the wall's dimensions. The height
+problem would be hard, if not insoluble, but the length and shape problem could
+perhaps be sooner dealt with. Stretching out my arms and pressing close to the
+barrier, I began to edge gradually to the left - keeping very careful track of the
+way I faced. After several steps I concluded that the wall was not straight, but
+
+
+
+
+that I was following part of some vast circle or ellipse. And then my attention
+was distracted by something wholly different - something connected with the
+still-distant crystal which had formed the object of my quest.
+
+I have said that even from a great distance the shining object's position seemed
+indefinably queer - on a slight mound rising from the slime. Now - at about a
+hundred yards - I could see plainly despite the engulfing mist just what that
+mound was. It was the body of a man in one of the Crystal Company's leather
+suits, lying on his back, and with his oxygen mask half buried in the mud a few
+inches away. In his right hand, crushed convulsively against his chest, was the
+crystal which had led me here - a spheroid of incredible size, so large that the
+dead fingers could scarcely close over it. Even at the given distance I could see
+that the body was a recent one. There was little visible decay, and I reflected that
+in this climate such a thing meant death not more than a day before. Soon the
+hateful farnoth-flies would begin to cluster about the corpse. I wondered who the
+man was. Surely no one I had seen on this trip. It must have been one of the old-
+timers absent on a long roving commission, who had come to this especial region
+independently of Anderson's survey. There he lay, past all trouble, and with the
+rays of the great crystal streaming out from between his stiffened fingers.
+
+For fully five minutes I stood there staring in bewilderment and apprehension. A
+curious dread assailed me, and I had an unreasonable impulse to run away. It
+could not have been done by those slinking man- lizards, for he still held the
+crystal he had found. Was there any connexion with the invisible wall? Where
+had he found the crystal? Anderson's instrument had indicated one in this
+quarter well before this man could have perished. I now began to regard the
+unseen barrier as something sinister, and recoiled from it with a shudder. Yet I
+knew I must probe the mystery all the more quickly and thoroughly because of
+this recent tragedy.
+
+Suddenly - wrenching my mind back to the problem I faced - I thought of a
+possible means of testing the wall's height, or at least of finding whether or not it
+extended indefinitely upward. Seizing a handful of mud, I let it drain until it
+gained some coherence and then flung it high in the air toward the utterly
+transparent barrier. At a height of perhaps fourteen feet it struck the invisible
+surface with a resounding splash, disintegrating at once and oozing downward
+in disappearing streams with surprising rapidity. Plainly, the wall was a lofty
+one. A second handful, hurled at an even sharper angle, hit the surface about
+eighteen feet from the ground and disappeared as quickly as the first.
+
+I now summoned up all my strength and prepared to throw a third handful as
+high as I possibly could. Letting the mud drain, and squeezing it to maximum
+dryness, I flung it up so steeply that I feared it might not reach the obstructing
+
+
+
+
+surface at all. It did, however, and this time it crossed the barrier and fell in the
+mud beyond with a violent spattering. At last I had a rough idea of the height of
+the wall, for the crossing had evidently occurred some twenty or twenty-one feet
+aloft.
+
+With a nineteen - or twenty-foot vertical wall of glassy flatness, ascent was
+clearly impossible. I must, then, continue to circle the barrier in the hope of
+finding a gate, an ending, or some sort of interruption. Did the obstacle form a
+complete round or other closed figure, or was it merely an arc or semi-circle?
+Acting on my decision, I resumed my slow leftward circling, moving my hands
+up and down over the unseen surface on the chance of finding some window or
+other small aperture. Before starting, I tried to mark my position by kicking a
+hole in the mud, but found the slime too thin to hold any impression. I did,
+though, gauge the place approximately by noting a tall cycad in the distant forest
+which seemed just on a line with the gleaming crystal a hundred yards away. If
+no gate or break existed I could now tell when I had completely circumnavigated
+the wall.
+
+I had not progressed far before I decided that the curvature indicated a circular
+enclosure of about a hundred yards' diameter - provided the outline was regular.
+This would mean that the dead man lay near the wall at a point almost opposite
+the region where I had started. Was he just inside or just outside the enclosure?
+This I would soon ascertain.
+
+As I slowly rounded the barrier without finding any gate, window, or other
+break, I decided that the body was lying within. On closer view the features of
+the dead man seemed vaguely disturbing. I found something alarming in his
+expression, and in the way the glassy eyes stared. By the time I was very near I
+believed I recognized him as Dwight, a veteran whom I had never known, but
+who was pointed out to me at the post last year. The crystal he clutched was
+certainly a prize - the largest single specimen I had ever seen.
+
+I was so near the body that I could - but for the barrier - have touched it, when
+my exploring left hand encountered a corner in the unseen surface. In a second I
+had learned that there was an opening about three feet wide, extending from the
+ground to a height greater than I could reach. There was no door, nor any
+evidence of hingemarks bespeaking a former door. Without a moment's
+hesitation I stepped through and advanced two paces to the prostrate body -
+which lay at right angles to the hallway I had entered, in what seemed to be an
+intersecting doorless corridor. It gave me a fresh curiosity to find that the interior
+of this vast enclosure was divided by partitions.
+
+
+
+
+Bending to examine the corpse, I discovered that it bore no wounds. This
+scarcely surprised me, since the continued presence of the crystal argued against
+the pseudo-reptilian natives. Looking about for some possible cause of death, my
+eyes lit upon the oxygen mask lying close to the body's feet. Here, indeed, was
+something significant. Without this device no human being could breathe the air
+of Venus for more than thirty seconds, and Dwight - if it were he - had obviously
+lost his. Probably it had been carelessly buckled, so that the weight of the tubes
+worked the straps loose - a thing which could not happen with a Dubois sponge-
+reservoir mask. The half-minute of grace had been too short to allow the man to
+stoop and recover his protection - or else the cyanogen content of the atmosphere
+was abnormally high at the time. Probably he had been busy admiring the crystal
+- wherever he may have found it. He had, apparently, just taken it from the
+pouch in his suit, for the flap was unbuttoned.
+
+I now proceeded to extricate the huge crystal from the dead prospector's fingers -
+a task which the body's stiffness made very difficult. The spheroid was larger
+than a man's fist, and glowed as if alive in the reddish rays of the weltering sun.
+As I touched the gleaming surface I shuddered involuntarily - as if by taking this
+precious object I had transferred to myself the doom which had overtaken its
+earlier bearer. However, my qualms soon passed, and I carefully buttoned the
+crystal into the pouch of my leather suit. Superstition has never been one of my
+failings.
+
+Placing the man's helmet over his dead, staring face, I straightened up and
+stepped back through the unseen doorway to the entrance hall of the great
+enclosure. All my curiosity about the strange edifice now returned, and I racked
+my brains with speculations regarding its material, origin, and purpose. That the
+hands of men had reared it I could not for a moment believe. Our ships first
+reached Venus only seventy-two years ago, and the only human beings on the
+planet have been those at Terra Nova. Nor does human knowledge include any
+perfectly transparent, non-refractive solid such as the substance of this building.
+Prehistoric human invasions of Venus can be pretty well ruled out, so that one
+must turn to the idea of native construction. Did a forgotten race of highly-
+evolved beings precede the man-lizards as masters of Venus? Despite their
+elaborately-built cities, it seemed hard to credit the pseudo-reptiles with
+anything of this kind. There must have been another race aeons ago, of which
+this is perhaps the last relique. Or will other ruins of kindred origin be found by
+future expeditions? The purpose of such a structure passes all conjecture - but its
+strange and seemingly non-practical material suggests a religious use.
+
+Realizing my inability to solve these problems, I decided that all I could do was
+to explore the invisible structure itself. That various rooms and corridors
+extended over the seemingly unbroken plain of mud I felt convinced; and I
+
+
+
+
+believed that a knowledge of their plan might lead to something significant. So,
+feeling my way back through the doorway and edging past the body, I began to
+advance along the corridor toward those interior regions whence the dead man
+had presumably come. Later on I would investigate the hallway I had left.
+
+Groping like a blind man despite the misty sunlight, I moved slowly onward.
+Soon the corridor turned sharply and began to spiral in toward the centre in
+ever-diminishing curves. Now and then my touch would reveal a doorless
+intersecting passage, and I several times encountered junctions with two, three,
+and four diverging avenues. In these latter cases I always followed the inmost
+route, which seemed to form a continuation of the one I had been traversing.
+There would be plenty of time to examine the branches after I had reached and
+returned from the main regions. I can scarcely describe the strangeness of the
+experience - threading the unseen ways of an invisible structure reared by
+forgotten hands on an alien planet!
+
+At last, still stumbling and groping, I felt the corridor end in a sizeable open
+space. Fumbling about, I found I was in a circular chamber about ten feet across;
+and from the position of the dead man against certain distant forest landmarks I
+judged that this chamber lay at or near the centre of the edifice. Out of it opened
+five corridors besides the one through which I had entered, but I kept the latter
+in mind by sighting very carefully past the body to a particular tree on the
+horizon as I stood just within the entrance.
+
+There was nothing in this room to distinguish it - merely the floor of thin mud
+which was everywhere present. Wondering whether this part of the building had
+any roof, I repeated my experiment with an upward-flung handful of mud, and
+found at once that no covering existed. If there had ever been one, it must have
+fallen long ago, for not a trace of debris or scattered blocks ever halted my feet.
+As I reflected, it struck me as distinctly odd that this apparently primordial
+structure should be so devoid of tumbling masonry, gaps in the walls, and other
+common attributes of dilapidation.
+
+What was it? What had it ever been? Of what was it made? Why was there no
+evidence of separate blocks in the glassy, bafflingly homogenous walls? Why
+were there no traces of doors, either interior or exterior? I knew only that I was in
+a round, roofless, doorless edifice of some hard, smooth, perfectly transparent,
+non-refractive and non-reflective material, a hundred yards in diameter, with
+many corridors, and with a small circular room at the centre. More than this I
+could never learn from a direct investigation.
+
+I now observed that the sun was sinking very low in the west - a golden-ruddy
+disc floating in a pool of scarlet and orange above the mist-clouded trees of the
+
+
+
+
+horizon. Plainly, I would have to hurry if I expected to choose a sleeping-spot on
+dry ground before dark. I had long before decided to camp for the night on the
+firm, mossy rim of the plateau near the crest whence I had first spied the shining
+crystal, trusting to my usual luck to save me from an attack by the man-lizards. It
+has always been my contention that we ought to travel in parties of two or more,
+so that someone can be on guard during sleeping hours, but the really small
+number of night attacks makes the Company careless about such things. Those
+scaly wretches seem to have difficulty in seeing at night, even with curious glow
+torches.
+
+Having picked out again the hallway through which I had come, I started to
+return to the structure's entrance. Additional exploration could wait for another
+day. Groping a course as best I could through the spiral corridors - with only
+general sense, memory, and a vague recognition of some of the ill-defined weed
+patches on the plain as guides - I soon found myself once more in close proximity
+to the corpse. There were now one or two farnoth flies swooping over the
+helmet-covered face, and I knew that decay was setting in. With a futile
+instinctive loathing I raised my hand to brush away his vanguard of the
+scavengers - when a strange and astonishing thing became manifest. An invisible
+wall, checking the sweep of my arm, told me that - notwithstanding my careful
+retracing of the way - I had not indeed returned to the corridor in which the
+body lay. Instead, I was in a parallel hallway, having no doubt taken some
+wrong turn or fork among the intricate passages behind.
+
+Hoping to find a doorway to the exit hall ahead, I continued my advance, but
+presently came to a blank wall. I would, then, have to return to the central
+chamber and steer my course anew. Exactly where I had made my mistake I
+could not tell. I glanced at the ground to see if by any miracle guiding footprints
+had remained, but at once realized that the thin mud held impressions only for a
+very few moments. There was little difficulty in finding my way to the centre
+again, and once there I carefully reflected on the proper outward course. I had
+kept too far to the right before. This time I must take a more leftward fork
+somewhere - just where, I could decide as I went.
+
+As I groped ahead a second time I felt quite confident of my correctness, and
+diverged to the left at a junction I was sure I remembered. The spiralling
+continued, and I was careful not to stray into any intersecting passages. Soon,
+however, I saw to my disgust that I was passing the body at a considerable
+distance; this passage evidently reached the outer wall at a point much beyond it.
+In the hope that another exit might exist in the half of the wall I had not yet
+explored, I pressed forward for several paces, but eventually came once more to
+a solid barrier. Clearly, the plan of the building was even more complicated than
+I had thought.
+
+
+
+
+I now debated whether to return to the centre again or whether to try some of the
+lateral corridors extending toward the body. If I chose this second alternative, I
+would run the risk of breaking my mental pattern of where I was; hence I had
+better not attempt it unless I could think of some way of leaving a visible trail
+behind me. Just how to leave a trail would be quite a problem, and I ransacked
+my mind for a solution. There seemed to be nothing about my person which
+could leave a mark on anything, nor any material which I could scatter - or
+minutely subdivide and scatter.
+
+My pen had no effect on the invisible wall, and I could not lay a trail of my
+precious food tablets. Even had I been willing to spare the latter, there would not
+have been even nearly enough - besides which the small pellets would have
+instantly sunk from sight in the thin mud. I searched my pockets for an old-
+fashioned note-book - often used unofficially on Venus despite the quick rotting-
+rate of paper in the planet's atmosphere - whose pages I could tear up and
+scatter, but could find none. It was obviously impossible to tear the tough, thin
+metal of this revolving decay -proof record scroll, nor did my clothing offer any
+possibilities. In Venus's peculiar atmosphere I could not safely spare my stout
+leather suit, and underwear had been eliminated because of the climate.
+
+I tried to smear mud on the smooth, invisible walls after squeezing it as dry as
+possible, but found that it slipped from sight as quickly as did the height-testing
+handfuls I had previously thrown. Finally I drew out my knife and attempted to
+scratch a line on the glassy, phantom surface - something I could recognize with
+my hand, even though I would not have the advantage of seeing it from afar. It
+was useless, however, for the blade made not the slightest impression on the
+baffling, unknown material.
+
+Frustrated in all attempts to blaze a trail, I again sought the round central
+chamber through memory. It seemed easier to act back to this room than to steer
+a definite, predetermined course away from it, and I had little difficulty in
+finding it anew. This time I listed on my record scroll every turn I made -
+drawing a crude hypothetical diagram of my route, and marking all diverging
+corridors. It was, of course, maddeningly slow work when everything had to be
+determined by touch, and the possibilities of error were infinite; but I believed it
+would pay in the long run.
+
+The long twilight of Venus was thick when I reached the central room, but I still
+had hopes of gaining the outside before dark. Comparing my fresh diagram with
+previous recollections, I believed I had located my original mistake, so once more
+set out confidently along the invisible hall-ways. I veered further to the left than
+during my previous attempts, and tried to keep track of my turnings on the
+records scroll in case I was still mistaken. In the gathering dusk I could see the
+
+
+
+
+dim line of the corpse, now the centre of a loathsome cloud of farnoth-flies.
+Before long, no doubt, the mud-dwelling sificlighs would be oozing in from the
+plain to complete the ghastly work. Approaching the body with some reluctance
+I was preparing to step past it when a sudden collision with a wall told me I was
+again astray.
+
+I now realized plainly that I was lost. The complications of this building were too
+much for offhand solution, and I would probably have to do some careful
+checking before I could hope to emerge. Still, I was eager to get to dry ground
+before total darkness set in; hence I returned once more to the centre and began a
+rather aimless series of trials and errors - making notes by the light of my electric
+lamp. When I used this device I noticed with interest that it produced no
+reflection - not even the faintest glistening - in the transparent walls around me. I
+was, however, prepared for this; since the sun had at no time formed a gleaming
+image in the strange material.
+
+I was still groping about when the dusk became total. A heavy mist obscured
+most of the stars and planets, but the earth was plainly visible as a glowing,
+bluish-green point in the southeast. It was just past opposition, and would have
+been a glorious sight in a telescope. I could even make out the moon beside it
+whenever the vapours momentarily thinned. It was now impossible to see the
+corpse - my only landmark - so I blundered back to the central chamber after a
+few false turns. After all, I would have to give up hope of sleeping on dry
+ground. Nothing could be done till daylight, and I might as well make the best of
+it here. Lying down in the mud would not be pleasant, but in my leather suit it
+could be done. On former expeditions I had slept under even worse conditions,
+and now sheer exhaustion would help to conquer repugnance.
+
+So here I am, squatting in the slime of the central room and making these notes
+on my record scroll by the light of the electric lamp. There is something almost
+humorous in my strange, unprecedented plight. Lost in a building without doors
+- a building which I cannot see! I shall doubtless get out early in the morning,
+and ought to be back at Terra Nova with the crystal by late afternoon. It certainly
+is a beauty - with surprising lustre even in the feeble light of this lamp. I have
+just had it out examining it. Despite my fatigue, sleep is slow in coming, so I find
+myself writing at great length. I must stop now. Not much danger of being
+bothered by those cursed natives in this place. The thing I like least is the corpse -
+but fortunately my oxygen mask saves me from the worst effects. I am using the
+chlorate cubes very sparingly. Will take a couple of food tablets now and turn in.
+More later.
+
+LATER - AFTERNOON, VI, 13
+
+
+
+
+There has been more trouble than I expected. I am still in the building, and will
+have to work quickly and wisely if I expect to rest on dry ground tonight. It took
+me a long time to get to sleep, and I did not wake till almost noon today. As it
+was, I would have slept longer but for the glare of the sun through the haze. The
+corpse was a rather bad sight - wriggling with sificlighs, and with a cloud of
+farnoth-flies around it. Something had pushed the helmet away from the face,
+and it was better not to look at it. I was doubly glad of my oxygen mask when I
+thought of the situation.
+
+At length I shook and brushed myself dry, took a couple of food tablets, and put
+a new potassium chlorate cube in the electrolyser of the mask. I am using these
+cubes slowly, but wish I had a larger supply. I felt much better after my sleep,
+and expected to get out of the building very shortly.
+
+Consulting the notes and sketches I had jotted down, I was impressed by the
+complexity of the hallways, and by the possibility that I had made a fundamental
+error. Of the six openings leading out of the central space, I had chosen a certain
+one as that by which I had entered - using a sighting-arrangement as a guide.
+When I stood just within the opening, the corpse fifty yards away was exactly in
+line with a particular lepidodendron in the far-off forest. Now it occurred to me
+that this sighting might not have been of sufficient accuracy - the distance of the
+corpse making its difference of direction in relation to the horizon comparatively
+slight when viewed from the openings next to that of my first ingress. Moreover,
+the tree did not differ as distinctly as it might from other lepidodendra on the
+horizon.
+
+Putting the matter to a test, I found to my chagrin that I could not be sure which
+of three openings was the right one. Had I traversed a different set of windings at
+each attempted exit? This time I would be sure. It struck me that despite the
+impossibility of trail-blazing there was one marker I could leave. Though I could
+not spare my suit, I could - because of my thick head of hair - spare my helmet;
+and this was large and light enough to remain visible above the thin mud.
+Accordingly I removed the roughly hemi-spherical device and laid it at the
+entrance of one of the corridors - the right-hand one of the three I must try.
+
+I would follow this corridor on the assumption that it was correct; repeating
+what I seemed to recall as the proper turns, and constantly consulting and
+making notes. If I did not get out, I would systematically exhaust all possible
+variations; and if these failed, I would proceed to cover the avenues extending
+from the next opening in the same way - continuing to the third opening if
+necessary. Sooner or later I could not avoid hitting the right path to the exit, but I
+must use patience. Even at worst, I could scarcely fail to reach the open plain in
+time for a dry night's sleep.
+
+
+
+
+Immediate results were rather discouraging, though they helped me eliminate
+the right-hand opening in little more than an hour. Only a succession of blind
+alleys, each ending at a great distance from the corpse, seemed to branch from
+this hallway; and I saw very soon that it had not figured at all in the previous
+afternoon's wanderings. As before, however, I always found it relatively easy to
+grope back to the central chamber.
+
+About 1 P.M. I shifted my helmet marker to the next opening and began to
+explore the hallways beyond it. At first I thought I recognized the turnings, but
+soon found myself in a wholly unfamiliar set of corridors. I could not get near
+the corpse, and this time seemed cut off from the central chamber as well, even
+though I thought I had recorded every move I made. There seemed to be tricky
+twists and crossings too subtle for me to capture in my crude diagrams, and I
+began to develop a kind of mixed anger and discouragement. While patience
+would of course win in the end, I saw that my searching would have to be
+minute, tireless and long-continued.
+
+Two o'clock found me still wandering vainly through strange corridors -
+constantly feeling my way, looking alternately at my helmet and at the corpse,
+and jotting data on my scroll with decreasing confidence. I cursed the stupidity
+and idle curiosity which had drawn me into this tangle of unseen walls -
+reflecting that if I had let the thing alone and headed back as soon as I had taken
+the crystal from the body, I would even now be safe at Terra Nova.
+
+Suddenly it occurred to me that I might be able to tunnel under the invisible
+walls with my knife, and thus effect a short cut to the outside - or to some
+outward-leading corridor. I had no means of knowing how deep the building's
+foundations were, but the omnipresent mud argued the absence of any floor save
+the earth. Facing the distant and increasingly horrible corpse, I began a course of
+feverish digging with the broad, sharp blade.
+
+There was about six inches of semi-liquid mud, below which the density of the
+soil increased sharply. This lower soil seemed to be of a different colour - a
+greyish clay rather like the formations near Venus's north pole. As I continued
+downward close to the unseen barrier I saw that the ground was getting harder
+and harder. Watery mud rushed into the excavation as fast as I removed the clay,
+but I reached through it and kept on working. If I could bore any kind of a
+passage beneath the wall, the mud would not stop my wriggling out.
+
+About three feet down, however, the hardness of the soil halted my digging
+seriously. Its tenacity was beyond anything I had encountered before, even on
+this planet, and was linked with an anomalous heaviness. My knife had to split
+and chip the tightly packed clay, and the fragments I brought up were like solid
+
+
+
+
+stones or bits of metal. Finally even this splitting and chipping became
+impossible, and I had to cease my work with no lower edge of wall in reach.
+
+The hour-long attempt was a wasteful as well as futile one, for it used up great
+stores of my energy and forced me both to take an extra food tablet, and to put
+an additional chlorate cube in the oxygen mask. It has also brought a pause in the
+day's gropings, for I am still much too exhausted to walk. After cleaning my
+hands and arms of the worst of the mud I sat down to write these notes - leaning
+against an invisible wall and facing away from the corpse.
+
+That body is simply a writhing mass of vermin now - the odour has begun to
+draw some of the slimy akmans from the far-off jungle. I notice that many of the
+efjeh-weeds on the plain are reaching out necrophagous feelers toward the thing;
+but I doubt if any are long enough to reach it. I wish some really carnivorous
+organisms like the skorahs would appear, for then they might scent me and
+wriggle a course through the building toward me. Things like that have an odd
+sense of direction. I could watch them as they came, and jot down their
+approximate route if they failed to form a continuous line. Even that would be a
+great help. When I met any the pistol would make short work of them.
+
+But I can hardly hope for as much as that. Now that these notes are made I shall
+rest a while longer, and later will do some more groping. As soon as I get back to
+the central chamber - which ought to be fairly easy - I shall try the extreme left-
+hand opening. Perhaps I can get outside by dusk after all.
+
+NIGHT - VI, 13
+
+New trouble. My escape will be tremendously difficult, for there are elements I
+had not suspected. Another night here in the mud, and a fight on my hands
+tomorrow. I cut my rest short and was up and groping again by four o'clock.
+After about fifteen minutes I reached the central chamber and moved my helmet
+to mark the last of the three possible doorways. Starting through this opening, I
+seemed to find the going more familiar, but was brought up short less than five
+minutes by a sight that jolted me more than I can describe.
+
+It was a group of four or five of those detestable man-lizards emerging from the
+forest far off across the plain. I could not see them distinctly at that distance, but
+thought they paused and turned toward the trees to gesticulate, after which they
+were joined by fully a dozen more. The augmented party now began to advance
+directly toward the invisible building, and as they approached I studied them
+carefully. I had never before had a close view of the things outside the steamy
+shadows of the jungle.
+
+
+
+
+The resemblance to reptiles was perceptible, though I knew it was only an
+apparent one, since these beings have no point of contact with terrestrial life.
+When they drew nearer they seemed less truly reptilian - only the flat head and
+the green, slimy, frog-like skin carrying out the idea. They walked erect on their
+odd, thick stumps, and their suction-discs made curious noises in the mud. These
+were average specimens, about seven feet in height, and with four long, ropy
+pectoral tentacles. The motions of those tentacles - if the theories of Fogg, Ekberg,
+and Janat are right, which I formerly doubted but am now more ready to believe
+- indicate that the things were in animated conversation.
+
+I drew my flame pistol and was ready for a hard fight. The odds were bad, but
+the weapon gave me a certain advantage. If the things knew this building they
+would come through it after me, and in this way would form a key to getting
+out; just as carnivorous skorahs might have done. That they would attack me
+seemed certain; for even though they could not see the crystal in my pouch, they
+could divine its presence through that special sense of theirs.
+
+Yet, surprisingly enough, they did not attack me. Instead they scattered and
+formed a vast circle around me - at a distance which indicated that they were
+pressing close to the unseen wall. Standing there in a ring, the beings stared
+silently and inquisitively at me, waving their tentacles and sometimes nodding
+their heads and gesturing with their upper limbs. After a while I saw others issue
+from the forest, and these advanced and joined the curious crowd. Those near
+the corpse looked briefly at it but made no move to disturb it. It was a horrible
+sight, yet the man-lizards seemed quite unconcerned. Now and then one of them
+would brush away the farnoth-flies with its limbs or tentacles, or crush a
+wriggling sificligh or akman, or an out-reaching efjeh-weed, with the suction
+discs on its stumps.
+
+Staring back at these grotesque and unexpected intruders, and wondering
+uneasily why they did not attack me at once, I lost for the time being the will-
+power and nervous energy to continue my search for a way out. Instead I leaned
+limply against the invisible wall of the passage where I stood, letting my wonder
+merge gradually into a chain of the wildest speculations. A hundred mysteries
+which had previously baffled me seemed all at once to take on a new and sinister
+significance, and I trembled with an acute fear unlike anything I had experienced
+before.
+
+I believed I knew why these repulsive beings were hovering expectantly around
+me. I believed, too, that I had the secret of the transparent structure at last. The
+alluring crystal which I had seized, the body of the man who had seized it before
+me - all these things began to acquire a dark and threatening meaning.
+
+
+
+
+It was no common series of mischances which had made me lose my way in this
+roofless, unseen tangle of corridors. Far from it. Beyond doubt, the place was a
+genuine maze - a labyrinth deliberately built by these hellish things whose craft
+and mentality I had so badly underestimated. Might I not have suspected this
+before, knowing of their uncanny architectural skill? The purpose was all too
+plain. It was a trap - a trap set to catch human beings, and with the crystal
+spheroid as bait. These reptilian things, in their war on the takers of crystals, had
+turned to strategy and were using our own cupidity against us.
+
+Dwight - if this rotting corpse were indeed he - was a victim. He must have been
+trapped some time ago, and had failed to find his way out. Lack of water had
+doubtless maddened him, and perhaps he had run out of chlorate cubes as well.
+Probably his mask had not slipped accidentally after all. Suicide was a likelier
+thing. Rather than face a lingering death he had solved the issue by removing the
+mask deliberately and letting the lethal atmosphere do its work at once. The
+horrible irony of his fate lay in his position - only a few feet from the saving exit
+he had failed to find. One minute more of searching and he would have been
+safe.
+
+And now I was trapped as he had been. Trapped, and with this circling herd of
+curious starers to mock at my predicament. The thought was maddening, and as
+it sank in I was seized with a sudden flash of panic which set me running
+aimlessly through the unseen hallways. For several moments I was essentially a
+maniac - stumbling, tripping, bruising myself on the invisible walls, and finally
+collapsing in the mud as a panting, lacerated heap of mindless, bleeding flesh.
+
+The fall sobered me a bit, so that when I slowly struggled to my feet I could
+notice things and exercise my reason. The circling watchers were swaying their
+tentacles in an odd, irregular way suggestive of sly, alien laughter, and I shook
+my fist savagely at them as I rose. My gesture seemed to increase their hideous
+mirth - a few of them clumsily imitating it with their greenish upper limbs.
+Shamed into sense, I tried to collect my faculties and take stock of the situation.
+
+After all, I was not as badly off as Dwight has been. Unlike him, I knew what the
+situation was - and forewarned is forearmed. I had proof that the exit was
+attainable in the end, and would not repeat his tragic act of impatient despair.
+The body - or skeleton, as it would soon be - was constantly before me as a guide
+to the sought-for aperture, and dogged patience would certainly take me to it if I
+worked long and intelligently enough.
+
+I had, however, the disadvantage of being surrounded by these reptilian devils.
+Now that I realized the nature of the trap - whose invisible material argued a
+science and technology beyond anything on earth - I could no longer discount
+
+
+
+
+the mentality and resources of my enemies. Even with my flame-pistol I would
+have a bad time getting away - though boldness and quickness would doubtless
+see me through in the long run.
+
+But first I must reach the exterior - unless I could lure or provoke some of the
+creatures to advance toward me. As I prepared my pistol for action and counted
+over my generous supply of ammunition it occurred to me to try the effect of its
+blasts on the invisible walls. Had I overlooked a feasible means of escape? There
+was no clue to the chemical composition of the transparent barrier, and
+conceivably it might be something which a tongue of fire could cut like cheese.
+Choosing a section facing the corpse, I carefully discharged the pistol at close
+range and felt with my knife where the blast had been aimed. Nothing was
+changed. I had seen the flame spread when it struck the surface, and now I
+realized that my hope had been vain. Only a long, tedious search for the exit
+would ever bring me to the outside.
+
+So, swallowing another food tablet and putting another cube in the elecrolyser of
+my mask, I recommenced the long quest; retracing my steps to the central
+chamber and starting out anew. I constantly consulted my notes and sketches,
+and made fresh ones - taking one false turn after another, but staggering on in
+desperation till the afternoon light grew very dim. As I persisted in my quest I
+looked from time to time at the silent circle of mocking stares, and noticed a
+gradual replacement in their ranks. Every now and then a few would return to
+the forest, while others would arrive to take their places. The more I thought of
+their tactics the less I liked them, for they gave me a hint of the creatures'
+possible motives. At any time these devils could have advanced and fought me,
+but they seemed to prefer watching my struggles to escape. I could not but infer
+that they enjoyed the spectacle - and this made me shrink with double force from
+the prospect of falling into their hands.
+
+With the dark I ceased my searching, and sat down in the mud to rest. Now I am
+writing in the light of my lamp, and will soon try to get some sleep. I hope
+tomorrow will see me out; for my canteen is low, and lacol tablets are a poor
+substitute for water. I would hardly dare to try the moisture in this slime, for
+none of the water in the mud-regions is potable except when distilled. That is
+why we run such long pipe lines to the yellow clay regions - or depend on rain-
+water when those devils find and cut our pipes. I have none too many chlorate
+cubes either, and must try to cut down my oxygen consumption as much as I
+can. My tunnelling attempt of the early afternoon, and my later panic flight,
+burned up a perilous amount of air. Tomorrow I will reduce physical exertion to
+the barest minimum until I meet the reptiles and have to deal with them. I must
+have a good cube supply for the journey back to Terra Nova. My enemies are still
+
+
+
+
+on hand; I can see a circle of their feeble glow-torches around me. There is a
+horror about those lights which will keep me awake.
+
+NIGHT - VI, 14
+
+Another full day of searching and still no way out! I am beginning to be worried
+about the water problem, for my canteen went dry at noon. In the afternoon
+there was a burst of rain, and I went back to the central chamber for the helmet
+which I had left as a marker - using this as a bowl and getting about two cupfuls
+of water. I drank most of it, but have put the slight remainder in my canteen.
+Lacol tablets make little headway against real thirst, and I hope there will be
+more rain in the night. I am leaving my helmet bottom up to catch any that falls.
+Food tablets are none too plentiful, but not dangerously low. I shall halve my
+rations from now on. The chlorate cubes are my real worry, for even without
+violent exercise the day's endless tramping burned a dangerous number. I feel
+weak from my forced economies in oxygen, and from my constantly mounting
+thirst. When I reduce my food I suppose I shall feel still weaker.
+
+There is something damnable - something uncanny - about this labyrinth. I could
+swear that I had eliminated certain turns through charting, and yet each new trial
+belies some assumption I had thought established. Never before did I realize
+how lost we are without visual landmarks. A blind man might do better - but for
+most of us sight is the king of the senses. The effect of all these fruitless
+wanderings is one of profound discouragement. I can understand how poor
+Dwight must have felt. His corpse is now just a skeleton, and the sificlighs and
+akmans and farnoth-flies are gone. The efjen-weeds are nipping the leather
+clothing to pieces, for they were longer and faster-growing than I had expected.
+And all the while those relays of tentacled starers stand gloatingly around the
+barrier laughing at me and enjoying my misery. Another day and I shall go mad
+if I do not drop dead from exhaustion.
+
+However, there is nothing to do but persevere. Dwight would have got out if he
+had kept on a minute longer. It is just possible that somebody from Terra Nova
+will come looking for me before long, although this is only my third day out. My
+muscles ache horribly, and I can't seem to rest at all lying down in this
+loathesome mud. Last night, despite my terrific fatigue, I slept only fitfully, and
+tonight I fear will be no better. I live in an endless nightmare - poised between
+waking and sleeping, yet neither truly awake nor truly asleep. My hand shakes, I
+can write no more for the time being. That circle of feeble glow-torches is
+hideous.
+
+LATE AFTERNOON - VI, 15
+
+
+
+
+Substantial progress! Looks good. Very weak, and did not sleep much till
+daylight. Then I dozed till noon, though without being at all rested. No rain, and
+thirst leaves me very weak. Ate an extra food tablet to keep me going, but
+without water it didn't help much. I dared to try a little of the slime water just
+once, but it made me violently sick and left me even thirstier than before. Must
+save chlorate cubes, so am nearly suffocating for lack of oxygen. Can't walk
+much of the time, but manage to crawl in the mud. About 2 P.M. I thought I
+recognized some passages, and got substantially nearer to the corpse - or
+skeleton - than I had been since the first day's trials. I was sidetracked once in a
+blind alley, but recovered the main trail with the aid of my chart and notes. The
+trouble with these jottings is that there are so many of them. They must cover
+three feet of the record scroll, and I have to stop for long periods to untangle
+them.
+
+My head is weak from thirst, suffocation, and exhaustion, and I cannot
+understand all I have set down. Those damnable green things keep staring and
+laughing with their tentacles, and sometimes they gesticulate in a way that
+makes me think they share some terrible joke just beyond my perception.
+
+It was three o'clock when I really struck my stride. There was a doorway which,
+according to my notes, I had not traversed before; and when I tried it I found I
+could crawl circuitously toward the weed-twined skeleton. The route was a sort
+of spiral, much like that by which I had first reached the central chamber.
+
+Whenever I came to a lateral doorway or junction I would keep to the course
+which seemed best to repeat that original journey. As I circled nearer and nearer
+to my gruesome landmark, the watchers outside intensified their cryptic
+gesticulations and sardonic silent laughter. Evidently they saw something grimly
+amusing in my progress - perceiving no doubt how helpless I would be in any
+encounter with them. I was content to leave them to their mirth; for although I
+realized my extreme weakness, I counted on the flame pistol and its numerous
+extra magazines to get me through the vile reptilian phalanx.
+
+Hope now soared high, but I did not attempt to rise to my feet. Better crawl now,
+and save my strength for the coming encounter with the man-lizards. My
+advance was very slow, and the danger of straying into some blind alley very
+great, but nonetheless I seemed to curve steadily toward my osseous goal. The
+prospect gave me new strength, and for the nonce I ceased to worry about my
+pain, my thirst, and my scant supply of cubes. The creatures were now all
+massing around the entrance - gesturing, leaping, and laughing with their
+tentacles. Soon, I reflected, I would have to face the entire horde - and perhaps
+such reinforcements as they would receive from the forest.
+
+
+
+
+I am now only a few yards from the skeleton, and am pausing to make this entry
+before emerging and breaking through the noxious band of entities. I feel
+confident that with my last ounce of strength I can put them to flight despite
+their numbers, for the range of this pistol is tremendous. Then a camp on the dry
+moss at the plateau's edge, and in the morning a weary trip through the jungle to
+Terra Nova. I shall be glad to see living men and the buildings of human beings
+again. The teeth of that skull gleam and grin horribly.
+
+TOWARD NIGHT - VI, I 5
+
+Horror and despair. Baffled again! After making the previous entry I approached
+still closer to the skeleton, but suddenly encountered an intervening wall. I had
+been deceived once more, and was apparently back where I had been three days
+before, on my first futile attempt to leave the labyrinth. Whether I screamed
+aloud I do not know - perhaps I was too weak to utter a sound. I merely lay
+dazed in the mud for a long period, while the greenish things outside leaped and
+laughed and gestured.
+
+After a time I became more fully conscious. My thirst and weakness and
+suffocation were fast gaining on me, and with my last bit of strength I put a new
+cube in the electrolyser - recklessly, and without regard for the needs of my
+journey to Terra Nova. The fresh oxygen revived me slightly, and enabled me to
+look about more alertly.
+
+It seemed as if I were slightly more distant from poor Dwight than I had been at
+that first disappointment, and I dully wondered if I could be in some other
+corridor a trifle more remote. With this faint shadow of hope I laboriously
+dragged myself forward - but after a few feet encountered a dead end as I had on
+the former occasion.
+
+This, then, was the end. Three days had taken me nowhere, and my strength was
+gone. I would soon go mad from thirst, and I could no longer count on cubes
+enough to get me back. I feebly wondered why the nightmare things had
+gathered so thickly around the entrance as they mocked me. Probably this was
+part of the mockery - to make me think I was approaching an egress which they
+knew did not exist.
+
+I shall not last long, though I am resolved not to hasten matters as Dwight did.
+His grinning skull has just turned toward me, shifted by the groping of one of
+the efjeh-weeds that are devouring his leather suit. The ghoulish stare of those
+empty eye-sockets is worse than the staring of those lizard horrors. It lends a
+hideous meaning to that dead, white-toothed grin.
+
+
+
+
+I shall lie very still in the mud and save all the strength I can. This record - which
+I hope may reach and warn those who come after me - will soon be done. After I
+stop writing I shall rest a long while. Then, when it is too dark for those frightful
+creatures to see, I shall muster up my last reserves of strength and try to toss the
+record scroll over the wall and the intervening corridor to the plain outside. I
+shall take care to send it toward the left, where it will not hit the leaping band of
+mocking beleaguers. Perhaps it will be lost forever in the thin mud - but perhaps
+it will land in some widespread clump of weeds and ultimately reach the hands
+of men.
+
+If it does survive to be read, I hope it may do more than merely warn men of this
+trap. I hope it may teach our race to let those shining crystals stay where they
+are. They belong to Venus alone. Our planet does not truly need them, and I
+believe we have violated some obscure and mysterious law - some law buried
+deep in the arcane of the cosmos - in our attempts to take them. Who can tell
+what dark, potent, and widespread forces spur on these reptilian things who
+guard their treasure so strangely? Dwight and I have paid, as others have paid
+and will pay. But it may be that these scattered deaths are only the prelude of
+greater horrors to come. Let us leave to Venus that which belongs only to Venus.
+
+I am very near death now, and fear I may not be able to throw the scroll when
+dusk comes. If I cannot, I suppose the man-lizards will seize it, for they will
+probably realize what it is. They will not wish anyone to be warned of the
+labyrinth - and they will not know that my message holds a plea in their own
+behalf. As the end approaches I feel more kindly towards the things. In the scale
+of cosmic entity who can say which species stands higher, or more nearly
+approaches a space-wide organic norm - theirs or mine?
+
+I have just taken the great crystal out of my pouch to look at in my last moments.
+It shines fiercely and menacingly in the red rays of the dying day. The leaping
+horde have noticed it, and their gestures have changed in a way I cannot
+understand. I wonder why they keep clustered around the entrance instead of
+concentrating at a still closer point in the transparent wall.
+
+I am growing numb and cannot write much more. Things whirl around me, yet I
+do not lose consciousness. Can I throw this over the wall? That crystal glows so,
+yet the twilight is deepening.
+
+Dark. Very weak. They are still laughing and leaping around the doorway, and
+have started those hellish glow-torches.
+
+Are they going away? I dreamed I heard a sound. . . light in the sky.
+
+
+
+
+REPORT OF WESLEY P. MILLER, SUPT. GROUP A, VENUS CRYSTAL CO.
+
+(TERRA NOVA ON VENUS - VI, 16)
+
+Our Operative A-49, Kenton J. Stanfield of 5317 Marshall Street, Richmond, Va.,
+left Terra Nova early on VI, 12, for a short-term trip indicated by detector. Due
+back 13th or 14th. Did not appear by evening of 15th, so Scouting Plane FR-58
+with five men under my command set out at 8 P.M. to follow route with detector.
+Needle showed no change from earlier readings.
+
+Followed needle to Erycinian Highland, played strong searchlights all the way.
+Triple-range flame-guns and D-radiation cylinders could have dispersed any
+ordinary hostile force of natives, or any dangerous aggregation of carnivorous
+skorahs.
+
+When over the open plain on Eryx we saw a group of moving lights which we
+knew were native glow- torches. As we approached, they scattered into the
+forest. Probably seventy-five to a hundred in all. Detector indicated crystal on
+spot where they had been. Sailing low over this spot, our lights picked out
+objects on the ground. Skeleton tangled in efjeh-weeds, and complete body ten
+feet from it. Brought plane down near bodies, and corner of wing crashed on
+unseen obstruction.
+
+Approaching bodies on foot, we came up short against a smooth, invisible
+barrier which puzzled us enormously. Feeling along it near the skeleton, we
+struck an opening, beyond which was a space with another opening leading to
+the skeleton. The latter, though robbed of clothing by weeds, had one of the
+company's numbered metal helmets beside it. It was Operative B-9, Frederick N.
+Dwight of Koenig's division, who had been out of Terra Nova for two months on
+a long commission.
+
+Between this skeleton and the complete body there seemed to be another wall,
+but we could easily identify the second man as Stanfield. He had a record scroll
+in his left hand and a pen in his right, and seemed to have been writing when he
+died. No crystal was visible, but the detector indicated a huge specimen near
+Stanfield's body.
+
+We had great difficulty in getting at Stanfield, but finally succeeded. The body
+was still warm, and a great crystal lay beside it, covered by the shallow mud. We
+at once studied the record scroll in the left hand, and prepared to take certain
+steps based on its data. The contents of the scroll forms the long narrative
+prefixed to this report; a narrative whose main descriptions we have verified,
+and which we append as an explanation of what was found. The later parts of
+
+
+
+
+this account show mental decay, but there is no reason to doubt the bulk of it.
+Stanfield obviously died of a combination of thirst, suffocation, cardiac strain,
+and psychological depression. His mask was in place, and freely generating
+oxygen despite an alarmingly low cube supply.
+
+Our plane being damaged, we sent a wireless and called out Anderson with
+Repair Plane PG-7, a crew of wreckers, and a set of blasting materials. By
+morning FH-58 was fixed, and went back under Anderson carrying the two
+bodies and the crystal. We shall bury Dwight and Stanfield in the company
+graveyard, and ship the crystal to Chicago on the next earth-bound liner. Later,
+we shall adopt Stanfield's suggestion - the sound one in the saner, earlier part of
+his report - and bring across enough troops to wipe out the natives altogether.
+With a clear field, there can be scarcely any limit to the amount of crystal we can
+secure.
+
+In the afternoon we studied the invisible building or trap with great care,
+exploring it with the aid of long guiding cords, and preparing a complete chart
+for our archives. We were much impressed by the design, and shall keep
+specimens of the substance for chemical analysis. All such knowledge will be
+useful when we take over the various cities of the natives. Our type C diamond
+drills were able to bite into the unseen material, and wreckers are now planting
+dynamite preparatory to a thorough blasting. Nothing will be left when we are
+done. The edifice forms a distinct menace to aerial and other possible traffic.
+
+In considering the plan of the labyrinth one is impressed not only with the irony
+of Dwight's fate, but with that of Stanfield as well. When trying to reach the
+second body from the skeleton, we could find no access on the right, but
+Markheim found a doorway from the first inner space some fifteen feet past
+Dwight and four or five past Stanfield. Beyond this was a long hall which we did
+not explore till later, but on the right-hand side of that hall was another doorway
+leading directly to the body. Stanfield could have reached the outside entrance
+by walking twenty-two or twenty-three feet if he had found the opening which
+lay directly behind him - an opening which he overlooked in his exhaustion and
+despair.
+
+
+
+
+At the Root
+
+Written 1918
+
+To those who look beneath the surface, the present universal war drives home
+more than one anthropological truth in striking fashion; and of the verities none
+is more profound than that relating to the essential immutability of mankind and
+its instincts.
+
+Four years ago a large part of the civilised world laboured under certain
+biological fallacies which may, in a sense, be held responsible for the extent and
+duration of the present conflict. These fallacies, which were the foundation of
+pacifism and other pernicious forms of social and political radicalism, dealt with
+the capacity of man to evolve mentally beyond his former state of subservience
+to primate instinct and pugnacity, and to conduct his affairs and international or
+interracial relations on a basis of reason and good-will. That belief in such
+capability is unscientific and childishly naive, is beside the question. The fact
+remains, that the most civilised part of the world, including our own Anglo-
+Saxondom, did entertain enough of these notions to relax military vigilance, lay
+stress on points of honour, place trust in treaties, and permit a powerful and
+unscrupulous nation to indulge unchecked and unsuspected in nearly fifty years
+of preparation for world-wide robbery and slaughter. We are reaping the result
+of our simplicity.
+
+The past is over. Our former follies we can but regret, and expiate as best we may
+by a crusade to the death against the Trans-Rhenane monster which we allowed
+to grow and flourish beneath our very eyes. But the future holds more of
+responsibility, and we must prepare to guard against any renascence of the
+benevolent delusions that four years of blood have barely been able to discard
+forever the sentimental standpoint, and to view our species through the cold
+eyes of science alone. We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in
+the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life
+and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as
+he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the
+dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation,
+we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological
+principles. In considering ourselves, we think too much of ethics and sociology -
+too little of plain natural history. We should perceive that man's period of
+historical existence, a period so short that his physical constitution has not been
+altered in the slightest degree, is insufficient to allow of any considerable mental
+change. The instincts that governed the Egyptians and the Assyrians of old,
+govern us as well; and as the ancients thought, grasped, struggled, and deceived.
+
+
+
+
+so shall we moderns continue to think, grasp, struggle, and deceive in our inmost
+hearts. Change is only superficial and apparent.
+
+Man's respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution
+and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training it can be
+elevated tremendously, yet there is always a limit. The man or nation of high
+culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions
+and honour, but beyond a certain point primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.
+Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley
+just so long - then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside
+every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after
+the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous
+repression. The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we
+must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves
+and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous.
+Dangerous beyond description are the voices sometimes heard today, decrying
+the continuance of armament after the close of the present hostilities.
+
+The specific application of the scientific truth regarding man's native instincts
+will be found in the adoption of a post-bellum international programme.
+Obviously, we must take into account the primordial substructure and arrange
+for the upholding of culture by methods which will stand the acid test of stress
+and conflicting ambitions. In disillusioned diplomacy, ample armament, and
+universal military training alone will be found the solution of the world's
+difficulties. It will not be a perfect solution, because humanity is not perfect. It
+will not abolish war, because war is the expression of a natural human tendency.
+But it will at least produce an approximate stability of social and political
+conditions, and prevent the menace of the entire world by the greed of any one
+of its constituent parts.
+
+
+
+
+Cats And Dogs
+
+Written November 23, 1926
+
+Published in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Arkham House, 1949
+
+Being told of the cat-and-dog fight about to occur in your literary club, I cannot
+resist contributing a few Thomastic yowls and sibilants upon my side of the
+dispute, though conscious that the word of a venerable ex-member can scarcely
+have much weight against the brilliancy of such still active adherents as may
+bark upon the other side. Aware of my ineptitude at argument, a valued
+correspondent has supplied me with the records of a similar controversy in the
+New York Tribune, in which Mr. Carl van Doran is on my side and Mr. Albert
+Payson Terhune on that of the canine tribe. From this I would be glad to
+plagiarise such data as I need; but my friend, with genuinely Machiavellian
+subtlety, has furnished me with only a part of the feline section whilst submitting
+the doggish brief in full. No doubt he imagines that this arrangement, in view of
+my own emphatic bias, makes for something like ultimate fairness; but for me it
+is exceedingly inconvenient, since it will force me to be more or less original in
+several parts of the ensuing remarks.
+
+Between dogs and cats my degree of choice is so great that it would never occur
+to me to compare the two. I have no active dislike for dogs, any more than I have
+for monkeys, human beings, tradesmen, cows, sheep, or pterodactyls; but for the
+cat I have entertained a particular respect and affection ever since the earliest
+days of my infancy. In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen
+a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself,
+objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the
+wonder and fascination of the unknown. The dog appeals to cheap and facile
+emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in
+the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together
+with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire and Swinburne, were all
+sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.
+
+Naturally, one's preference in the matter of cats and dogs depends wholly upon
+one's temperament and point of view. The dog would appear to me to be the
+favorite of superficial, sentimental, and emotional people — people who feel
+rather than think, who attach importance to mankind and the popular
+conventional emotions of the simple, and who find their greatest consolation in
+the fawning and dependent attachments of a gregarious society. Such people live
+
+
+
+
+in a limited world of imagination; accepting uncritically the values of common
+folklore, and always preferring to have their naive beliefs, feelings, and
+prejudices tickled, rather than to enjoy a purely aesthetic and philosophic
+pleasure arising from discrimination, contemplation, and the recognition of
+austere, absolute beauty. This is not to say that the cheaper elements do not also
+reside in the average cat-lover's love of cats, but merely to point out that in
+ailurophily there exists a basis of true aestheticism which kynophily does not
+possess. The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the
+universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to
+swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and
+horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such. He is unwilling to
+set up himself and his cruder feelings as a measure of universal values, or to
+allow shallow ethical notions to warp his judgment. In a word, he had rather
+admire and respect than effuse and dote; and does not fall into the fallacy that
+pointless sociability and friendliness, or slavering devotion and obedience,
+constitute anything intrinsically admirable or exalted. Dog-lovers base their
+whole case on these commonplace, servile, and plebeian qualities, and amusingly
+judge the intelligence of a pet by its degree of conformity to their own wishes.
+Cat-lovers escape this delusion, repudiate the idea that cringing subservience
+and sidling companionship to man are supreme merits, and stand free to
+worship aristocratic independence, self-respect, and individual personality
+joined to extreme grace and beauty as typified by the cool, lithe, cynical and
+unconquered lord of the housetops.
+
+Persons of commonplace ideas — unimaginative worthy burghers who are
+satisfied with the daily round of things and who subscribe to the popular credo
+of sentimental values — will always be dog-lovers. To them nothing will ever be
+more important than themselves and their own primitive feelings, and they will
+never cease to esteem and glorify the fellow-animal who best typifies these. Such
+persons are submerged in the vortex of Oriental idealism and abasement which
+ruined classic civilisation in the Dark Ages, and live in a bleak world of abstract
+sentimental values wherein the mawkish illusions of meekness, gentleness,
+brotherhood, and whining humility are magnified into supreme virtues, and a
+whole false ethic and philosophy erected on the timid reactions of the flexor
+system of muscles. This heritage, ironically foisted on us when Roman politics
+raised the faith of a whipped and broken people to supremacy in the later
+empire, has naturally kept a strong hold over the weak and sentimentally
+thoughtless; and perhaps reached its culmination in the insipid nineteenth
+century, when people were wont to praise dogs "because they are so human" (as
+if humanity were any valid standard of merit!), and honest Edwin Landseer
+painted hundreds of smug Fidoes and Carlos and Rovers with all the anthropoid
+triviality, pettiness, and "cuteness" of eminent Victorians.
+
+
+
+
+But amidst this chaos of intellectual and emotional groveling a few free souls
+have always stood out for the old civilised realities which mediaevalism eclipsed
+
+— the stern classic loyalty to truth, strength, and beauty given a clear mind and
+uncowed spirit to the full-living Western Aryan confronted by Nature's majesty,
+loveliness, and aloofness. This is the virile aesthetic and ethic of the extensor
+muscles — the bold, buoyant, assertive beliefs and preferences of proud,
+dominant, unbroken and unterrified conquerors, hunters, and warriors — and it
+has small use for the shams and whimperings of the brotherly, affection-
+slobbering peacemaker and cringer and sentimentalist. Beauty and sufficiency —
+twin qualities of the cosmos itself — are the gods of this unshackled and pagan
+type; to the worshipper of such eternal things the supreme virtue will not be
+found in lowliness, attachment, obedience, and emotional messiness. This sort of
+worshipper will look for that which best embodies the loveliness of the stars and
+the worlds and the forests and the seas and the sunsets, and which best acts out
+the blandness, lordliness, accuracy, self-sufficiency, cruelty, independence, and
+contemptuous and capricious impersonality of the all governing Nature. Beauty
+
+— coolness — aloofness — philosophic repose — self-sufficiency — untamed
+mastery — where else can we find these things incarnated with even half the
+perfection and completeness that mark their incarnation in the peerless and
+softly gliding cat, which performs its mysterious orbit with the relentless and
+obtrusive certainty of a planet in infinity?
+
+That dogs are dear to the unimaginative peasant-burgher whilst cats appeal to
+the sensitive poet-aristocrat-philosopher will be clear in a moment when we
+reflect on the matter of biological association. Practical plebeian folk judge a
+thing only by its immediate touch, taste, and smell; while more delicate types
+form their estimates from the linked images and ideas which the object calls up
+in their minds. Now when dogs and cats are considered, the stolid churl sees
+only the two animals before him, and bases his favour on their relative capacity
+to pander to his sloppy, uniformed ideas of ethics and friendship and flattering
+subservience. On the other hand the gentleman and thinker sees each in all its
+natural affiliations, and cannot fail to notice that in the great symmetries of
+organic life dogs fall in with slovenly wolves and foxes and jackals and coyotes
+and dingoes and painted hyaenas, whilst cats walk proudly with the jungle's
+lords, and own the haughty lion, the sinuous leopard, the regal tiger, and the
+shapely panther and jaguar as their kin. Dogs are the hieroglyphs of blind
+emotion, inferiority, servile attachment, and gregariousness — the attributes of
+commonplace, stupidly passionate, and intellectually and imaginatively
+underdeveloped men. Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride,
+freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality — the qualities of
+sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic,
+dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-
+class men. The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.
+
+
+
+
+We may, indeed, judge the tone and bias of a civilisation by its relative attitude
+toward dogs and cats. The proud Egypt wherein Pharaoh was Pharaoh and
+pyramids rose in beauty at the wish of him who dreamed them bowed down to
+the cat, and temples were built to its goddess at Bubastis. In imperial Rome the
+graceful leopard adorned most homes of quality, lounging in insolent beauty in
+the atrium with golden collar and chain; while after the age of the Antonines the
+actual cat was imported from Egypt and cherished as a rare and costly luxury. So
+much for the dominant and enlightened peoples. When, however, we come to
+the groveling Middle Ages with their superstitions and ecstasies and
+monasticisms and maunderings over saints and their relics, we find the cool and
+impersonal loveliness of the felidae in very low esteem; and behold a sorry
+spectacle of hatred and cruelty shown toward the beautiful little creature whose
+mousing virtues alone gained it sufferance amongst the ignorant churls who
+resented its self-respecting coolness and feared its cryptical and elusive
+independence as something akin to the dark powers of witchcraft. These boorish
+slaves of eastern darkness could not tolerate what did not serve their own cheap
+emotions and flimsy purposes. They wished a dog to fawn and hunt and fetch
+and carry, and had no use for the cat's gift of eternal disinterested beauty to feed
+the spirit. One can imagine how they must have resented Pussy's magnificent
+reposefulness, unhurriedness, relaxation, and scorn for trivial human aims and
+concernments. Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and
+stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with
+coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer
+the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants
+something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own
+life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its
+business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse
+you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who
+relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you
+into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about
+the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your
+attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and
+individuality and self-respect — the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own
+and not yours — and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because
+he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own
+heritage and aesthetic sense. Altogether, we may see that the dog appeals to
+those primitive emotional souls whose chief demands on the universe are for
+meaningless affection, aimless companionship, and flattering attention and
+subservience; whilst the cat reigns among those more contemplative and
+imaginative spirits who ask of the universe only the objective sight of poignant,
+ethereal beauty and the animate symbolisation of Nature's bland, relentless,
+reposeful, unhurried and impersonal order and sufficiency. The dog gives, but
+the cat is.
+
+
+
+
+Simple folk always overstress the ethical element in life, and it is quite natural
+that they should extend it to the realm of their pets. Accordingly, we hear many
+inane dicta in favour of dogs on the ground that they are faithful, whilst cats are
+treacherous. Now just what does this really mean? Where are the points of
+reference? Certainly, the dog has so little imagination and individuality that it
+knows no motives but its master's; but what sophisticated mind can descry a
+positive virtue in this stupid abnegation of its birthright? Discrimination must
+surely award the palm to the superior cat, which has too much natural dignity to
+accept any scheme of things but its own, and which consequently cares not one
+whit what any clumsy human thinks or wishes or expects of it. It is not
+treacherous, because it has never acknowledged any allegiance to anything
+outside its own leisurely wishes; and treachery basically implies a departure
+from some covenant explicitly recognised. The cat is a realist, and no hypocrite.
+He takes what pleases him when he wants it, and gives no promises. He never
+leads you to expect more from him than he gives, and if you choose to be
+stupidly Victorian enough to mistake his purrs and rubbings of self-satisfaction
+for marks of transient affection toward you, that is no fault of his. He would not
+for a moment have you believe that he wants more of you than food and warmth
+and shelter and amusement — and he is certainly justified in criticising your
+aesthetic and imaginative development if you fail to find his grace, beauty, and
+cheerful decorative influence an aboundingly sufficient repayment for all you
+give him. The cat-lover need not be amazed at another's love for dogs — indeed,
+he may also possess this quality himself; for dogs are often very comely, and as
+lovable in a condescending way as a faithful old servant or tenant in the eyes of a
+master — but he cannot help feeling astonished at those who do not share his
+love for cats. The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it
+seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than
+worship it. We call ourselves a dog's "master" — but who ever dared call himself
+the "master" of a cat? We own a dog — he is with us as a slave and inferior
+because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat — he adorns our hearth as a
+guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there. It is no
+compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to
+idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of
+a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another
+companion if he found such a one more agreeable and interesting. A trace, I
+think, of this great truth regarding the higher dignity of the cat has crept into
+folklore in the use of the names "cat" and "dog" as terms of opprobrium. Whilst
+"cat" has never been applied to any sort of offender more than the mildly
+spiteful and innocuously sly female gossip and commentator, the words "dog"
+and "cur" have always been linked with vileness, dishonor, and degradation of
+the gravest type. In the crystallisation of this nomenclature there has
+undoubtedly been present in the popular mind some dim, half-unconscious
+realisation that there are depths of slinking, whining, fawning, and servile
+
+
+
+
+ignobility which no kith of the hon and the leopard could ever attain. The cat
+may fall low, but he is always unbroken. He is, like the Nordic among men, one
+of those who govern their own lives or die.
+
+We have but to glance analytically at the two animals to see the points pile up in
+favour of the cat. Beauty, which is probably the only thing of any basic
+significance in all the cosmos, ought to be our chief criterion; and here the cat
+excels so brilliantly that all comparisons collapse. Some dogs, it is true, have
+beauty in a very ample degree; but even the highest level of canine beauty falls
+far below the feline average. The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic —
+nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of
+form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae. Puss is a Doric temple
+— an Ionic colonnade — in the utter classicism of its structural and decorative
+harmonies. And this is just as true kinetically as statically, for art has no parallel
+for the bewitching grace of the cat's slightest motion. The sheer, perfect
+aestheticism of kitty's lazy stretchings, industrious face-washings, playful
+rollings, and little involuntary shiftings in sleep is something as keen and vital as
+the best pastoral poetry or genre painting; whilst the unerring accuracy of his
+leaping and springing, running and hunting, has an art-value just as high in a
+more spirited way but it is his capacity for leisure and repose which makes the
+cat preeminent. Mr. Carl Van Vechten, in "Peter Whiffle," holds up the timeless
+restfulness of the cat as a model for life's philosophy, and Prof. William Lyon
+Phelps has very effectively captured the secret of felinity when he says that the
+cat does not merely lie down, but "pours his body out on the floor like a glass of
+water". What other creature has thus merged the aestheticism of mechanics and
+hydraulics? Contrast this with the inept panting, wheezing, fumbling, drooling,
+scratching, and general clumsiness of the average dog with his false and wasted
+motions. And in the details of neatness the fastidious cat is of course
+immeasurably ahead. We always love to touch a cat, but only the insensitive can
+uniformly welcome the frantic and humid nuzzlings and pawings of a dusty and
+perhaps not inodorous canine which leaps and fusses and writhes about in
+awkward feverishness for no particular reason save that blind nerve-centres have
+been spurred by certain meaningless stimuli. There is a wearying excess of bad
+manners in all this doggish fury — well-bred people don't paw and maul one,
+and surely enough we invariably find the cat gentle and reserved in his
+advances, and delicate even when he glides gracefully into your lap with
+cultivated purrs, or leaps whimsical on the table where you are writing to play
+with your pen in modulated, seriocomic pats. I do not wonder that Mahomet,
+that sheik of perfect manners, loved cats for their urbanity and disliked dogs for
+their boorishness; or that cats are the favorites in the polite Latin countries whilst
+dogs take the lead in heavy, practical, and beer-drinking Central Europe. Watch
+a cat eat, and then watch a dog. The one is held in check by an inherent and
+inescapable daintiness, and lends a kind of grace to one of the most ungraceful of
+
+
+
+
+all processes. The dog, on the other hand, is wholly repulsive in his bestial and
+insatiate greediness; living up to his forest kinship of "wolfing" most openly and
+unashamedly. Returning to beauty of line — is it not significant that while many
+normal breeds of dogs are conspicuously and admittedly ugly, no healthy and
+well-developed feline of any species whatsoever is other than beautiful? There
+are, of course, many ugly cats; but these are always individual cases of
+mongrelism, malnutrition, deformity, or injury. No breed of cats in its proper
+condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly
+ungraceful — a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of
+impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously
+shapeless and shaggy Airedales, and the like. Of course, it may be said that no
+aesthetic standard is other than relative — but we always work with such
+standards as we empirically have, and in comparing cats and dogs under the
+Western European aesthetic we cannot be unfair to either. If any undiscovered
+tribe in Tibet finds Airedales beautiful and Persian cats ugly, we will not dispute
+them on their own territory — but just now we are dealing with ourselves and
+our territory, and here the verdict would not admit of much doubt even from the
+most ardent kynophile. Such an one usually passes the problem off in an
+epigrammatic paradox, and says that "Snookums is so homely, he's pretty!" This
+is the childish penchant for the grotesque and tawdrily "cute" which we see
+likewise embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls, and all the malformed
+decorative trumpery of the "Billikin" or "Krazy Kat" order found in the "dens"
+and "cosy corners" of the would-be-sophisticated yokelry.
+
+In the matter of intelligence we find the caninites making amusing claims —
+amusing because they so naively measure what they conceive to be an animal's
+intelligence by its degree of subservience to the human will. A dog will retrieve,
+a cat will not; therefore (sic!) the dog is the more intelligent. Dogs can be more
+elaborately trained for the circus and vaudeville acts than cats, therefore (O Zeus,
+O Royal Mount!) they are cerebrally superior. Now of course this is all the
+sheerest nonsense. We would not call a weak-spirited man more intelligent than
+an independent citizen because we can make him vote as we wish whereas we
+can't influence the independent citizen, yet countless persons apply an exactly
+parallel argument in appraising the grey matter of dogs and cats. Competition in
+servility is something to which no self-respecting Thomas or Tabitha ever
+stooped, and it is plain that any really effective estimate of canine and feline
+intelligence must proceed from a careful observation of dogs and cats in a
+detached state — uninfluenced by human beings — as they formulate certain
+objectives of their own and use their own mental equipment in achieving them.
+When we do this, we arrive at a very wholesome respect for our purring
+hearthside friend who makes so little display about his wishes and business
+methods; for in every conception and calculation he shows a steel-cold and
+deliberate union of intellect, will, and sense of proportion which puts utterly to
+
+
+
+
+shame the emotional sloppings-over and docilely acquired artificial tricks of the
+"clever" and "faithful" pointer or sheep-dog. Watch a cat decide to move
+through a door, and see how patiently he waits for his opportunity, never losing
+sight of his purpose even when he finds it expedient to feign other interests in
+the interim. Watch him in the thick of the chase, and compare his calculating
+patience and quiet study of his terrain with the noisy floundering and pawing of
+his canine rival. It is not often that he returns empty-handed. He knows what he
+wants, and means to get it in the most effective way, even at the sacrifice of time
+— which he philosophically recognises as unimportant in the aimless cosmos.
+There is no turning him aside or distracting his attention — and we know that
+among humans this is the quality of mental tenacity, this ability to carry a single
+thread through complex distractions, is considered a pretty good sign of
+intellectual vigour and maturity. Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs
+ramble, cats and philosophers stick to their point. In resourcefulness, too, the cat
+attests his superiority. Dogs can be well trained to do a single thing, but
+psychologists tell us that these responses to an automatic memory instilled from
+outside are of little worth as indices of real intelligence. To judge the abstract
+development of a brain, confront it with new and unfamiliar conditions and see
+how well its own strength enables it to achieve its object by sheer reasoning
+without blazed trails. Here the cats can silently devise a dozen mysterious and
+successful alternatives whilst poor Fido is barking in bewilderment and
+wondering what it is all about. Granted that Rover the retriever may make a
+greater bid for popular sentimental regard by going into the burning house and
+saving the baby in traditional cinema fashion, it remains a fact that whiskered
+and purring Nig is a higher-grade biological organism — something
+physiologically and psychologically nearer a man because of his very freedom
+from man's orders, and as such entitled to a higher respect from those who judge
+by purely philosophic and aesthetic standards. We can respect a cat as we cannot
+respect a dog, no matter which personally appeals the more to our mere doting
+fancy; and if we be aesthetes and analysts rather than commonplace-lovers and
+emotionalists, the scales must inevitably turn completely in kitty's favour.
+
+It may be added, moreover, that even the aloof and sufficient cat is by no means
+devoid of sentimental appeal. Once we get rid of the uncivilised ethical bias —
+the "treacherous" and "horrid bird-catcher" prejudice — we find in the
+"harmless cat" the very apex of happy domestic symbolism; whilst small kittens
+become objects to adore, idealise, and celebrate in the most rhapsodic of dactyls
+and anapaests, iambics and trochaics. I, in my own senescent mellowness,
+confess to an inordinate and wholly unphilosophic predilection for tiny coal-
+black kittens with large yellow eyes, and could no more pass one without petting
+him than Dr. Johnson could pass a sidewalk post without striking it. There is,
+likewise, in many cats quite analogous to the reciprocal fondness so loudly
+extolled in dogs, human beings, horses, and the like. Cats come to associate
+
+
+
+
+certain persons with acts continuously contributing to their pleasure, and acquire
+for them a recognition and attachment which manifests itself in pleasant
+excitement at their approach — whether or not bearing food and drink — and a
+certain pensiveness at their protracted absence. A cat with whom I was on
+intimate terms reached the point of accepting food from no hand but one, and
+would actually go hungry rather than touch the least morsel from a kindly
+neighbour source. He also had distinct affections amongst the other cats of that
+idyllic household; voluntarily offering food to one of his whiskered friends,
+whilst disputing most savagely the least glance which his coal-black rival
+"Snowball" would bestow upon his plate. If it be argued that these feline
+fondnesses are essentially "selfish" and "practical" in their ultimate composition,
+let us inquire in return how many human fondnesses, apart from those springing
+directly upon primitive brute instinct, have any other basis. After the returning
+board has brought in the grand total of zero we shall be better able to refrain
+from ingenuous censure of the "selfish" cat.
+
+The superior imaginative inner life of the cat, resulting in superior self-
+possession, is well known. A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on
+companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master.
+Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot
+about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however, is never without
+the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone
+and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down
+to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having
+occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well-balanced kitten which
+believes itself to be alone. Only after such a glimpse of unaffected tail-chasing
+grace and unstudied purring can one fully understand the charm of those lines
+which Coleridge wrote with reference to the human rather than the feline young
+— page eleven
+
+".... a limber elf.
+
+Singing, dancing to itself."
+
+But whole volumes could be written on the playing of cats, since the varieties
+and aesthetic aspects of such sportiveness are infinite. Be it sufficient to say that
+in such pastimes cats have exhibited traits and actions which psychologists
+authentically declare to be motivated by genuine humour and whimsicality in its
+purest sense; so that the task of "making a cat laugh" may not be so impossible a
+thing even outside the borders of Cheshire. In short, a dog is an incomplete
+thing. Like an inferior man, he needs emotional stimuli from outside, and must
+set something artificial up as a god and motive. The cat, however, is perfect in
+himself. Like the human philosopher, he is a self-sufficient entity and microcosm.
+He is a real and integrated being because he thinks and feels himself to be such.
+
+
+
+
+whereas the dog can conceive of himself only in relation to something else. Whip
+a dog and he licks your hand - frauth! The beast has no idea of himself except as
+an inferior part of an organism whereof you are the superior part — he would no
+more think of striking back at you than you would think of pounding your own
+head when it punishes you with a headache. But whip a cat and watch it glare
+and move backward hissing in outraged dignity and self-respect! One more
+blow, and it strikes you in return; for it is a gentleman and your equal, and will
+accept no infringement on its personality and body of privileges. It is only in
+your house anyway because it wishes to be, or perhaps even as a condescending
+favour to yourself. It is the house, not you, it likes; for philosophers realise that
+human beings are at best only minor adjuncts to scenery. Go one step too far, and
+it leaves you altogether. You have mistaken your relationship to it and imagined
+you are its master, and no real cat can tolerate that breach of good manners.
+Henceforward it will seek companions of greater discrimination and clearer
+perspective. Let anaemic persons who believe in "turning the other cheek"
+console themselves with cringing dogs — for the robust pagan with the blood of
+Nordic twilights in his veins there is no beast like the cat; intrepid steed of Freya,
+who can boldly look even Thor and Odin full in the face and stare with great
+round eyes of undimmed yellow or green.
+
+In these observations I believe I have outlined with some fullness the diverse
+reasons why, in my opinion and in the smartly timed title-phrase of Mr. Van
+Doren, "gentlemen prefer cats." The reply of Mr. Terhune in a subsequent issue
+of the Tribune appears to me beside the point; insomuch as it is less a refutation
+of facts than a mere personal affirmation of the author's membership in that
+conventional "very human" majority who take affection and companionship
+seriously, enjoy being important to something alive, hate a "parasite" on mere
+ethical ground without consulting the right of beauty to exist for its own sake,
+and therefore love man's noblest and most faithful friend, the perennial dog. I
+suppose Mr. Terhune loves horses and babies also, for the three go
+conventionally together in the great hundred-per-center's credo as highly
+essential likings for every good and lovable he-man of the Arrow Collar and
+Harold Bell Wright hero school, even though the automobile and Margaret
+Sanger have done much to reduce the last two items.
+
+Dogs, then, are peasants and the pets of peasants, cats are gentlemen and the pets
+of gentlemen. The dog is for him who places crude feeling and outgrown ethic
+and humanocentricity above austere and disinterested beauty; who just loves
+"folks and folksiness" and doesn't mind sloppy clumsiness if only something
+will truly care for him. (Tableau of dog across master's grave — cf. Lanseer, "The
+Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner.") The guy who isn't much for highbrow stuff,
+but is always on the square and don't (sic) often find the Saddypost or the N.Y.
+World too deep for him; who hadn't much use for Valentino, but thinks Doug
+
+
+
+
+Fairbanks is just about right for an evening's entertainment. Wholesome —
+constructive — non-morbid — civic-minded — domestic — (I forgot to mention
+the radio) normal — that's the sort of go-getter that ought to go in for dogs.
+
+The cat is for the aristocrat — whether by birth or inclinations or both - who
+admires his fellow-aristocrats. He is for the man who appreciates beauty as the
+one living force in a blind and purposeless universe, and who worships that
+beauty in all its forms without regard for the sentimental and ethical illusions of
+the moment. For the man who knows the hoUowness of feeling and the
+emptiness of human objects and aspirations, and who therefore clings solely to
+what is real — as beauty is real because it pretends to a significance beyond the
+emotion which it excites and is. For the man who feels sufficient in the cosmos,
+and asks no scruples of conventional prejudice, but loves repose and strength
+and freedom and luxury and sufficiency and contemplation; who as a strong
+fearless soul wishes something to respect instead of something to lick his face
+and accept his alternate blows and strokings; who seeks a proud and beautiful
+equal in the peerage of individualism rather than a cowed and cringing satellite
+in the hierarchy of fear, subservience, and devolution. The cat is not for the brisk,
+self-important little worker with a mission, but for the enlightened dreaming
+poet who knows that the world contains nothing really worth doing. The
+dilettante — the connoisseur — the decadent, if you will, though in a healthier
+age than this there were things for such men to do, so that they were the planners
+and leader of those glorious pagan times. The cat is for him who does things not
+for empty duty but for power, pleasure, splendour, romance, and glamour — for
+the harpist who sings alone in the night of old battles, or the warrior who goes
+out to fight such battles for beauty, glory, fame and the splendour of a land
+athwart which no shadow of weakness falls. For him who will be lulled by no
+sops of prose and usefulness, but demands for his comfort the ease and beauty
+and ascendancy and cultivation which make effort worth while. For the man
+who knows that play, not work, and leisure, not bustle, are the great things of
+life; and that the round of striving merely in order to strive some more is a bitter
+irony of which the civilised soul accepts as little as it can.
+
+Beauty, sufficiency, ease, and good manners — what more can civilisation
+require? We have them all in the divine monarch who lounges gloriously on his
+silken cushion before the hearth. Loveliness and joy for their own sake — pride
+and harmony and coordination — spirit, restfulness and completeness — all here
+are present, and need but a sympathetic disillusionment for worship in full
+measure. What fully civilised soul but would eagerly serve as high priest of Bast?
+The star of the cat, I think, is just now in the ascendant, as we emerge little by
+little from the dreams of ethics and conformity which clouded the nineteenth
+century and raised the grubbing and unlovely dog to the pinnacle of sentimental
+regard. Whether a renaissance of power and beauty will restore our Western
+
+
+
+
+civilisation, or whether the forces of disintegration are aheady too powerful for
+any hand to check, none may yet say, but in the present moment of cynical
+world-unmasking between the pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the
+ominous mystery of the decades ahead we have at least a flash of the old pagan
+perspective and the old pagan clearness and honesty.
+
+And one idol lit up by that flash, seen fair and lovely on a dream-throne of silk
+and gold under a chryselephantine dome, is a shape of deathless grace not
+always given its due among groping mortals — the haughty, the unconquered,
+the mysterious, the luxurious, the Babylonian, the impersonal, the eternal
+companion of superiority and art — the type of perfect beauty and the brother of
+poetry — the bland, grave, compliant, and patrician cat.
+
+
+
+
+Letter to August Derleth
+
+December 11, 1919
+
+Before quitting the subject of Loveman and horror stories, I must relate the
+frightful dream I had the night after I received S.L.'s latest letter. We have lately
+been discussing weird tales at length, and he has recommended several hair-
+raising books to me; so that I was in the mood to connect him with any thought
+of hideousness or supernatural terror. I do not recall how this dream began, or
+what it was really all about. There remains in my mind only one damnably
+blood-curdling fragment whose ending haunts me yet. We were, for some
+terrible yet unknown reason, in a very strange and very ancient cemetery - which
+I could not identify. I suppose no Wisconsinite can picture such a thing - but we
+have them in New England; horrible old places where the slate stones are graven
+with odd letters and grotesque designs such as a skull and crossbones. In some of
+these places one can walk a long way without coming upon any grave less than
+an hundred and fifty years old. Some day, when Cook issues that promised
+MONADNOCK, you will see my tale "The Tomb", which was inspired by one of
+these places. Such was the scene of my dream - a hideous hollow whose surface
+was covered with a coarse, repulsive sort of long grass, above which peeped the
+shocking stones and markers of decaying slate. In a hillside were several tombs
+whose facades were in the last stages of decrepitude. I had an odd idea that no
+living thing had trodden that ground for many centuries till Loveman and I
+arrived. It was very late in the night - probably in the small hours, since a waning
+crescent moon had attained considerable height in the east. Loveman carried,
+slung over his shoulder, a portable telephone outfit; whilst I bore two spades. We
+proceeded directly to a flat sepulchre near the centre of the horrible place, and
+began to clear away the moss-grown earth which had been washed down upon it
+by the rains of innumerable years. Loveman, in the dream, looked exactly like the
+snapshots of himself which he has sent me - a large, robust young man, not the
+least Semitic in features (albeit dark), and very handsome save for a pair of
+protruding ears. We did not speak as he laid down his telephone outfit, took a
+shovel, and helped me clear away the earth and weeds. We both seemed very
+much impressed with something - almost awestruck. At last we completed these
+preliminaries, and Loveman stepped back to survey the sepulchre. He seemed to
+know exactly what he was about to do, and I also had an idea - though I cannot
+now remember what it was! All I recall is that we were following up some idea
+which Loveman had gained as the result of extensive reading in some old rare
+books, of which he possessed the only existing copies. (Loveman, you may know,
+has a vast library of rare first editions and other treasures precious to the
+bibliophile's heart.) After some mental estimates, Loveman took up his shovel
+again, and using it as a lever, sought to pry up a certain slab which formed the
+
+
+
+
+top of the sepulchre. He did not succeed, so I approached and helped him with
+my own shovel. Finally we loosened the stone, lifted it with our combined
+strength, and heaved it away. Beneath was a black passageway with a flight of
+stone steps; but so horrible were the miasmic vapours which poured up from the
+pit, that we stepped back for a while without making further observations. Then
+Loveman picked up the telephone output and began to uncoil the wire -
+speaking for the first time as he did so.
+
+"I'm really sorry", he said in a mellow, pleasant voice; cultivated, and not very
+deep, "to have to ask you to stay above ground, but I couldn't answer for the
+consequences if you were to go down with me. Honestly, I doubt if anyone with
+a nervous system like yours could see it through. You can't imagine what I shall
+have to see and do - not even from what the book said and from what I have told
+you - and I don't think anyone without iron-clad nerves could ever go down and
+come out of that place alive and sane. At any rate, this is no place for anybody
+who can't pass an army physical examination. I discovered this thing, and I am
+responsible in a way for anyone who goes with me - so I would not for a
+thousand dollars let you take the risk. But I'll keep you informed of every move I
+make by the telephone - you see I've enough wire to reach to the centre of the
+earth and back!"
+
+I argued with him, but he replied that if I did not agree, he would call the thing
+off and get another fellow-explorer - he mentioned a "Dr. Burke," a name
+altogether unfamiliar to me. He added, that it would be of no use for me to
+descend alone, since he was sole possessor of the real key to the affair. Finally I
+assented, and seated myself upon a marble bench close by the open grave,
+telephone in hand. He produced an electric lantern, prepared the telephone wire
+for unreeling, and disappeared down the damp stone steps, the insulated wire
+rustling as it uncoiled. For a moment I kept track of the glow of his lantern, but
+suddenly it faded out, as if there were a turn in the stone staircase. Then all was
+still. After this came a period of dull fear and anxious waiting. The crescent
+moon climbed higher, and the mist or fog about the hollow seemed to thicken.
+Everything was horribly damp and bedewed, and I thought I saw an owl flitting
+somewhere in the shadows. Then a clicking sounded in the telephone receiver.
+
+"Lovecraft - I think I'm finding it" - the words came in a tense, excited tone. Then
+a brief pause, followed by more words in atone of ineffable awe and horror.
+
+"God, Lovecraft! If you could see what I am seeing!" I now asked in great
+excitement what had happened. Loveman answered in a trembling voice: "I can't
+tell you - 1 don't dare - 1 never dreamed of this - 1 can't tell - It's enough to unseat
+any mind - wait - what's this?" Then a pause, a clicking in the receiver, and a sort
+of despairing groan. Speech again - "Lovecraft - for God's sake - it's all up - Beat
+
+
+
+
+it! Beat it! Don't lose a second!" I was now thoroughly alarmed, and frantically
+asked Loveman to tell what the matter was. He replied only "Never mind!
+Hurry!" Then I felt a sort of offence through my fear - it irked me that anyone
+should assume that I would be willing to desert a companion in peril. I
+disregarded his advice and told him I was coming down to his aid. But he cried:
+
+"Don't be a fool - it's too late - there's no use - nothing you or anyone can do
+now." He seemed calmer - with a terrible, resigned calm, as if he had met and
+recognised an inevitable, inescapable doom. Yet he was obviously anxious that I
+should escape some unknown peril.
+
+"For God's sake get out of this, if you can find the way! I'm not joking - So long,
+Lovecraft, won't see you again - God! Beat it! Beat it!" As he shrieked out the last
+words, his tone was a frenzied crescendo. I have tried to recall the wording as
+nearly as possible, but I cannot reproduce the tone. There followed a long -
+hideously long - period of silence. I tried to move to assist Loveman, but was
+absolutely paralysed. The slightest motion was an impossibility. I could speak,
+however, and kept calling excitedly into the telephone - "Loveman! Loveman!
+What is it? What's the trouble?" But he did not reply. And then came the
+unbelievably frightful thing - the awful, unexplainable, almost unmentionable
+thing. I have said that Loveman was now silent, but after a vast interval of
+terrified waiting another clicking came into the receiver. I called "Loveman - are
+you there?" And in reply came a voice - a thing which I cannot describe by any
+words I know. Shall I say that it was hollow - very deep - fluid - gelatinous -
+indefinitely distant - unearthly - guttural - thick? What shall I say? In that
+telephone I heard it; heard it as I sat on a marble bench in that very ancient
+unknown cemetery with the crumbling stones and tombs and long grass and
+dampness and the owl and the waning crescent moon. Up from the sepulchre it
+came, and this is what it said:
+
+"YOU FOOL, LOVEMAN IS DEAD!"
+
+Well, that's the whole damn thing! I fainted in the dream, and the next I knew I
+was awake - and with a prize headache! I don't know yet what it was all about -
+what on (or under) earth we were looking for, or what that hideous voice at the
+last was supposed to be. I have read of ghouls - mould shades - but hell - the
+headache I had was worse than the dream! Loveman will laugh when I tell him
+about that dream! In due time, I intend to weave this picture into a story, as I
+wove another dream-picture into "The Doom that Came to Sarnath". I wonder,
+though, if I have a right to claim authorship of things I dream? I hate to take
+credit, when I did not really think out the picture with my own conscious wits.
+Yet if I do not take credit, who'n Heaven will I give credit tuh? Coleridge
+
+
+
+
+claimed "Kubla Khan", so I guess I'll claim the thing an' let it go at that. But
+believe muh, that was some dream!
+
+(Lovecraft wrote The Statement of Randolph Carter based on this dream.)
+
+
+
+
+Metrical Regularity
+
+
+
+Of the various forms of decadence manifest in the poetical art of the present age,
+none strikes more harshly on our sensibilities than the alarming decline in that
+harmonious regularity of metre which adorned the poetry of our immediate
+ancestors.
+
+That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not
+even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can
+disestablish. As old a critic as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and as modern an
+philosopher as Hegel have each affirmed that versification in poetry is not alone
+a necessary attribute, but the very foundation as well; Hegel, indeed, placing
+metre above metaphorical imagination as the essence of all poetic creation.
+
+Science can likewise trace the metrical instinct from the very infancy of mankind,
+or even beyond, to the pre-human age of the apes. Nature is in itself an unending
+succession of regular impulses. The steady recurrence of the seasons and of the
+moonlight, the coming and going of the day, the ebb and flow of the tides, the
+beating of the heart and pulses, the tread of the feet in walking, the countless
+other phenomena of like regularity, have all combined to inculcate in the human
+brain a rhythmic sense which is as manifest in the most uncultivated, as in the
+most polished of peoples. Metre, therefore, is no such false artifice as most
+exponents of radicalism would have us believe, but is instead a natural and
+inevitable embellishment to poesy, which succeeding ages should develop and
+refine, rather than maim or destroy.
+
+Like other instincts, the metric sense has taken on different aspects among
+different races. Savages show it in its simplest form while dancing to the sound
+of primitive drums; barbarians display it in their religious and other chantings;
+civilized peoples utilize it for their formal poetry, either as measured quantity,
+like that of Greek and Roman verse, or as measured accentual stress, like that of
+our own English verse. Precision of metre is thus no mere display of meretricious
+ornament, but a logical evolution from eminently natural sources.
+
+It is the contention of the ultra-modern poet, as enunciated by Mrs. J. W.
+Renshaw in her recent article on "The Autocracy of Art," (The Looking Glass for
+May) that the truly inspired bard must chant forth his feelings independently of
+form or language, permitting each changing impulse to alter the rhythm of his
+lay, and blindly resigning his reason to the "fine frenzy" of his mood. This
+contention is of course founded upon the assumption that poetry is super-
+intellectual; the expression of a "soul" which outranks the mind and its precepts.
+Now while avoiding the impeachment of this dubious theory, we must needs
+
+
+
+
+remark that the laws of Nature cannot so easily be outdistanced. However much
+true poesy may overtop the produce of the brain, it must still be affected by
+natural laws, which are universal and inevitable. Wherefore it is the various
+clearly defined natural forms through which the emotions seek expression.
+
+Indeed, we feel even unconsciously the fitness of certain types of metre for
+certain types of thought, and in perusing a crude or irregular poem are often
+abruptly repelled by the unwarranted variations made by the bard, either
+through his ignorance or his perverted taste. We are naturally shocked at the
+clothing of a grave subject in anapestic metre, or the treatment of a long and lofty
+theme in short, choppy lines. This latter defect is what repels us so much from
+Coninghton's really scholarly translation of the Aeneid.
+
+What the radicals so wantonly disregard in their eccentric performances is unity
+of thought. Amidst their wildly repeated leaps from one rough metre to another,
+they ignore the underlying uniformity of each of their poems. Scene may change;
+atmosphere may vary; yet one poem cannot carry but one definite message, and
+to suit this ultimate and fundamental message but one metre must be selected
+and sustained. To accommodate the minor inequalities of tone in a poem, one
+regular metre will amply lend itself to diversity. Our chief but now annoyingly
+neglected measure, the heroic couplet, is capable of taking on the infinite shades
+of expression by the right selection of sequence of words, and by the proper
+placing of the caesura or pause in each line. Dr. Blair, in his 38th lecture, explains
+and illustrates with admirable perspicuity the importance of the caesura's
+location in varying the flow of heroic verse. It is also possible to lend variety to a
+poem by using very judiciously occasional feet of a metre different from that of
+the body of the work. This is generally done without disturbing the
+syllabification, and it in no way impairs or obscures the dominant measure.
+
+Most amusing of all the claims of the radical is the assertion that true poetic
+fervor can never be confined to regular metre; that the wild-eyed, long-haired
+rider of Pegasus must inflict upon a suffering public in unaltered form the vague
+conceptions which flit in noble chaos through his exalted soul. While it is
+perfectly obvious that the hour of rare inspiration must be improved without the
+hindrance of grammars or rhyming dictionaries, it is no less obvious that the
+succeeding hour of calmer contemplation may very profitably be devoted to
+amendment and polishing. The "language of the heart" must be clarified and
+made intelligible to other hearts, else its purport will forever be confined to its
+creator. If natural laws of metrical construction be willfully set aside, the reader's
+attention will be distracted from the soul of the poem to its uncouth and ill-fitting
+dress. The more nearly perfect the metre, the less conspicuous its presence; hence
+if the poet desires supreme consideration for his matter, he should make his
+verses so smooth that the sense may never be interrupted.
+
+
+
+
+The ill effect of metrical laxity on the younger generation of poets is enormous.
+These latest suitors of the Muse, not yet sufficiently trained to distinguish
+between their own artless crudities and the cultivated monstrosities of the
+educated but radical bard, come to regard with distrust the orthodox critics, and
+to believe that no grammatical, rhetorical, or metrical skill is necessary to their
+own development. The result cannot but be a race of churlish, cacophonous
+hybrids, whose amorphous outcries will waver uncertainly betwixt prose and
+verse, absorbing the vices of both and the virtues of neither.
+
+When proper consideration shall be taken of the perfect naturalness of polished
+metre, a wholesome reaction against the present chaos must inevitably occur; so
+that the few remaining disciples of conservatism and good taste may justly
+entertain one last, lingering hope of hearing from modern lyres the stately
+heroics of Pope, the majestic blank verse of Thomson, the terse octosyllabics of
+Swift, the sonorous quatrains of Gray, and the lively anapests of Sheridan and
+Moore.
+
+
+
+
+The Allowable Rhyme
+
+"Sed ubi plira nitent in carmine, non ego paucis Offendar maculis." - Horace
+
+The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been
+divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of
+bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems
+to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad
+scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school
+constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period,
+demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists
+of the age of Pope.
+
+The rational contemporary disciple of the Nine, justly ignoring the dissonant
+shrieks of the radicals, is therefore confronted with a grave choice of technique.
+May he retain the liberties of imperfect or "allowable" rhyming which were
+enjoyed by his ancestors, or must he conform to the new ideals of perfection
+evolved during the past century? The writer of this article is frankly an archaist
+in verse. He has not scrupled to rhyme "toss'd" with "coast", "come" with
+"Rome", or "home" with "gloom" in his very latest published efforts, thereby
+proclaiming his maintenance of the old-fashioned pets as models; but sound
+modern criticism, proceeding from Mr. Rheinhart Kleiner and from other sources
+which must needs command respect, has impelled him there to rehearse the
+question for public benefit, and particularly to present his own side, attempting
+to justify his adherence to the style of two centuries ago.
+
+The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose
+agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere "assonance" rather than
+that of actual rhyme. Thus in the original ballad of "Chevy-Chase," we encounter
+"King" and "within" supposedly rhymed, whilst in the similar "Battle of
+Otterbourne" we behold "long" rhymed with "down," "ground" with
+"Agurstonne," and "name" with "again". In the ballad of "Sir Patrick Spense,"
+"morn" and "storm," and "deep" and "feet" are rhymed. But the infelicities were
+obviously the result not of artistic negligence, but of plebeian ignorance, since the
+old ballads were undoubtedly the careless products of a peasant minstrelsy. In
+Chaucer, a poet of the Court, the allowable rhyme is but infrequently discovered,
+hence we may assume that the original ideal in English verse was the perfect
+rhyming sound.
+
+Spenser uses allowable rhymes, giving in one of his characteristic stanzas the
+three distinct sounds of "Lord", "ador'd", and "word," all supposed to rhyme;
+but of his pronunciation we know little, and may justly guess that to the ears of
+
+
+
+
+his contemporaries the sounds were not conspicuously different. Ben Johnson's
+employment of imperfect rhyming was much like Spenser's; moderate, and
+partially to be excused on account of a chaotic pronunciation. The better poets of
+the Restoration were also sparing of allowable rhymes; Cowley, Waller, Marvell,
+and many others being quite regular in this respect.
+
+It was therefore upon a world unprepared that Samuel Butler burst forth with his
+immortal "Hudibras," whose comical familiarity of diction is in grotesqueness
+surpassed only by its clever licentiousness of rhyming. Butler's well-known
+double rhymes are of necessity forced and inexact, and in ordinary single rhymes
+he seems to have had no more regard for precision. "Vow'd" and "would,"
+"talisman" and "slain," "restores" and "devours" are a few specimens selected at
+random.
+
+Close after Butler came Jon Oldham, a satirist whose force and brilliance gained
+him universal praise, and whose enormous crudity both in rhyme and in metre
+was forgiven amidst the splendor of his attacks. Oldham was almost absolutely
+ungoverned by the demands of the ear, and perpetrated such atrocious rhymes
+as "heads" and "besides," "devise" and "this," "again" and "sin," "tool" and
+"foul," "end" and "design'd," and even "prays" and "cause."
+
+The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme
+than he did for metre. Though nowhere attaining the extravagances of his friend
+Oldham, he lent the sanction of his great authority to rhymes which Dr. Johnson
+admits are "open to objection." But one vast difference betwixt Dryden and his
+loose predecessors must be observed. Dryden had so far improved metrical
+cadence, that the final syllables of heroic couplets stood out in especial eminence,
+displaying and emphasizing every possible similarity of sound; that is, lending
+to sounds in the first place approximately similar, the added similarity caused by
+the new prominence of their perfectly corresponding positions in their respective
+lines.
+
+It were needless to dwell upon the rhetorical polish of the age immediately
+succeeding Dryden's. So far as English versification is concerned. Pope was the
+world, and all the world was Pope. Dryden had founded a new school of verse,
+but the development and ultimate perfections of this art remained for the sickly
+lad who before the age of twelve begged to be taken to Will's Coffee-House, that
+he might obtain a personal view of the aged Dryden, his idol and model.
+Delicately attuned to the subtlest harmonies of poetical construction, Alexander
+Pope brought English prosody to its zenith, and still stands alone on the heights,
+yet he, exquisite master of verse that he was, frowned not upon imperfect
+rhymes, provided they were set in faultless metre. Though most of his allowable
+rhymes are merely variations in the breadth and nature of vowel sounds, he in
+
+
+
+
+one instance departs far enough from rigid perfection to rhyme the words "vice"
+and "destroys." Yet who can take offence? The unvarying ebb and flow of the
+refined metrical impulse conceals and condones all else.
+
+Every argument by which English blank verse or Spanish assonant verse is
+sustained, may with greater force be applied to the allowable rhyme. Metre is the
+real essential of poetical technique, and when two sounds of substantial
+resemblance are so placed that one follows the other in a certain measured
+relation, the normal ear cannot without cavilling find fault with a slight want of
+identity in the respective dominant vowels. The rhyming of a long vowel with a
+short one is common in all the Georgian poets, and when well recited cannot but
+be overlooked amidst the general flow of the verse; as, for instance, the following
+from Pope:
+
+But thinks, admitted to that equal sky.
+
+His faithful dog shall bear him company.
+
+Of like nature is the rhyming of actually different vowels whose sounds are,
+when pronounced in animated oration, by no means dissimilar. Out of verse,
+such words as "join" and "line" are quite unlike, but Pope well rhymes them
+when he writes:
+
+While expletives their feeble aid do join,
+
+and ten low words oft creep in one dull line.
+
+It is the final consonantal sound in rhyming which can never vary. This, above all
+else, gives the desired similarity. Syllables which agree in vowels but not in the
+final consonants are not rhymes at all, but simply assonants. Yet such is the
+inconsistent carelessness of the average modern writer, that he often uses mere
+assonants to a greater extent than his fathers ever employed actually allowable
+rhymes. The writer, in his critical duties, has more than once been forced to point
+out the attempted rhyming of such words as "fame" and "lane," "task" and
+"glass," or "feels" and "yields" and in view of these impossible combinations he
+cannot blame himself very seriously for rhyming "art" and "shot" in the March
+Conservative; for this pair of words have at least identical consonants at the end.
+
+That allowable rhymes have real advantages of a positive sort is an opinion by
+no means lightly to be denied. The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be
+pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect successions of
+rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and
+Alexandrines. Another advantage is the greater latitude allowed for the
+expression of thought. How numerous are the writers who, from restriction to
+perfect rhyming, are frequently compelled to abandon a neat epigram, or
+
+
+
+
+brilliant antithesis, which allowable rhyme would easily permit, or else to
+introduce a dull expletive merely to supply a desired rhyme!
+
+But a return to historical considerations shows us only too clearly the logical
+trend of taste, and the reason Mr. Kleiner's demand for absolute perfection is no
+idle cry. In Oliver Goldsmith there arose one who, though retaining the familiar
+classical diction of Pope, yet advanced further still toward what he deemed ideal
+polish by virtually abandoning the allowable rhyme. In unvaried exactitude run
+the couplets of "The Traveler" and of "The Deserted Village," and none can deny
+to them a certain urbanity which pleases the critical ear. With but little less
+precision are molded the simple rhymes of Cowper, whilst the pompous
+Erasmus Darwin likewise shows more attention to identity of sound than do the
+Queen Anne Bards. Gifford's translations of Juvenal and Persius show to an
+almost equal degree the tendency of the age, and Campbell, Crabbe,
+Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, and Thomas Moore are all inclined to refrain from
+the liberties practiced by those of former times. To deny the importance of such a
+widespread change of technique is fruitless, for its existence argues for its
+naturalness. The best critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demand
+perfect rhyming, and no aspirant for fame can afford to depart from a standard
+so universal. It is evidently the true goal of the English, as well as of the French
+bard; the goal from which we are but temporarily deflected during the preceding
+age.
+
+But exceptions should and must be made in the case of a few who have somehow
+absorbed theatmosphere of other days, and who long in their hearts for the
+stately sound of the old classic cadences. Well may their predilection for
+imperfect rhyming be discouraged to a limited extent, but to chain them wholly
+to modern rules would be barbarous. Every limited mind demands a certain
+freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily
+without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago
+should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so
+harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of
+employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable
+rhyme.
+
+
+
+
+The Despised Pastoral
+
+
+
+Among the many and complex tendencies observable in modern poetry, or what
+answers for poetry in this age, is a decided but unjust scorn of the honest old
+pastoral, immortalised by Theocritus and Virgil, and revived in our own
+literature by Spencer.
+
+Nor is this unfavorable attitude confined alone to the formal eclogue whose
+classical elements are so well described and exemplified by Mr. Pope. Whenever
+a versifier adorns his song with the pleasing and innocent imagery of this type of
+composition, or borrows its mild and sweet atmosphere, he is forthwith
+condemned as an irresponsible pedant and fossil by every little-wit critic in
+Grub-street.
+
+Modern bards, in their endeavour to display with seriousness and minute
+verisimilitude the inward operations of the human mind and emotions, have
+come to look down upon the simple description of ideal beauty, or the
+straightforward presentation of pleasing images for no other purpose than to
+delight the fancy. Such themes they deem trivial and artificial, and altogether
+unworthy of an art whose design they take to be the analysis and reproduction of
+Nature in all her moods and aspects.
+
+But in this belief, the writer cannot but hold that our contemporaries are
+misjudging the true province and functions of poesy. It was no starched
+classicist, but the exceedingly unconventional Edgar Allen Poe, who roundly
+denounced the melancholy metaphysicians and maintained that true poetry has
+for its first object "pleasure, not truth", and "indefinite pleasure instead of
+definite pleasure," intimating that its concern for the dull or ugly aspects of life is
+slight ideed. That the American bard and critic was fundamentally just in his
+deductions, seems well proved by a comparative survey of those poems of all
+ages which have lived, and those which have fallen into deserved obscurity.
+
+The English pastoral, based upon the best models of antiquity, depicts engaging
+scenes of Arcadian simplicity, which not only transport the imagination through
+their intrinsic beauty, but recall to the scholarly mind the choicest remembrances
+of classical Greece and Rome. Though the combination of rural pursuits with
+polished sentiments and diction is patently artificial, the beauty is not a whit less;
+nor do the conventional names, phrases, and images detract in the least from the
+quaint agreeableness of the whole. The magic of this sort of verse is to any
+unprejudiced mind irresistible, and capable of evoking a more deliciously placid
+and refreshing train of pictures in the imagination than may be obtained from
+any more realistic species of composition. Every untainted fancy begets ideal
+
+
+
+
+visions of which the pastoral forms a legitimate and artistically necessary
+reflection.
+
+It is not impossible that the intellectual upheaval attendant upon the present
+conflict will bring about a general simplification and rectification of taste, and an
+appreciation of the value of pure imaginary beauty in a world so full of actual
+misery, which may combine to restore the despised pastoral to its proper station.
+
+
+
+
+POETRY
+
+
+
+An American to Mother England
+
+England! My England! can the surging sea
+
+That lies between us tear my heart from thee?
+
+Can distant birth and distant dwelling drain
+
+Th' ancestral blood that warms the loyal vein?
+
+Isle of my Fathers! hear the filial song
+
+Of him whose sources but to thee belong!
+
+World-Conquering Mother! by thy mighty hand
+
+Was carv'd from savage wilds my native land:
+
+Thy matchless sons the firm foundation laid;
+
+Thy matchless arts the nascent nation made:
+
+By thy just laws the young republic grew.
+
+And through thy greatness, kindred greatness knew.
+
+What man that springs from thy untainted line
+
+But sees Columbia's virtues all as thine?
+
+Whilst nameless multitudes upon our shore
+
+From the dim corners of creation pour.
+
+Whilst mongrel slaves crawl hither to partake
+
+Of Saxon liberty they could not make.
+
+From such an alien crew in grief I turn.
+
+And for the mother's voice of Britain burn.
+
+England! can aught remove the cherish'd chain
+
+That binds my spirit to thy blest domain?
+
+Can Revolution's bitter precepts sway
+
+The soul that must the ties of race obey?
+
+Create a new Columbia if ye will.
+
+The flesh that forms me is Britannic still!
+
+Hail! oaken shades, and meads of dewy green.
+
+So oft in sleep, yet ne'er in waking seen.
+
+Peal out, ye ancient chimes, from vine-clad tower
+
+Where pray'd my fathers in a vanish'd hour:
+
+What countless years of rev'rence can ye claim
+
+From bygone worshippers that bore my name!
+
+Their forms are crumbling in the vaults around.
+
+Whilst I, across the sea, but dreamthe sound.
+
+Return, Sweet Vision! Let me glimpse again
+
+
+
+
+The stone-built abbey, rising o'er the plain;
+
+The neighb'ring village with its sun-shower'd square;
+
+The shaded mill-stream, and the forest fair.
+
+The hedge-lin'd lane, that leads to rustic cot
+
+Where sweet contentment is the peasant's lot:
+
+The mystic grove, by Druid wraiths possess'd.
+
+The flow'ring fields, with fairy -castles blest:
+
+And the old manor-house, sedate and dark.
+
+Set in the shadows of the wooded park.
+
+Can this be dreaming? Must my eyelids close
+
+That I may catch the fragrance of the rose?
+
+Is it in fancy that the midnight vale
+
+Thrills with the warblings of the nightingale?
+
+A golden moon bewitching radiance yields.
+
+And England's fairies trip o'er England's fields.
+
+England! Old England! in my love for thee
+
+No dream is mine, but blessed memory;
+
+Such haunting images and hidden fires
+
+Course with the bounding blood of British sires:
+
+From British bodies, minds, and souls I come.
+
+And from them draw the vision of their home.
+
+Awake, Columbia! scorn the vulgar age
+That bids thee slight thy lordly heritage.
+Let not the wide Atlantic's wildest wave
+Burst the blest bonds that fav'ring Nature gave:
+Connecting surges 'twixt the nations run.
+Our Saxon souls dissolving into one!
+
+
+
+
+Astrophobos
+
+In the Midnight heaven's burning
+Through the ethereal deeps afar
+Once I watch'd with restless yearning
+An alluring aureate star;
+Ev'ry eve aloft returning
+Gleaming nigh the Arctic Car.
+
+Mystic waves of beauty blended
+With the gorgeous golden rays
+Phantasies of bliss descended
+In a myrrh'd Elysian haze.
+In the lyre-born chords extended
+Harmonies of Lydian lays.
+
+And (thought I) lies scenes of pleasure.
+Where the free and blessed dwell.
+And each moment bears a treasure.
+Freighted with the lotos-spell.
+And there floats a liquid measure
+From the lute of Israfel.
+
+There (I told myself) were shining
+Worlds of happiness unknown.
+Peace and Innocence entwining
+By the Crowned Virtue's throne;
+Men of light, their thoughts refining
+Purer, fairer, than my own.
+
+Thus I mus'd when o'er the vision
+Crept a red delirious change;
+Hope dissolving to derision.
+Beauty to distortion strange;
+Hymnic chords in weird collision.
+Spectral sights in endless range. ...
+Crimson burn'd the star of madness
+As behind the beams I peer'd;
+All was woe that seem'd but gladness
+Ere my gaze with Truth was sear'd;
+Cacodaemons, mir'd with madness.
+Through the fever'd flick'ring leer'd. ...
+
+
+
+
+Now I know the fiendish fable
+The the golden glitter bore;
+Now I shun the spangled sable
+That I watch'd and lov'd before;
+But the horror, set and stable.
+Haunts my soul forevermore!
+
+
+
+
+Christmas Blessings
+
+As when a pigeon, loos'd in realms remote.
+Takes instant wing, and seeks his native cote.
+So speed my blessings from a barb'rous clime
+To thee and Providence at Christmas time!
+
+
+
+
+Christmastide
+
+The cottage hearth beams warm and bright.
+The candles gaily glow;
+The stars emit a kinder light
+Above the drifted snow.
+
+Down from the sky a magic steals
+To glad the passing year.
+And belfries sing with joyous peals.
+For Christmastide is here!
+
+
+
+
+Despair
+
+February 1919
+
+O'er the midnight moorlands crying.
+Thro' the cypress forests sighing.
+In the night-wind madly flying.
+Hellish forms with streaming hair;
+In the barren branches creaking.
+By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking.
+Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking,
+Damn'd demons of despair.
+
+Once, I think I half remember.
+Ere the grey skies of November
+Quench'd my youth's aspiring ember,
+Liv'd there such a thing as bliss;
+Skies that now are dark were beaming.
+Bold and azure, splendid seeming
+Till I learn'd it all was dreaming —
+Deadly drowsiness of Dis.
+
+But the stream of Time, swift flowing.
+Brings the torment of half -knowing —
+Dimly rushing, blindly going
+Past the never-trodden lea;
+And the voyager, repining.
+Sees the wicked death-fires shining.
+Hears the wicked petrel's whining
+As he helpless drifts to sea.
+
+Evil wings in ether beating;
+Vultures at the spirit eating;
+Things unseen forever fleeting
+Black against the leering sky.
+Ghastly shades of bygone gladness.
+Clawing fiends of future sadness.
+Mingle in a cloud of madness
+Ever on the soul to lie.
+
+Thus the living, lone and sobbing.
+In the throes of anguish throbbing.
+
+
+
+
+With the loathsome Furies robbing
+Night and noon of peace and rest.
+But beyond the groans and grating
+Of abhorrent Life, is waiting
+Sweet Obhvion, culminating
+All the years of fruitless quest.
+
+
+
+
+Fact and Fancy
+
+
+
+How dull the wretch, whose philosophic mind
+
+Disdains the pleasures of fantastic kind;
+
+Whose prosy thoughts the joys of life exclude.
+
+And wreck the solace of the poet's mood!
+
+Young Zeno, practis'd in the Stoic's art.
+
+Rejects the language of the glowing heart;
+
+Dissolves sweet Nature to a mess of laws;
+
+Condemns th' effect whilst looking for the cause;
+
+Freezes poor Ovid in an iced review.
+
+And sneers because his fables are untrue!
+
+In search of hope the hopeful zealot goes.
+
+But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!
+
+Stay! Vandal sophist, whose deep lore would blast
+
+The grateful legends of the storied past;
+
+Whose tongue in censure flays th' embellish'd page.
+
+And scorns the comforts of a dreary age:
+
+Wouldst strip the foliage from the vital bough
+
+Till all men grow as wisely dull as thou?
+
+Happy the man whose fresh, untainted eye
+
+Discerns a Pantheon in the spangled sky;
+
+Finds sylphs and dryads in the waving trees.
+
+And spies soft Notus in the southern breeze
+
+For whom the stream a cheering carol sings.
+
+While reedy music by the fountain rings;
+
+To whom the waves a Nereid tale confide
+
+Till friendly presence fills the rising tide.
+
+Happy is he, who void of learning's woes,
+
+Th' ethereal life of bodied Nature knows;
+
+I scorn the sage that tells me it but seems.
+
+And flout his gravity in sunlight dreams!
+
+
+
+
+Festival
+
+
+
+Published December 1926 in Weird Tales
+
+There is snow on the ground.
+
+And the valleys are cold.
+
+And a midnight profound
+
+Blackly squats o'er the wold;
+
+But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of
+
+feastings unhallowed and old.
+
+There is death in the clouds.
+
+There is fear in the night.
+
+For the dead in their shrouds
+
+Hail the sun's turning flight.
+
+And chant wild in the woods as they dance
+
+round a Yule-altar fungous and white.
+
+To no gale of Earth's kind
+
+Sways the forest of oak.
+
+Where the thick boughs entwined
+
+By mad mistletoes choke.
+
+For these pow'rs are the pow'rs of the dark,
+
+from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.
+
+And mayst thou to such deeds
+Be an abbot and priest.
+Singing cannibal greeds
+At each devil-wrought feast.
+And to all the incredulous world
+shewing dimly the sign of the beast.
+
+(Originally a christmas poem sent to Farnsworth Wright, who surprised
+Lovecraft by publishing it as "Yule Horror.")
+
+
+
+
+Fungi from Yuggoth
+
+Written 1929-30
+
+I. The Book
+
+The place was dark and dusty and half-lost
+In tangles of old alleys near the quays.
+Reeking of strange things brought in from the seas.
+And with queer curls of fog that west winds tossed.
+Small lozenge panes, obscured by smoke and frost.
+Just shewed the books, in piles like twisted trees.
+Rotting from floor to roof - congeries
+Of crumbling elder lore at little cost.
+
+I entered, charmed, and from a cobw ebbed heap
+Took up the nearest tome and thumbed it through.
+Trembling at curious words that seemed to keep
+Some secret, monstrous if one only knew.
+Then, looking for some seller old in craft,
+I could find nothing but a voice that laughed.
+
+II. Pursuit
+
+I held the book beneath my coat, at pains
+To hide the thing from sight in such a place;
+Hurrying through the ancient harbor lanes
+With often-turning head and nervous pace.
+Dull, furtive windows in old tottering brick
+Peered at me oddly as I hastened by.
+And thinking what they sheltered, I grew sick
+For a redeeming glimpse of clean blue sky.
+
+No one had seen me take the thing - but still
+
+A blank laugh echoed in my whirling head.
+
+And I could guess what nighted worlds of ill
+
+Lurked in that volume I had coveted.
+
+The way grew strange - the walls alike and madding
+
+And far behind me, unseen feet were padding.
+
+
+
+
+III. The Key
+
+I do not know what windings in the waste
+
+Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more.
+
+But on my porch I trembled, white with haste
+
+To get inside and bolt the heavy door.
+
+I had the book that told the hidden way
+
+Across the void and through the space-hung screens
+
+That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay.
+
+And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.
+
+At last the key was mine to those vague visions
+Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood
+Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth's precisions.
+Lurking as memories of infinitude.
+The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling.
+The attic window shook with a faint fumbling.
+
+IV. Recognition
+
+The day had come again, when as a child
+I saw - just once - that hollow of old oaks.
+Grey with a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes
+The slinking shapes which madness has defiled.
+It was the same - an herbage rank and wild
+Clings round an altar whose carved sign invokes
+That Nameless One to whom a thousand smokes
+Rose, aeons gone, from unclean towers up-piled.
+
+I saw the body spread on that dank stone.
+
+And knew those things which feasted were not men;
+
+I knew this strange, grey world was not my own.
+
+But Yuggoth, past the starry voids - and then
+
+The body shrieked at me with a dead cry.
+
+And all too late I knew that it was I!
+
+V. Homecoming
+
+The daemon said that he would take me home
+To the pale, shadowy land I half recalled
+As a high place of stair and terrace, walled
+With marble balustrades that sky -winds comb.
+While miles below a maze of dome on dome
+
+
+
+
+And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.
+Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled
+On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.
+
+All this he promised, and through sunset's gate
+
+He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame.
+
+And red-gold thrones of gods without a name
+
+Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.
+
+Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:
+
+"Here was your home," he mocked, "when you had sight!'
+
+VI. The Lamp
+
+We found the lamp inside those hollow cliffs
+Whose chiseled sign no priest in Thebes could read.
+And from whose caverns frightened hieroglyphs
+Warned every living creature of earth's breed.
+No more was there - just that one brazen bowl
+With traces of a curious oil within;
+Fretted with some obscurely patterned scroll.
+And symbols hinting vaguely of strange sin.
+
+Little the fears of forty centuries meant
+
+To us as we bore off our slender spoil.
+
+And when we scanned it in our darkened tent
+
+We struck a match to test the ancient oil.
+
+It blazed - great God!. . . But the vast shapes we saw
+
+In that mad flash have seared our lives with awe.
+
+VII. Zaman's Hill
+
+The great hill hung close over the old town,
+
+A precipice against the main street's end;
+
+Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down
+
+Upon the steeple at the highway bend.
+
+Two hundred years the whispers had been heard
+
+About what happened on the man-shunned slope -
+
+Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird.
+
+Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.
+
+One day the mail-man found no village there.
+Nor were its folk or houses seen again;
+People came out from Aylesbury to stare -
+
+
+
+
+Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain
+
+That he was mad for saying he had spied
+
+The great hill's gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide.
+
+VIII. The Port
+
+Ten miles from Arkham I had struck the trail
+That rides the cliff-edge over Boynton Beach,
+And hoped that just at sunset I could reach
+The crest that looks on Innsmouth in the vale.
+Far out at sea was a retreating sail.
+White as hard years of ancient winds could bleach.
+But evil with some portent beyond speech.
+So that I did not wave my hand or hail.
+
+Sails out of Innsmouth! echoing old renown
+
+Of long-dead times. But now a too-swift night
+
+Is closing in, and I have reached the height
+
+Whence I so often scan the distant town.
+
+The spires and roofs are there - but look! The gloom
+
+Sinks on dark lanes, as lightless as the tomb!
+
+IX. The Courtyard
+
+It was the city I had known before;
+The ancient, leprous town where mongrel throngs
+Chant to strange gods, and beat unhallowed gongs
+In crypts beneath foul alleys near the shore.
+The rotting, fish-eyed houses leered at me
+From where they leaned, drunk and half-animate.
+As edging through the filth I passed the gate
+To the black courtyard where the man would be.
+
+The dark walls closed me in, and loud I cursed
+That ever I had come to such a den.
+When suddenly a score of windows burst
+Into wild light, and swarmed with dancing men:
+Mad, soundless revels of the dragging dead -
+And not a corpse had either hands or head!
+
+
+
+
+X. The Pigeon-Flyers
+
+They took me slumming, where gaunt walls of brick
+
+Bulge outward with a viscous stored-up evil.
+
+And twisted faces, thronging foul and thick.
+
+Wink messages to alien god and devil.
+
+A million fires were blazing in the streets.
+
+And from flat roofs a furtive few would fly
+
+Bedraggled birds into the yawning sky
+
+While hidden drums droned on with measured beats.
+
+I knew those fires were brewing monstrous things.
+And that those birds of space had been Outside -
+I guessed to what dark planet's crypts they plied.
+And what they brought from Thog beneath their wings.
+The others laughed - till struck too mute to speak
+By what they glimpsed in one bird's evil beak.
+
+XL The Well
+
+Farmer Seth Atwood was past eighty when
+He tried to sink that deep well by his door.
+With only Eb to help him bore and bore.
+We laughed, and hoped he'd soon be sane again.
+And yet, instead, young Eb went crazy, too.
+So that they shipped him to the county farm.
+Seth bricked the well-mouth up as tight as glue -
+Then hacked an artery in his gnarled left arm.
+
+After the funeral we felt bound to get
+Out to that well and rip the bricks away.
+But all we saw were iron hand-holds set
+Down a black hole deeper than we could say.
+And yet we put the bricks back - for we found
+The hole too deep for any line to sound.
+
+XII. The Howler
+
+They told me not to take the Briggs' Hill path
+That used to be the highroad through to Zoar,
+For Goody Watkins, hanged in seventeen-four.
+Had left a certain monstrous aftermath.
+Yet when I disobeyed, and had in view
+
+
+
+
+The vine-hung cottage by the great rock slope,
+
+I could not think of elms or hempen rope.
+
+But wondered why the house still seemed so new.
+
+Stopping a while to watch the fading day,
+I heard faint howls, as from a room upstairs.
+When through the ivied panes one sunset ray
+Struck in, and caught the howler unawares.
+I glimpsed - and ran in frenzy from the place.
+And from a four-pawed thing with human face.
+
+XIII. Hesperia
+
+The winter sunset, flaming beyond spires
+And chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere.
+Opens great gates to some forgotten year
+Of elder splendours and divine desires.
+Expectant wonders burn in those rich fires.
+Adventure-fraught, and not untinged with fear;
+A row of sphinxes where the way leads clear
+Toward walls and turrets quivering to far lyres.
+
+It is the land where beauty's meaning flowers;
+Where every unplaced memory has a source;
+Where the great river Time begins its course
+Down the vast void in starlit streams of hours.
+Dreams bring us close - but ancient lore repeats
+That human tread has never soiled these streets.
+
+XIV. Star-Winds
+
+It is a certain hour of twilight glooms.
+Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours
+Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors.
+But shewing early lamplight from snug rooms.
+The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists.
+And chimney-smoke whirls round with alien grace.
+Heeding geometries of outer space.
+While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.
+
+This is the hour when moonstruck poets know
+What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
+And tints of flowers fill Nithon's continents.
+
+
+
+
+Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.
+Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,
+A dozen more of ours they sweep away!
+
+XV. Antarktos
+
+Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
+Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
+Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly.
+By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
+Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses.
+And only pale auroras and faint suns
+Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
+Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.
+
+If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
+What tricky mound of Nature's build they spied;
+But the bird told of vaster parts, that under
+The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
+God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
+Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!
+
+XVI. The Window
+
+The house was old, with tangled wings outthrown.
+Of which no one could ever half keep track.
+And in a small room somewhat near the back
+Was an odd window sealed with ancient stone.
+There, in a dream-plagued childhood, quite alone
+I used to go, where night reigned vague and black;
+Parting the cobwebs with a curious lack
+Of fear, and with a wonder each time grown.
+
+One later day I brought the masons there
+
+To find what view my dim forbears had shunned.
+
+But as they pierced the stone, a rush of air
+
+Burst from the alien voids that yawned beyond.
+
+They fled - but I peered through and found unrolled
+
+All the wild worlds of which my dreams had told.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. A Memory
+
+There were great steppes, and rocky table-lands
+Stretching half-limitless in starlit night.
+With alien campfires shedding feeble light
+On beasts with tinkling bells, in shaggy bands.
+Far to the south the plain sloped low and wide
+To a dark zigzag line of wall that lay
+Like a huge python of some primal day
+Which endless time had chilled and petrified.
+
+I shivered oddly in the cold, thin air.
+
+And wondered where I was and how I came.
+
+When a cloaked form against a campfire's glare
+
+Rose and approached, and called me by my name.
+
+Staring at that dead face beneath the hood,
+
+I ceased to hope - because I understood.
+
+XVIII. The Gardens of Yin
+
+Beyond that wall, whose ancient masonry
+Reached almost to the sky in moss-thick towers.
+There would be terraced gardens, rich with flowers.
+And flutter of bird and butterfly and bee.
+There would be walks, and bridges arching over
+Warm lotos-pools reflecting temple eaves.
+And cherry-trees with delicate boughs and leaves
+Against a pink sky where the herons hover.
+
+All would be there, for had not old dreams flung
+Open the gate to that stone-lanterned maze
+Where drowsy streams spin out their winding ways.
+Trailed by green vines from bending branches hung?
+I hurried - but when the wall rose, grim and great,
+I found there was no longer any gate.
+
+XIX. The Bells
+
+Year after year I heard that faint, far ringing
+Of deep-toned bells on the black midnight wind;
+Peals from no steeple I could ever find.
+But strange, as if across some great void winging.
+I searched my dreams and memories for a clue.
+
+
+
+
+And thought of all the chimes my visions carried;
+Of quiet Innsmouth, where the white gulls tarried
+Around an ancient spire that once I knew.
+
+Always perplexed I heard those far notes falling.
+Till one March night the bleak rain splashing cold
+Beckoned me back through gateways of recalling
+To elder towers where the mad clappers tolled.
+They tolled - but from the sunless tides that pour
+Through sunken valleys on the sea's dead floor.
+
+XX. Night-Gaunts
+
+Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell.
+
+But every night I see the rubbery things.
+
+Black, horned, and slender, with membraneous wings.
+
+And tails that bear the bifid barb of hell.
+
+They come in legions on the north wind's swell.
+
+With obscene clutch that titillates and stings.
+
+Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
+
+To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare's well.
+
+Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep.
+
+Heedless of all the cries I try to make.
+
+And down the nether pits to that foul lake
+
+Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
+
+But oh! If only they would make some sound.
+
+Or wear a face where faces should be found!
+
+XXL Nyarlathotep
+
+And at the last from inner Egypt came
+The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
+Silent and lean and cryptically proud.
+And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
+Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands.
+But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
+While through the nations spread the awestruck word
+That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.
+
+Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
+Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
+The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
+
+
+
+
+Down on the quaking citadels of man.
+
+Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play.
+
+The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away.
+
+XXII. Azathoth
+
+Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me.
+
+Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space.
+
+Till neither time nor matter stretched before me.
+
+But only Chaos, without form or place.
+
+Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
+
+Things he had dreamed but could not understand.
+
+While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
+
+In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.
+
+They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
+Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw.
+Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
+Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
+"I am His Messenger," the daemon said.
+As in contempt he struck his Master's head.
+
+XXIII. Mirage
+
+I do not know if ever it existed -
+
+That lost world floating dimly on Time's stream -
+
+And yet I see it often, violet-misted.
+
+And shimmering at the back of some vague dream.
+
+There were strange towers and curious lapping rivers.
+
+Labyrinths of wonder, and low vaults of light.
+
+And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
+
+Wistfully just before a winter's night.
+
+Great moors led off to sedgy shores unpeopled.
+Where vast birds wheeled, while on a windswept hill
+There was a village, ancient and white-steepled.
+With evening chimes for which I listen still.
+I do not know what land it is - or dare
+Ask when or why I was, or will be, there.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV. The Canal
+
+Somewhere in dream there is an evil place
+Where tall, deserted buildings crowd along
+A deep, black, narrow channel, reeking strong
+Of frightful things whence oily currents race.
+Lanes with old walls half meeting overhead
+Wind off to streets one may or may not know.
+And feeble moonlight sheds a spectral glow
+Over long rows of windows, dark and dead.
+
+There are no footfalls, and the one soft sound
+
+Is of the oily water as it glides
+
+Under stone bridges, and along the sides
+
+Of its deep flume, to some vague ocean bound.
+
+None lives to tell when that stream washed away
+
+Its dream-lost region from the world of clay.
+
+XXV. St. Toad's
+
+"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" I heard him scream
+
+As I plunged into those mad lanes that wind
+
+In labyrinths obscure and undefined
+
+South of the river where old centuries dream.
+
+He was a furtive figure, bent and ragged.
+
+And in a flash had staggered out of sight.
+
+So still I burrowed onward in the night
+
+Toward where more roof-lines rose, malign and jagged.
+
+No guide-book told of what was lurking here -
+
+But now I heard another old man shriek:
+
+"Beware St.Toad's cracked chimes!" And growing weak,
+
+I paused, when a third greybeard croaked in fear:
+
+"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" Aghast, I fled -
+
+Till suddenly that black spire loomed ahead.
+
+XXVI. The Familiars
+
+John Whateley lived about a mile from town.
+Up where the hills begin to huddle thick;
+We never thought his wits were very quick.
+Seeing the way he let his farm run down.
+He used to waste his time on some queer books
+
+
+
+
+He'd found around the attic of his place.
+Till funny lines got creased into his face.
+And folks all said they didn't like his looks.
+
+When he began those night-howls we declared
+He'd better be locked up away from harm.
+So three men from the Aylesbury town farm
+Went for him - but came back alone and scared.
+They'd found him talking to two crouching things
+That at their step flew off on great black wings.
+
+XXVII. The Elder Pharos
+
+From Leng, where rocky peaks climb bleak and bare
+
+Under cold stars obscure to human sight.
+
+There shoots at dusk a single beam of light
+
+Whose far blue rays make shepherds whine in prayer.
+
+They say (though none has been there) that it comes
+
+Out of a pharos in a tower of stone.
+
+Where the last Elder One lives on alone.
+
+Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums.
+
+The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask
+Of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide
+A face not of this earth, though none dares ask
+Just what those features are, which bulge inside.
+Many, in man's first youth, sought out that glow.
+But what they found, no one will ever know.
+
+XXVIII. Expectancy
+
+I cannot tell why some things hold for me
+A sense of unplumbed marvels to befall.
+Or of a rift in the horizon's wall
+Opening to worlds where only gods can be.
+There is a breathless, vague expectancy.
+As of vast ancient pomps I half recall.
+Or wild adventures, uncorporeal.
+Ecstasy-fraught, and as a day-dream free.
+
+It is in sunsets and strange city spires.
+
+Old villages and woods and misty downs.
+
+South winds, the sea, low hills, and lighted towns.
+
+
+
+
+Old gardens, half-heard songs, and the moon's fires.
+But though its lure alone makes life worth living.
+None gains or guesses what it hints at giving.
+
+XXIX. Nostalgia
+
+Once every year, in autumn's wistful glow.
+
+The birds fly out over an ocean waste.
+
+Calling and chattering in a joyous haste
+
+To reach some land their inner memories know.
+
+Great terraced gardens where bright blossoms blow.
+
+And lines of mangoes luscious to the taste.
+
+And temple-groves with branches interlaced
+
+Over cool paths - all these their vague dreams shew.
+
+They search the sea for marks of their old shore -
+For the tall city, white and turreted -
+But only empty waters stretch ahead.
+So that at last they turn away once more.
+Yet sunken deep where alien polyps throng.
+The old towers miss their lost, remembered song.
+
+XXX. Background
+
+I never can be tied to raw, new things.
+
+For I first saw the light in an old town.
+
+Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
+
+To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.
+
+Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
+
+Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes.
+
+And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes -
+
+These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.
+
+Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven.
+Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths
+That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths
+Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.
+They cut the moment's thongs and leave me free
+To stand alone before eternity.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI. The Dweller
+
+It had been old when Babylon was new;
+None knows how long it slept beneath that mound.
+Where in the end our questing shovels found
+Its granite blocks and brought it back to view.
+There were vast pavements and foundation-walls.
+And crumbling slabs and statues, carved to shew
+Fantastic beings of some long ago
+Past anything the world of man recalls.
+
+And then we saw those stone steps leading down
+Through a choked gate of graven dolomite
+To some black haven of eternal night
+Where elder signs and primal secrets frown.
+We cleared a path - but raced in mad retreat
+When from below we heard those clumping feet.
+
+XXXII. Alienation
+
+His solid flesh had never been away.
+
+For each dawn found him in his usual place.
+
+But every night his spirit loved to race
+
+Through gulfs and worlds remote from common day.
+
+He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind.
+
+And come back safely from the Ghooric zone.
+
+When one still night across curved space was thrown
+
+That beckoning piping from the voids behind.
+
+He waked that morning as an older man.
+And nothing since has looked the same to him.
+Objects around float nebulous and dim -
+False, phantom trifles of some vaster plan.
+His folk and friends are now an alien throng
+To which he struggles vainly to belong.
+
+XXXIII. Harbour Whistles
+
+Over old roofs and past decaying spires
+The harbour whistles chant all through the night;
+Throats from strange ports, and beaches far and white.
+And fabulous oceans, ranged in motley choirs.
+Each to the other alien and unknown.
+
+
+
+
+Yet all, by some obscurely focussed force
+
+From brooding gulfs beyond the Zodiac's course.
+
+Fused into one mysterious cosmic drone.
+
+Through shadowy dreams they send a marching line
+
+Of still more shadowy shapes and hints and views;
+
+Echoes from outer voids, and subtle clues
+
+To things which they themselves cannot define.
+
+And always in that chorus, faintly blent.
+
+We catch some notes no earth-ship ever sent.
+
+XXXIV. Recapture
+
+The way led down a dark, half-wooded heath
+
+Where moss-grey boulders humped above the mould.
+
+And curious drops, disquieting and cold.
+
+Sprayed up from unseen streams in gulfs beneath.
+
+There was no wind, nor any trace of sound
+
+In puzzling shrub, or alien-featured tree.
+
+Nor any view before - till suddenly.
+
+Straight in my path, I saw a monstrous mound.
+
+Half to the sky those steep sides loomed upspread.
+
+Rank-grassed, and cluttered by a crumbling flight
+
+Of lava stairs that scaled the fear-topped height
+
+In steps too vast for any human tread.
+
+I shrieked - and knew what primal star and year
+
+Had sucked me back from man's dream-transient sphere!
+
+XXXV. Evening Star
+
+I saw it from that hidden, silent place
+Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.
+It shone through all the sunset's glories - thin
+At first, but with a slowly brightening face.
+Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued.
+Beat on my sight as never it did of old;
+The evening star - but grown a thousandfold
+More haunting in this hush and solitude.
+
+It traced strange pictures on the quivering air -
+Half-memories that had always filled my eyes -
+Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies
+
+
+
+
+Of some dim life - 1 never could tell where.
+But now I knew that through the cosmic dome
+Those rays were calling from my far, lost home.
+
+XXXVI. Continuity
+
+There is in certain ancient things a trace
+
+Of some dim essence - more than form or weight;
+
+A tenuous aether, indeterminate.
+
+Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
+
+A faint, veiled sign of continuities
+
+That outward eyes can never quite descry;
+
+Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by.
+
+And out of reach except for hidden keys.
+
+It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
+
+On old farm buildings set against a hill.
+
+And paint with life the shapes which linger still
+
+From centuries less a dream than this we know.
+
+In that strange light I feel I am not far
+
+From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.
+
+
+
+
+Good Saint Nick
+
+May good St. Nick, like as a bird of night.
+Bring thee rich blessings in his annual flight;
+Long by thy chimney rest his pond'rous pack.
+And leave with lessen'd weight upon his back!
+
+
+
+
+Hallowe'^en in a Suburb
+
+The steeples are white in the wild moonlight.
+
+And the trees have a silver glare;
+
+Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly.
+
+And the harpies of upper air.
+
+That flutter and laugh and stare.
+
+For the village dead to the moon outspread
+
+Never shone in the sunset's gleam.
+
+But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
+
+Where the rivers of madness stream
+
+Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.
+
+A chill wind blows through the rows of sheaves
+
+In the meadows that shimmer pale.
+
+And comes to twine where the headstones shine
+
+And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
+
+For harvests that fly and fail.
+
+Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
+
+That tore from the past its own
+
+Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power
+
+Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne.
+
+And looses the vast unknown.
+
+So here again stretch the vale and plain
+That moons long-forgotten saw.
+And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray.
+Sprung out of the tomb's black maw
+To shake all the world with awe.
+
+And all that the morn shall greet forlorn.
+
+The ugliness and the pest
+
+Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick.
+
+Shall some day be with the rest.
+
+And brood with the shades unblest.
+
+Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark.
+And the leprous spires ascend;
+For new and old alike in the fold
+
+
+
+
+Of horror and death are penned.
+For the hounds of Time to rend.
+
+
+
+
+Laeta; A Lament
+
+How sad droop the willows by Zalal's fair side.
+Where so lately I stray'd with my raven-hair'd bride;
+Ev'ry light-floating lily, each flow'r on the shore.
+Folds in sorrow since Laeta can see them no more!
+
+Oh blest were the days when in childhood and hope
+With my Laeta I rov'd o'er the blossom-clad slope.
+Plucking white meadow-daisies and ferns by the stream.
+As we laugh'd at the ripples that twinkle and gleam.
+
+Not a bloom deck'd the mead that could rival in grace
+The dear innocent charms of my Laeta's fair face;
+Not a thrush thrill'd the grove with a carol so choice
+As the silvery strains of my Laeta's sweet voice.
+
+The shy nymphs of the woodlands, the fount, and the plain.
+Strove to equal her beauty, but strove all in vain;
+Yet no envy they bore her, while fruitless they strove.
+For so pure was my Laeta, they could only love!
+
+When the warm breath of Auster play'd soft o'er the flow'rs.
+And young Zephyrus rustled the gay scented bow'rs,
+Ev'ry breeze seem'd to pause as it drew near the fair.
+Too much aw'd at her sweetness to tumble her hair.
+
+How fond were our dreams on the day when we stood
+In the ivy-grown temple beside the dark wood;
+When our pledges we seal'd at the sanctify'd shrine.
+And I knew that my Laeta forever was mine!
+
+How blissful our thoughts when the wild autumn came.
+And the forests with scarlet and gold were aflame;
+Yet how heavy my heart when I first felt the fear
+That my starry-eyed Laeta would fade with the year!
+
+The pastures were sere and the heavens were grey
+When I laid my lov'd Laeta forever away.
+And the river god pity'd, as weeping I pac'd
+Mingling hot bitter tears with his cold frozen waste.
+
+
+
+
+Now the flow'rs have return' d, but they bloom not so sweet
+As in days when they blossom'd round Laeta's dear feet;
+And the willows complain to the answering hill.
+And the thrushes that once were so happy are still.
+
+The green meadows and groves in their loneliness pine.
+Whilst the dryads no more in their madrigals join.
+The breeze once so joyous now murmurs and sighs.
+And blows soft o'er the spot where my lov'd Laeta lies.
+
+So pensive I roam o'er the desolate lawn
+Where we wander'd and lov'd in the days that are gone.
+And I yearn for the autumn, when Zalal's blue tide
+Shall sing low by my grave and the lov'd Laeta's side.
+
+
+
+
+Lines on General Robert Edward Lee
+
+Si veris magna paratur
+
+Fama bonis, et se successu nuda remoto
+
+Inspicitur virtus, quicquid laudamus in ullo
+
+Majorum, ortuna fuit.
+
+- Lucan
+
+Whilst martial echoes o'er the wave resound.
+And Europe's gore incarnadines the ground;
+Today no foreign hero we bemoan.
+But count the glowing virtues of our own!
+illustrious LEE! around whose honour'd name
+Entwines a patriot's and a Christian's fame;
+With whose just praise admiring nations ring.
+And whom repenting foes contritely sing!
+When first our land fraternal fury bore.
+And Sumter's guns alarm'd the anxious shore;
+When Faction's reign ancestral rights o'erthrew.
+And sunder'd States a mutual hatred knew;
+Then clash'd contending chiefs of kindred line.
+In flesh to suffer and in fame to shine.
+But o'er them all, majestic in his might.
+Rose LEE, unrivall'd, to sublimest height:
+With torturing choice defy'd opposing Fate,
+And shunn'd Temptation for his native State!
+Thus Washington his monarch's rule o'erturned
+When young Columbia with rebellion burn'd.
+And what in Washington the world reveres.
+In LEE with equal magnitude appears.
+Our nation's Father, crown'd with vict'ry bays.
+Enjoys a loving land's eternal praise:
+Let, then, our hearts with equal rev'rence greet
+His proud successor, rising o'er defeat!
+Around his greatness pour disheart'ning woes.
+But still he tow'rs above his conquering foes.
+Silence! ye jackal herd that vainly blame
+Th' unspotted leader by a traitor's name.
+If such was LEE, let blushing Justice mourn.
+And trait'rous Liberty endure our scorn!
+As Philopoemen once sublimely strove.
+And earn'd declining Hellas' thankful love;
+
+
+
+
+So followed LEE the purest patriot's part.
+
+And wak'd the worship of the grateful heart:
+
+The South her soul in body'd form discerns;
+
+The North from LEE a nobler freedom learns!
+
+Attend! ye sons of Albion's ancient race,
+
+Whate'er your country, and whate'er your place;
+
+LEE'S valiant deeds, though dear to Southern song.
+
+To all our Saxon strain as well belong.
+
+Courage like his the parent Island won.
+
+And led an Empire past the setting sun;
+
+To realms unknown our laws and language bore,
+
+Rais'd England's banner on the desert shore;
+
+Crush'd the proud rival, and subdued the sea
+
+For ages past, and aeons yet to be!
+
+From Scotia's hilly bounds the paean rolls.
+
+And Afric's distant Cape great LEE extols;
+
+The sainted soul and manly mien combine
+
+To grace Britannia's and Virginia's line
+
+As dullards now in thoughtless fervour prate
+
+Of shameful peace, and sing th' unmanly State;
+
+As churls their piping reprobations shriek.
+
+And damn the heroes that protect the weak;
+
+Let LEE'S brave shade the timid throng accost.
+
+And give them back the manhood they have lost!
+
+What kindlier spirit, breathing from on high.
+
+Can teach us how to live and how to die?
+
+
+
+
+Little Tiger
+
+Little Tiger, burning bright
+With a subtle Blakeish Hght,
+Tell what visions have their home
+In those eyes of flame and chrome!
+Children vex thee - thoughtless, gay
+Holding when thou wouldst away:
+What dark lore is that which thou.
+Spitting, mixest with thy meow?
+
+
+
+
+Nathicana
+
+(cowritten with Alfred Galpin)
+
+It was in the pale garden of Zais;
+
+The mist-shrouded gardens of Zais,
+
+Where blossoms the white naphalot.
+
+The redolent herald of midnight.
+
+There slumber the still lakes of crystal.
+
+And streamlets that flow without murm'ring;
+
+Smooth streamlets from caverns of Kathos
+
+Where broodth the calm spirits of twilight.
+
+And over the lakes and the streamlets
+
+Are bridges of pure alabaster.
+
+White bridges all cunningly carven
+
+With figures of fairies and daemons.
+
+Here glimmer strange suns and strange planets.
+
+And strange is the crescent Bnapis
+
+That sets 'yong the ivy-grown ramparts
+
+Where thicken the dusk of the evening.
+
+Here fall the white vapours of Yabon;
+
+And here in the swirl of vapours
+
+I saw the divine Nathicana;
+
+The garlanded, white Nathicana;
+
+The slow -eyed, red-lipped Nathicana;
+
+The silver-voiced, sweet Nathicana;
+
+The pale-rob'd, belov'd Nathicana.
+
+And ever was she my beloved.
+
+From ages when time was unfashioned
+
+Now anything fashion'd but Yabon.
+
+And here dwelt we ever and ever.
+
+The innocent children of Zais,
+
+At peace in the paths and the arbours.
+
+White-crowned with the blest nephalote.
+
+How oft would we float in the twilight
+
+O'er flow'r-cover'd pastures and hillsides
+
+All white with the lowly astalthon;
+
+The lowly yet lovely astalthon.
+
+And dream in a world made of dreaming
+
+The dreams that are fairer than Aidenn;
+
+Bright dreams that are truer than reason!
+
+So dreamed and so lov'd we thro' ages.
+
+
+
+
+Till came the cursed season of Dzannin;
+
+The daemon-damn'd season of Dzannin;
+
+When red shone the suns and the planets.
+
+And red learned the crescent Banapis,
+
+And red fell the vapours of Yabon.
+
+Then redden'd the blossoms and streamlets
+
+And lakes that lay under the bridges.
+
+And even the calm alabaster
+
+glowed pink with uncanny reflections
+
+Till all the carv'd fairies and daemons
+
+Leer'd redly from the backgrounds of shadow.
+
+Now redden'd my vision, and madly
+
+I strove to peer thro' the dense curtain
+
+And glimpsed the divine Nathicana;
+
+The pure, ever-pale Nathicana;
+
+The lov'd, the unchang'd Nathicana.
+
+But vortex on vortex of madness
+
+Beclouded my labouring vision;
+
+My damnable, reddening vision
+
+That built a new world for my seeing;
+
+Anew world of redness and darkness,
+
+A horrible coma call'd living
+
+So now in this come call'd living
+
+I view the bright phantons of beauty;
+
+The false hollow phantoms of beauty
+
+That cloak all the evils of Dzannin.
+
+I view them with infinite longing.
+
+So like do they seem to my lov'd one:
+
+Yet foul for their eyes shines their evil;
+
+Their cruel and pitilessevil.
+
+More evil than Thaphron and Latgoz,
+
+Twice ill fro its gorgeous concealment.
+
+And only in slumbers of midnight
+
+Appears the lost maid Nathicana,
+
+The pallid, the pure Nathicana
+
+Who fades at the glance of the dreamer.
+
+Again and again do I seek her;
+
+I woo with deep draughts of Plathotis,
+
+Deep draughts brew'd in wine of Astarte
+
+And strengthen'd with tears of long weeping.
+
+I yearn for the gardens of Zais;
+
+The lovely, lost garden of Zais
+
+Where blossoms the white nephalot.
+
+
+
+
+The redolent herald of midnight.
+The last potent draught am I brewing;
+A draught that the daemons delight ih;
+A drught that will banish the redness;
+The horrible coma call'd living.
+Soon, soon, if I fail not in brewing.
+The redness and madness will vanish.
+And deep in the worm-people'd darkness
+Will rot the base chains that hav bound me.
+Once more shall the gardens of Zais
+Dawn white on my long-tortur'd vision,
+Andthere midst the vapours of Yabon
+Will stand the divine Nathicana;
+The deathless, restor'd Nathicana
+whose like is not met with in living.
+
+(In a letter to Donald Wandrei written August 2, 1927, Lovecraft said that this
+
+poem was supposed to be a
+
+"parody on those stylistic excesses which really have no basic meaning". In his
+
+response ten days later,
+
+Wandrei said "It is a rare and curious kind of literary freak, a satire too good, so
+
+that, instead of
+
+parodying, it possesses, the original." )
+
+
+
+
+Nemesis
+
+Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber.
+
+Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
+
+I have lived o'er my lives without number,
+
+I have sounded all things with my sight;
+
+And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
+
+I have whirled with the earth at the dawning.
+
+When the sky was a vaporous flame;
+
+I have seen the dark universe yawning
+
+Where the black planets roll without aim.
+
+Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
+
+I had drifted o'er seas without ending.
+
+Under sinister grey -clouded skies.
+
+That the many -forked lightning is rending.
+
+That resound with hysterical cries;
+
+With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.
+
+I have plunged like a deer through the arches
+
+Of the hoary primoridal grove.
+
+Where the oaks feel the presence that marches.
+
+And stalks on where no spirit dares rove.
+
+And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches
+
+above.
+
+I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
+
+That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
+
+I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
+
+That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
+
+And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.
+
+I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
+
+I have trod its untenanted hall.
+
+Where the moon rising up from the valleys
+
+Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
+
+Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.
+
+I have peered from the casements in wonder
+At the mouldering meadows around.
+At the many-roofed village laid under
+
+
+
+
+The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
+
+And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.
+
+I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
+
+I have flown on the pinions of fear.
+
+Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
+
+Where the jokulls loom snow -clad and drear:
+
+And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.
+
+I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
+
+The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
+
+I was old in those epochs uncounted
+
+When I, and I only, was vile;
+
+And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.
+
+Oh, great was the sin of my spirit.
+
+And great is the reach of its doom;
+
+Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it.
+
+Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
+
+Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.
+
+Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber.
+
+Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
+
+I have lived o'er my lives without number,
+
+I have sounded all things with my sight;
+
+And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
+
+
+
+
+Ode for July Fourth, 1917
+
+As Columbia's brave scions, in anger array'd.
+
+Once defy'd a proud monarch and built a new nation;
+
+'Gainst their brothers of Britain unsheath'd the sharp blade
+
+That hath ne'er met defeat nor endur'd desecration;
+
+So must we in this hour
+
+Show our valour and pow'r.
+
+And dispel the black perils that over us low'r:
+
+Whilst the sons of Britannia, no longer our foes.
+
+Will rejoice in our triumphs and strengthen our blows!
+
+See the banners of Liberty float in the breeze
+
+That plays light o'er the regions our fathers defended;
+
+Hear the voice of the million resound o'er the leas.
+
+As deeds of the past are proclaim'd and commended;
+
+And in splendour on high
+
+Where our flags proudly fly.
+
+See the folds we tore down flung again to the sky:
+
+For the Emblem of England, in kinship unfurl'd.
+
+Shall divide with Old Glory the praise of the world!
+
+Bury'd now are the hatreds of subject and King,
+
+And the strife that once sunder'd an Empire hath vanish'd.
+
+With the fame of the Saxon the heavens shall ring
+
+As the vultures of darkness are baffled and banish' d;
+
+And the broad British sea.
+
+Of her enemies free.
+
+Shall in tribute bow gladly, Columbia to thee:
+
+For the friends of the Right, in the field side by side.
+
+Form a fabric of Freedom no hand can divide!
+
+
+
+
+On Reading Lord Dunsany's Book of
+Wonder
+
+
+
+The hours of night unheeded fly.
+And in the grate the embers fade;
+Vast shadows one by one pass by
+In silent daemon cavalcade.
+
+But still the magic volume holds
+The raptur'd eye in realms apart.
+And fulgent sorcery enfolds
+The willing mind and eager heart.
+
+The lonely room no more is there -
+For to the sight in pomp appear
+Temples and cities pois'd in air
+And blazing glories - sphere on sphere.
+
+
+
+
+On Receiving a Picture of Swans
+
+"Impromtu verse, or 'poetry' to order, is easy only when approached in the cooly
+
+prosaic sprit. Given
+
+something to say, a metrical mechanic like myself can easily hammer the matter
+
+into technically correct
+
+verse, substituting formal poetic diction for real inspiration or thought. For
+
+instance, I lately received a
+
+post-card bearing the picture of swans on a placid stream. Desiring to reply in
+
+appropriate verse, I harked
+
+back to the classic myth of Phaethon and Cygnus, handling it as follows:
+
+With pensive grace, the melancholy Swan
+Mourns o'er the tomb of luckless Phaethon;
+On grassy banks the weeping poplars wave.
+And guard with tender card the wat'ry grave.
+Would that I might, should I too proudly claim
+An Heav'nly parent, or a God-like fame;
+When flown too high, and dash'd to depths below.
+Receive such tribute as a Cygnus' woe!
+The faithful bird, that dumbly floats along.
+Sighs all the deeper for his want of song.
+
+"This required about 10 minutes of composition."
+
+
+
+
+Pacifist War Song - 1917
+
+We are the valiant Knights of Peace
+Who prattle for the Right:
+Our banner is of snowy fleece,
+Inscrib'd: "TOO PROUD TO FIGHT!"
+
+By sweet Chautauqua's flow'ry banks
+We love to sing and play.
+But should we spy a foeman's ranks!
+We'd proudly run away!
+
+When Prussian fury sweeps the main
+Our freedom to deny;
+Of tyrant laws we ne'er complain;
+But gladsomely comply!
+
+We do not fear the submarines
+That plough the troubled foam;
+We scorn the ugly old machines -
+And safely stay at home!
+
+They say our country's close to war
+And soon must man the guns;
+But we see naught to struggle for -
+We love the gentle Huns!
+
+What though their hireling Greaser bands
+Invade our southern plains?
+We well can spare those boist'rous lands.
+Content with what remains!
+
+Our fathers were both rude and bold.
+And would not live like brothers;
+But we are of a finer mould -
+We're much more like our mothers!
+
+
+
+
+Poemata Minora
+
+Published September 1902
+
+To The
+
+Gods, Heros, & Ideals
+
+Of The
+
+ANCIENTS
+
+This Volume is Affectionately
+
+DEDICATED
+
+By
+
+A
+
+GREAT
+
+ADMIRER
+
+I submit to the publik these idle lines, hoping they will please.
+
+They form a sort of series, with my Odyssey, Iliad, Aeneid, and the like.
+
+Ode to Selene or Diana
+
+Immortal Moon, in maiden splendour shine;
+Dispense thy beams, divine Latona's child.
+Thy silver rays all grosser things define.
+And hide harsh Truth in sweet illusion mildl.
+
+In thy soft light, the city of unrest
+That stands so squalid in thy brother's glare.
+Throws off its habit, and in silence blest.
+Becomes a vision, sparkling bright and fair.
+
+The modern world,with all its care and pain
+The smokey streets, the loathsome clanging mills.
+Face 'neath thy breams, Selene, and again
+We dream as shepherds on Chaldea's hills.
+
+Take heed, Diana, of my humble plea;
+Convey me where my happiness can last.
+Draw me against the tide of Time's rought sea.
+And let my sprirt rest amidst the past.
+
+
+
+
+To the Old Pagan Religion
+
+Olympian gods! how can I let ye go.
+
+And pin my faith to this new Christian creed?
+
+Can I resign the deities I know,
+
+for him who on a cross for man did bleed?
+
+How in my weakness can my hopes depend
+On one lone god, tho' mighty be his pow'r?
+Why can Jove's host no more assistance lend.
+To Soothe my pain, and cheer my troubled hour?
+
+Are there no dryads on these wooded mounts
+O'er which I oft in desolation roam?
+Are there no naiads in these crystal founts
+Or nereids upon the ocean foam?
+
+Fast spreads the new; the older faith declines;
+The name of Christ resounds upon the air;
+But my wrack'd soul in solitude repines
+And gives the gods their last-received pray'r.
+
+On the Ruin of Rome
+
+How dost thou lie, O Rome, neath the foot of the Teuton
+Slaves are they men, and bent to the will of thy conqueror;
+Wither hath gone, great city, the race that gave law to all nations,
+Subdu'd the East and the West, and made them bow down to thy consuls.
+Knew not defeat, but gave it to all who attack'd thee?
+
+Dead! and replac'd by these wretches who cower in confusion.
+
+Dead! they who gave us this empire to guard and to live in,
+
+Rome, thou didst fall from thy pow'r with the proud race that made thee,
+
+and we, base Italians, enjoy'd what we could not have builded.
+
+To Pan
+
+Seated in a woodland glen
+By a shallow stream
+Once I fell a-musing, when
+I was lull'd into a dream.
+
+
+
+
+From the brook a shape arose
+Half a man and half a goat.
+Hoofs it had instead of toes
+And a beard adorn'd its throat.
+
+On a set of rustic reeds
+Sweetly play'd this hybrid man
+Naught car'd I for earthly needs.
+For I knew that this was Pan.
+
+Nymphs and Satyrs gather'd round
+To enjoy the lively sound.
+
+All to soon I woke in pain
+And return'd to haunts of men
+But in rural vales I'd fain
+Live and hear Pan's pipes again
+
+On the Vanity of Human Ambition
+
+Apollo, chasing Daphen, claim'd his prize
+But lo! she turn'd to wood before his eyes.
+More modern swains at golden prizes aim.
+And ever strive some worldly thing to claim.
+Yet 'tis the same as in Apollo's case.
+For, once attain' d, the purest gold seems base.
+All that men seek's unworthy of the quest.
+Yet seek they will, and never pause for rest.
+True bliss, methinks, a man can only find
+In virtuous life, and cultivated mind.
+
+
+
+
+Providence
+
+Written May 1924
+
+Where bay and river tranquil blend.
+
+And leafy hillsides rise.
+
+The spires of Providence ascend
+
+Against the ancient skies.
+
+And in the narrow winding ways
+
+That climb o'er slope and crest.
+
+The magic of forgotten days
+
+May still be found to rest.
+
+A fanlight's gleam, a knocker's blow,
+
+A glimpse of Georgian brick -
+
+The sights and sounds of long ago
+
+Where fancies cluster thick.
+
+A flight of steps with iron rail,
+
+A belfry looming tall,
+
+A slender steeple, carved and pale,
+
+A moss-grown garden wall.
+
+A hidden churchyard's crumbling proofs
+
+Of man's mortality,
+
+A rotting wharf where gambrel roofs
+
+Keep watch above the sea.
+
+Square and parade, whose walls have towered
+
+Full fifteen decades long
+
+By cobbled ways 'mid trees embowered.
+
+And slighted by the throng.
+
+Stone bridges spanning languid streams.
+
+Houses perched on the hill.
+
+And courts where mysteries and dreams
+
+The brooding spirit fill.
+
+Steep alley steps by vines concealed.
+
+Where small-paned windows glow
+
+At twilight on a bit of field
+
+That chance has left below.
+
+My Providence! What airy hosts
+
+Turn still thy gilded vanes;
+
+What winds of elf that with grey ghosts
+
+People thine ancient lanes!
+
+The chimes of evening as of old
+
+Above thy valleys sound.
+
+
+
+
+While thy stern fathers 'neath the mould
+Make blest thy sacred ground.
+
+
+
+
+Revelation
+
+In a vale of light and laughter.
+Shining 'neath the friendly sun.
+Where fulfilment foUow'd after
+Ev'ry hope or dream begun;
+Where an Aidenn gay and glorious,
+Beckon'd down the winsome way;
+There my soul, o'er pain victorious,
+Laugh'd and lingered - yesterday.
+
+Green and narrow was my valley,
+Temper'd with a verdant shade;
+Sun deck'd brooklets musically
+Sparkled thro' each glorious glade;
+And at night the stars serenely
+Glow'd betwixt the boughs o'erhead.
+While Astarte, calm and queenly.
+Floods of fairy radiance shed.
+
+There amid the tinted bowers,
+Raptur'd with the opiate spell
+Of the grasses, ferns and flowers.
+Poppy, Phlox and Pimpernel,
+Long I lay, entranc'd and dreaming,
+Pleas'd with Nature's bounteous store.
+Till I mark'd the shaded gleaming
+Of the sky, and yearn'd for more.
+
+Eagerly the branches tearing,
+Clear'd I all the space above.
+Till the bolder gaze, high faring,
+Scann'd the naked skies of Jove;
+Deeps unguess'd now shone before me.
+Splendid beam'd the solar car;
+Wings of fervid fancy bore me
+Out beyond the farthest star.
+
+Reaching, gasping, wishing, longing
+For the pageant brought to sight.
+Vain I watch'd the gold orbs thronging
+Round the celestial poles of light.
+
+
+
+
+Madly on a moonbeam ladder
+Heav'ns abyss I sought to scale.
+Ever wiser, ever sadder.
+As the fruitless task would fail.
+
+Then, with futile striving sated,
+Veer'd my soul to earth again.
+Well content that I was fated
+For a fair, yet low domain;
+Pleasing thoughts of glad tomorrows.
+Like the blissful moments past,
+Lull'd to rest my transient sorrows,
+Stil'd my godless greed at last.
+
+But my downward glance, returning.
+Shrank in fright from what it spy'd;
+Slopes in hideous torment burning.
+Terror in the brooklet's tide:
+For the dell, of shade denuded
+By my desecrating hand,
+'Neath the bare sky blaz'd and brooded
+As a lost, accursed land.
+
+
+
+
+The Bride of the Sea
+
+Black loom the crags of the uplands behind me.
+Dark are the sands of the far-stretching shore.
+Dim are the pathways and rocks that remind me
+Sadly of years in the lost Nevermore.
+
+Soft laps the ocean on wave-polish'd boulder.
+Sweet is the sound and familiar to me;
+Here, with her head gently bent to my shoulder,
+Walk'd I with Unda, the Bride of the Sea.
+
+Bright was the morn of my youth when I met her.
+Sweet as the breeze that blew o'er the brine.
+Swift was I captur'd in Love's strongest fetter.
+Glad to be here, and she glad to be mine.
+
+Never a question ask'd I where she wander'd.
+Never a question ask'd she of my birth:
+Happy as children, we thought not nor ponder'd.
+Glad of the bounty of ocean and earth.
+
+Once when the moonlight play'd soft 'mid the billows.
+High on the cliff o'er the waters we stood.
+Bound was her hair with a garland of willows,
+Pluck'd by the fount in the bird-haunted wood.
+
+Strangely she gaz'd on the surges beneath her,
+Charm'd with the sound or entranc'd by the light:
+Then did the waves a wild aspect bequeath her.
+Stern as the ocean and weird as the night.
+
+Coldly she left me, astonish'd and weeping.
+Standing alone 'mid the legions she bless'd:
+Down, ever downward, half gliding, half creeping.
+Stole the sweet Unda in oceanward quest.
+
+Calm grew the sea, and tumultuous beating
+Turn'd to a ripple as Unda the fair
+Trod the wet sands in affectionate greeting,
+Beckon'd to me, and no longer was there!
+
+
+
+
+Long did I pace by the banks where she vanish' d.
+High cHmb'd the moon and descended again.
+Grey broke the dawn till the sad night was banish' d.
+Still ach'd my soul with its infinite pain.
+
+All the wide world have I search'd for my darling;
+Scour'd the far desert and sail'd distant seas.
+Once on the wave while the tempest was snarling,
+Flash'd a fair face that brought quiet and ease.
+
+Ever in restlessness onward I stumble
+Seeking and pining scarce heeding my way.
+Now have I stray' d where the wide waters rumble.
+Back to the scene of the lost yesterday.
+
+Lo! the red moon from the ocean's low hazes
+Rises in ominous grandeur to view;
+Strange is its face as my tortur'd eye gazes
+O'er the vast reaches of sparkle and blue.
+
+Straight from the moon to the shore where I'm sighing
+Grows a bright bridge made of wavelets and beams.
+Frail it may be, yet how simple the trying,
+Wand'ring from earth to the orb of sweet dreams.
+
+What is yon face in the moonlight appearing;
+Have I at last found the maiden that fled?
+Out on the beam-bridge my footsteps are nearing
+Her whose sweet beckoning hastens my tread.
+
+Current's surround me, and drowsily swaying.
+Far on the moon-path I seek the sweet face.
+Eagerly, hasting, half panting, half praying.
+Forward I reach for the vision of grace.
+
+Murmuring waters about me are closing.
+Soft the sweet vision advances to me.
+Done are my trials; my heart is reposing
+Safe with my Unda, the Bride of the Sea.
+
+
+
+
+The Cats
+
+Babels of blocks to the high heavens towering
+Flames of futility swirling below;
+Poisonous fungi in brick and stone flowering.
+Lanterns that shudder and death-lights that glow.
+
+Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers.
+Cobwebs of cable to nameless things spun;
+Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers
+Streams of live foetor that rots in the sun.
+
+Colour and splendour, disease and decaying.
+Shrieking and ringing and crawling insane.
+Rabbles exotic to stranger-gods praying.
+Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.
+
+Legions of cats from the alleys nocturnal.
+Howling and lean in the glare of the moon.
+Screaming the future with mouthings infernal.
+Yelling the Garden of Pluto's red rune.
+
+Tall towers and pyramids ivy'd and crumbling.
+Bats that swoop low in the weed-cumber'd streets;
+Bleak Arkham bridges o'er rivers whose rumbling
+Joins with no voice as the thick horde retreats.
+
+Belfries that buckle against the moon totter.
+Caverns whose mouths are by mosses effac'd.
+And living to answer the wind and the water.
+Only the lean cats that howl in the wastes.
+
+
+
+
+The City
+
+
+
+It was golden and splendid.
+
+That City of light;
+
+A vision suspended
+
+In deeps of the night;
+
+A region of wonder and glory, whose temples were marble and white.
+
+I remember the season
+
+It dawn'd on my gaze;
+
+The mad time of unreason.
+
+The brain-numbing days
+
+When Winter, white-sheeted and ghastly, stalks onward to torture and craze.
+
+More lovely than Zion
+
+It shone in the sky
+
+When the beams of Orion
+
+Beclouded my eye.
+
+Bringing sleep that was filled with dim mem'ries of moments obscure and gone
+
+by.
+
+Its mansions were stately.
+
+With carvings made fair.
+
+Each rising sedately
+
+On terraces rare.
+
+And the gardens were fragrant and bright with strange miracles blossoming
+
+there.
+
+The avenues lur'd me
+
+With vistas sublime;
+
+Tall arches assur'd me
+
+That once on a time
+
+I had wander'd in rapture beneath them, and bask'd in the Halcyon clime.
+
+On the plazas were standing
+
+A sculptur'd array;
+
+Long bearded, commanding,
+
+rave men in their day-
+
+But one stood dismantled and broken, its bearded face battered away.
+
+In that city effulgent
+No mortal I saw.
+
+
+
+
+But my fancy, indulgent
+
+To memory's law,
+
+Linger'd long on the forms in the plazas, and eyed their stone features with awe.
+
+I fann'd the faint ember
+
+That glow'd in my mind.
+
+And strove to remember
+
+The aeons behind;
+
+To rove thro' infinity freely, and visit the past unconfin'd.
+
+Then the horrible warning
+
+Upon my soul sped
+
+Like the ominous morning
+
+That rises in red.
+
+And in panic I flew from the knowledge of terrors forgotten and dead.
+
+
+
+
+The Conscript
+
+I am a peaceful working man,
+I am not wise or strong.
+But I can follow Nature's plan.
+In labour, rest, and song.
+
+One day the men that rule us all
+Decided we must die.
+Else pride and freedom surely fall
+In the dim bye and bye!
+
+They told me I must write my name
+Upon a scroll of death;
+That some day I should rise to fame
+By giving up my breath.
+
+I do not know what I have done
+That I should thus be bound
+To wait for tortures one by one
+And then an unmark'd mound.
+
+I hate no man, and yet they say
+That I must fight and kill;
+That I must suffer day by day
+To please a master's will.
+
+I used to have a conscience free.
+But now they bid it rest;
+They've made a number out of me.
+And I must ne'er protest.
+
+They tell of trenches, long and deep,
+Fill'd with the mangled slain.
+They talk till I can scarcely sleep.
+So reeling is my brain.
+
+They tell of filth, and blood, and woe;
+Of things beyond belief;
+Of things that make me tremble so
+With mingled fright and grief.
+
+
+
+
+I do not know what I shall do -
+Is not the law unjust?
+I can't do what they want me to.
+And yet they say I must!
+
+Each day my doom doth nearer bring;
+Each day the State prepares;
+Sometimes I feel a watching thing
+That stares, and stares, and stares.
+
+I never seem to sleep - my head
+Whirls in the queerest way.
+Why am I chosen to be dead
+Upon some fateful day?
+
+Yet hark - some fibre is o'erwrought
+A giddying wine I quaff -
+Things seem so odd, I can do naught
+But laugh, and laugh, and laugh!
+
+
+
+
+The Garden
+
+There's an ancient, ancient garden that I see sometimes in dreams.
+
+Where the very Maytime sunHght plays and glows with spectral gleams;
+
+Where the gaudy-tinted blossoms seem to wither into grey.
+
+And the crumbling walls and pillars waken thoughts of yesterday.
+
+There are vines in nooks and crannies, and there's moss about the pool.
+
+And the tangled weedy thicket chokes the arbour dark and cool:
+
+In the silent sunken pathways springs a herbage sparse and spare.
+
+Where the musty scent of dead things dulls the fragrance of the air.
+
+There is not a living creature in the lonely space arouna.
+
+And the hedge-encompass'd d quiet never echoes to a sound.
+
+As I walk, and wait, and listen, I will often seek to find
+
+When it was I knew that garden in an age long left behind;
+
+I will oft conjure a vision of a day that is no more.
+
+As I gaze upon the grey, grey scenes I feel I knew before.
+
+Then a sadness settles o'er me, and a tremor seems to start -
+
+For I know the flow'rs are shrivell'd hopes - the garden is my heart.
+
+
+
+
+The House
+
+
+
+'Tis a grove-circled dwelling
+
+Set close to a hill.
+
+Where the branches are telling
+
+Strange legends of ill;
+
+Over timbers so old
+
+That they breathe of the dead.
+
+Crawl the vines, green and cold.
+
+By strange nourishment fed;
+
+And no man knows the juices they suck from the depths of their dank slimy bed.
+
+In the gardens are growing
+
+Tall blossoms and fair.
+
+Each pallid bloom throwing
+
+Perfume on the air;
+
+But the afternoon sun
+
+with its shining red rays
+
+Makes the picture loom dun
+
+On the curious gaze.
+
+And above the sween scent of the the blossoms rise odours of numberless days.
+
+The rank grasses are waving
+
+On terrace and lawn.
+
+Dim memories savouring
+
+Of things that have gone;
+
+The stones of the walks
+
+Are encrusted and wet.
+
+And a strange spirit stalks
+
+When the red sun has set.
+
+And the soul of the watcher is fill'd with faint pictures he fain would forget.
+
+It was in the hot Junetime
+
+I stood by that scene.
+
+When the gold rays of noontime
+
+Beat bright on the green.
+
+But I shiver'd with cold.
+
+Groping feebly for light.
+
+As a picture unroll'd -
+
+And my age-spanning sight
+
+Saw the time I had been there before flash like fulgury out of the night.
+
+
+
+
+(This poem is about the house at 135 Benefit Street in Providence that also
+inspired the short story "The Shunned House".)
+
+
+
+
+The Messenger
+
+The thing, he said, would come in the night at three
+From the old churchyard on the hill below;
+But crouching by an oak fire's wholesome glow,
+I tried to tell myself it could not be.
+
+Surely, I mused, it was pleasantry
+Devised by one who did not truly know
+The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago.
+That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.
+
+He had not meant it - no - but still I lit
+Another lamp as starry Leo climbed
+Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed
+Three - and the firelight faded, bit by bit.
+
+Then at the door that cautious rattling came -
+And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!
+
+(This was written in response to Bertrand Kelton Hart, author of a daily column
+
+called "The Sideshow" in
+
+the Providence Journal, who, upon discovering that Wilcox's residence in "The
+
+CallofCthulhu"(7
+
+Thomas Street) was his own, published in his column " . . .1 shall not be happy
+
+until, joining league with
+
+wraiths and ghouls, I have plumped down at least one large and abiding ghost
+
+by way of reprisal upon
+
+[Lovecraft's] own doorstep in Barnes street. . . I think I shall teach it to moan in a
+
+minor dissonance every
+
+morning at 3 o'clock sharp, with a clinking of chains.")
+
+
+
+
+The Peace Advocate
+
+(Supposed to be a "pome," but cast strictly in modern metre)
+
+The vicar sat in the firehght's glow,
+
+A volume in his hand.
+
+And a tear he shed for the widespread woe.
+
+And the anguish brought by the vicious foe
+
+That overran the land.
+
+But never a hand for his King raised he.
+For he was a man of peace;
+And he car'd not a whit for the victory
+That must come to preserve his nation free.
+And the world from fear release.
+
+His son had buckled on his sword.
+The first at the front was he.
+But the vicar his valiant child ignor'd
+And his noble deeds in the field deplor'd.
+For he knew not bravery.
+
+On his flock he strove to fix his will.
+
+And lead them to scorn the fray.
+
+He told them that conquest brings but ill;
+
+That meek submission would serve them still
+
+To keep the foe away.
+
+In vain did he hear the bugle's sound
+That strove to avert the fall.
+The land, quoth he, is all men's ground.
+What matter if friend or foe be found
+As master of us all?
+
+One day from the village green hard by
+The vicar heard a roar
+Of cannon that rival'd the anguish'd cry
+Of the hundreds that liv'd but wish'd to die
+As the enemy rode them o'er.
+
+Now he sees his own cathedral shake
+
+At the foemen's wanton aim.
+
+The ancient towers with the bullets quake;
+
+
+
+
+The steeples fall, the foundations break.
+And the whole is lost in flame.
+
+Up the vicarage lane file the cavalcade.
+And the vicar, and daughter, and wife
+Scream out in vain for the needed aid
+That only a regiment might have made
+Ere they lose what is more than life.
+
+Then quick to his brain came manhood's thought.
+
+As he saw his erring course.
+
+And the vicar his dusty rifle brought
+
+That the foe might at least by one be fought.
+
+And force repaid with force.
+
+One shot - the enemy's blasting fire
+
+A breach in the wall cuts through.
+
+But the vicar replies with his wakened ire;
+
+Fells one arm'd brute for each fallen spire.
+
+And in blood is born anew.
+
+Two shots - the wife and daughter sink.
+Each with a mortal wound.
+And the vicar, too madden'd by far to think.
+Rushes boldly on to death's vague brink
+With the manhood he has found.
+
+Three shots - but shots of another kind
+The smoky regions rend.
+And upon the foemen with rage gone blind,
+like a ceaseless, resistless, avenging wind.
+The rescuing troops descend.
+
+The smoke-pall clears, and the vicar's son
+His father's life has sav'd.
+And the vicar looks o'er ruin done.
+Ere the victory by his child was won.
+His face with care engrav'd.
+
+The vicar sat in the firelight's glow.
+
+The volume in his hand
+
+That brought to his hearth the bitter woe
+
+
+
+
+Which only a husband and father can know.
+And truly understand.
+
+With a chasten'd mien he flung the book
+
+To the leaping flames before.
+
+And a breath of sad relief he took
+
+As the pages blacken'd beneath his look -
+
+The fool of peace no more!
+
+Epilogue
+
+The reverend parson, wak'd to man's estate.
+Laments his wife's and daughter's common fate.
+His martial son in warm embrace enfolds.
+And clings the tighter to the child he holds:
+His peaceful notions, banish'd in an hour.
+Will nevermore his wit or sense devour.
+But steep'd in truth, 'tis now his nobler plan
+To cure, yet recognize, the faults of man.
+
+
+
+
+The Poe-et^s Nightmare
+
+A Fable
+
+Luxus tumultus semper causa est.
+
+LucuUus Languish, student of the skies.
+
+And connoisseur of rarebits and mince pies,
+
+A bard by choice, a grocer's clerk by trade,
+
+(Grown pessimist through honours long delay'd)
+
+A secret yearning bore, that he might shine
+
+In breathing numbers, and in song divine.
+
+Each day his fountain pen was wont to drop
+
+An ode or dirge or two about the shop.
+
+Yet naught could strike the chord within his heart
+
+That throbb'd for poesy, and cry'd for art.
+
+Each eve he sought his bashful Muse to wake
+
+With overdoses of ice cream and cake.
+
+But though th' ambitious youth a dreamer grew,
+
+Th' Aonian Nymph delcin'd to come to view.
+
+Something at dusk he scour'd the heav'ns afar
+Searching for raptures in the evening star;
+One night he strove to catch a tale untold
+In crystal deeps - but only caught a cold.
+So pin'd LucuUus with his lofty woe.
+Till one drear day he bought a set of Poe:
+Charm'd with the cheerful horrors there display's.
+He vow'd with gloom to woo the Heav'nly Maid.
+Of Auber's Tarn and Yaanek's slope he dreams.
+And weaves an hundred Ravens in his schemes.
+Not far from our young hero's peaceful home.
+Lies the fair grove wherein he loves to roam.
+Though but a stunted copse in vacant lot.
+He dubs it Temp-e, and adores the spot;
+When shallow puddles dot the wooded plain.
+And brim o'er muddy banks with muddy rain.
+He calls them limpid lakes or poison pools,
+(Depending on which bard his fancy rules.)
+
+'Tis here he comes with Heliconian fire
+On Sundays when he smites the Attic lyre;
+
+
+
+
+And here one afternoon he brought his gloom,
+Resolv'd to chant a poet's lay of doom.
+Roget's Thesaurus, and a book of rhymes.
+Provide the rungs whereon his spirit climbs:
+With this grave retinue he trod the grove
+And pray'd the Fauns he might a Poe-et prove.
+But sad to tell, ere Pegasus flew high.
+The not unrelish'd supper hour drew nigh;
+Our tuneful swain th' imperious call attends.
+And soon above the groaning table bends.
+Though it were too prosaic to relate
+Th' exact particulars of what he ate,
+(Such long-drawn lists the hasty reader skips.
+Like Homer's well-known catalogue of ships)
+This much we swear: that as adjournment near'd,
+A monstrous lot of cake had disappear'd!
+Soon to his chamber the young bard repairs.
+And courts soft Somnus with sweet Lydian airs;
+Through open casement scans the star-strown deep.
+And 'neath Orion's beams sinks off to sleep.
+
+Now start from airy dell the elfin train
+
+That dance each midnight o'er the sleeping plain.
+
+To bless the just, or cast a warning spell
+
+On those who dine not wisely, but too well.
+
+First Deacon Smith they plague, whose nasal glow
+
+Comes from what Holmes hath call'd "Elixir Pro";
+
+Group'd round the couch his visage they deride.
+
+Whilst through his dreams unnumber'd serpents glide.
+
+Next troop the little folk into the room
+
+Where snore our young Endymion, swath'd in gloom:
+
+A smile lights up his boyish face, whilst he
+
+Dreams of the moon - or what he ate at tea.
+
+The chieftain elf th' unconscious youth surveys,
+
+and on his form a strange enchantment lays:
+
+Those lips, that lately trill'd with frosted cake.
+
+Uneasy sounds in slumbrous fashion make;
+
+At length their owner's fancies they rehearse.
+
+And lisp this awesome Poe-em in blank verse:
+
+Aletheia Phrikodes
+
+Omnia risus et omnia pulvis et omnia nihil.
+
+
+
+
+Demoniac clouds, up-pil'd in chasmy reach
+
+Of soundless heav'n, smother'd the brooding night;
+
+Nor came the wonted whisp'rings of the swamp.
+
+Nor voice of autumn wind along the moor.
+
+Nor mutter'd noises of th' insomnious grove
+
+Whose black recesses never saw the sun.
+
+Within that grove a hideous hollow lies.
+
+Half bare of trees; a pool in centre lurks
+
+That none dares sound; a tarn of murky face,
+
+(Though naught can prove its hue, since light of day.
+
+Affrighted, shuns the forest-shadow's banks.)
+
+Hard by, a yawning hillside grotto breathes
+
+From deeps unvisited, a dull, dank air
+
+That sears the leaves on certain stunted trees
+
+Which stand about, clawing the spectral gloom
+
+With evil boughs. To this accursed dell
+
+Come woodland creatures, seldom to depart:
+
+Once I behold, upon a crumbling stone
+
+Set altar-like before the cave, a thing
+
+I saw not clearly, yet from glimpsing, fled.
+
+In this half-dusk I meditate alone
+
+At many a weary noontide, when without
+
+A world forgets me in its sun-blest mirth.
+
+Here howls by night the werewolves, and the souls
+
+Of those that knew me well in other days.
+
+Yet on this night the grove spake not to me;
+
+Nor spake the swamp, nor wind along the moor
+
+Nor moan'd the wind about the lonely eaves
+
+Of the bleak, haunted pile wherein I lay.
+
+I was afraid to sleep, or quench the spark
+
+Of the low -burning taper by my couch.
+
+I was afraid when through the vaulted space
+
+Of the old tow'r, the clock-ticks died away
+
+Into a silence so profound and chill
+
+That my teeth chatter'd - giving yet no sound.
+
+Then flicker'd low the light, and all dissolv'd
+
+Leaving me floating in the hellish grasp
+
+Of body'd blackness, from whose beating wings
+
+Came ghoulish blasts of charnel-scented mist.
+
+things vague, unseen, unfashion'd, and unnam'd
+
+Jostled each other in the seething void
+
+That gap'd, chaotic, downward to a sea
+
+Of speechless horror, foul with writhing thoughts.
+
+
+
+
+All this I felt, and felt the mocking eyes
+
+Of the curs's universe upon my soul;
+
+Yet naught I saw nor heard, till flash'd a beam
+
+Of lurid lustre through the rotting heav'ns.
+
+Playing on scenes I labour'd not to see.
+
+Methought the nameless tarn, alight at last.
+
+Reflected shapes, and more reveal'd within
+
+Those shocking depths that ne'er were seen before;
+
+Methought from out the cave a demon train.
+
+Grinning and smirking, reel'd in fiendish rout;
+
+Bearing within their reeking paws a load
+
+Of carrion viands for an impious feast.
+
+Methought the stunted trees with hungry arms
+
+Grop'd greedily for things I dare not name;
+
+The while a stifling, wraith-like noisomeness
+
+Fill'd all the dale, and spoke a larger life
+
+Of uncorporeal hideousness awake
+
+In the half-sentient wholeness of the spot.
+
+Now glow'd the ground, and tarn, and cave, and trees.
+
+And moving forms, and things not spoken of.
+
+With such a phosphorescence as men glimpse
+
+In the putrescent thickets of the swamp
+
+Where logs decaying lie, and rankness reigns.
+
+Methought a fire-mist drap'd with lucent fold
+
+The well-remember'd features of the grove.
+
+Whilst whirling ether bore in eddying streams
+
+The hot, unfinish'd stuff of nascent worlds
+
+Hither and thither through infinity
+
+Of light and darkness, strangely intermix'd;
+
+Wherein all entity had consciousness.
+
+Without th' accustom'd outward shape of life.
+
+Of these swift circling currents was my soul.
+
+Free from the flesh, a true constituent part;
+
+Nor felt I less myself, for want of form.
+
+Then clear'd the mist, and o'er a star-strown scene
+
+Divine and measureless, I gaz'd in awe.
+
+Alone in space, I view'd a feeble fleck
+
+Of silvern light, marking the narrow ken
+
+Which mortals call the boundless universe.
+
+On ev'ry side, each as a tiny star.
+
+Shone more creations, vaster than our own.
+
+And teeming with unnumber'd forms of life;
+
+Though we as life would recognize it not.
+
+
+
+
+Being bound to earthy thoughts of human mould.
+
+As on a moonless night the Milky Way
+
+In solid sheen displays its countless orbs
+
+To weak terrestrial eyes, each orb a sun;
+
+So beam'd the prospect on my wond'ring soul;
+
+A spangled curtain, rich with twinkling gems.
+
+Yet each a mighty universe of suns.
+
+But as I gaz'd, I sens'd a spirit voice
+
+In speech didactic, though no voice it was.
+
+Save as it carried thought. It bade me mark
+
+That all the universes in my view
+
+Form'd but an atom in infinity;
+
+Whose reaches pass the ether-laden realms
+
+Of heat and light, extending to far fields
+
+Where flourish worlds invisible and vague,
+
+Fill'd with strange wisdom and uncanny life.
+
+And yet beyond; to myriad spheres of light.
+
+To spheres of darkness, to abysmal voids
+
+That know the pulses of disorder'd force.
+
+Big with these musings, I survey'd the surge
+
+Of boundless being, yet I us'd not eyes.
+
+For spirit leans not on the props of sense.
+
+The docent presence swell'd my strength of soul;
+
+All things I knew, but knew with mind alone.
+
+Time's endless vista spread before my thought
+
+With its vast pageant of unceasing change
+
+And sempiternal strife of force and will;
+
+I saw the ages flow in stately stream
+
+Past rise and fall of universe and life;
+
+I saw the birth of suns and worlds, their death.
+
+Their transmutation into limpid flame.
+
+Their second birth and second death, their course
+
+Perpetual through the aeons' termless flight.
+
+Never the same, yet born again to serve
+
+The varying purpose of omnipotence.
+
+And whilst I watch' d, I knew each second's space
+
+Was greater than the lifetime of our world.
+
+Then turn'd my musings to that speck of dust
+
+Whereon my form corporeal took its rise;
+
+That speck, born but a second, which must die
+
+In one brief second more; that fragile earth;
+
+That crude experiment; that cosmic sport
+
+Which holds our proud, aspiring race of mites
+
+
+
+
+And moral vermin; those presuming mites
+
+Whom ignorance with empty pomp adorns.
+
+And misinstructs in specious dignity;
+
+Those mites who, reas'ning outward, vaunt themselves
+
+As the chief work of Nature, and enjoy
+
+In fatuous fancy the particular care
+
+Of all her mystic, super-regnant pow'r.
+
+And as I strove to vision the sad sphere
+
+Which lurk'd, lost in ethereal vortices;
+
+Methough my soul, tun'd to the infinite,
+
+Refus'd to glimpse that poor atomic blight;
+
+That misbegotten accident of space;
+
+That globe of insignificance, whereon
+
+(My guide celestial told me) dwells no part
+
+Of empyreal virtue, but where breed
+
+The coarse corruptions of divine disease;
+
+The fest'ring ailments of infinity;
+
+The morbid matter by itself call'd man:
+
+Such matter (said my guide) as oft breaks forth
+
+On broad Creation's fabric, to annoy
+
+For a brief instant, ere assuaging death
+
+Heal up the malady its birth provok'd.
+
+Sicken' d, I turn'd my heavy thoughts away.
+
+Then spake th' ethereal guide with mocking mien.
+
+Upbraiding me for searching after Truth;
+
+Visiting on my mind the searing scorn
+
+Of mind superior; laughing at the woe
+
+Which rent the vital essence of my soul.
+
+Methought he brought remembrance of the time
+
+When from my fellows to the grove I stray'd.
+
+In solitude and dusk to meditate
+
+On things forbidden, and to pierce the veil
+
+Of seeming good and seeming beauteousness
+
+That covers o'er the tragedy of Truth,
+
+Helping mankind forget his sorry lot.
+
+And raising Hope where Truth would crush it down.
+
+He spake, and as he ceas'd, methought the flames
+
+Of fuming Heav'n revolv'd in torments dire;
+
+Whirling in maelstroms of revellious might.
+
+Yet ever bound by laws I fathom'd not.
+
+Cycles and epicycles of such girth
+
+That each a cosmos seem'd, dazzled my gaze
+
+Till all a wild phantasmal flow became.
+
+
+
+
+Now burst athwart the fulgent formlessness
+
+A rift of purer sheen, a sight supernal.
+
+Broader that all the void conceiv'd by man.
+
+Yet narrow here. A glimpse of heav'ns beyond;
+
+Of weird creations so remote and great
+
+That ev'n my guide assum'd a tone of awe.
+
+Borne on the wings of stark immensity,
+
+A touch of rhythm celestial reach'd my soul;
+
+Thrilling me more with horror than with joy.
+
+Again the spirit mock'd my human pangs.
+
+And deep revil'd me for presumptuous thoughts;
+
+Yet changing now his mien, he bade me scan
+
+The wid'ning rift that clave the walls of space;
+
+He bade me search it for the ultimate;
+
+He bade me find the truth I sought so long;
+
+He bade me brave th' unutterable Thing,
+
+The final Truth of moving entity.
+
+All this he bade and offer'd - but my soul.
+
+Clinging to life, fled without aim or knowledge.
+
+Shrieking in silence through the gibbering deeps.
+
+
+
+'*■'*■'*■'*■'*■'*■
+
+
+
+Thus shriek'd the young LucuUus, as he fled
+Through gibbering deeps - and tumbled out of bed;
+Within the room the morning sunshine gleams.
+Whilst the poor youth recalls his troubled dreams.
+He feels his aching limbs, whose woeful pain
+Informs his soul his body lives again.
+And thanks his stars - or cosmoses - or such -
+That he survives the noxious nightmare's clutch.
+Thrill'd with the music of th' eternal spheres,
+(Or is it the alarm-clock that he hears?)
+He vows to all the Pantheon, high and low.
+No more to feed on cake, or pie, or Foe.
+And now his gloomy spirits seem to rise.
+As he the world beholds with clearer eyes;
+The cup he thought too full of dregs to quaff.
+Affords him wine enough to raise a laugh.
+(All this is metaphor - you must not think
+Our late Endymion prone to stronger drink!)
+With brighter visage and with lighter heart.
+He turns his fancies to the grocer's mart;
+
+
+
+
+And strange to say, at last he seems to find
+
+His daily duties worthy of his mind.
+
+Since Truth prov'd such a high and dang'rous goal.
+
+Our bard seeks one less trying to his soul;
+
+With deep-drawn breath he flouts his dreary woes.
+
+And a good clerk from a bad poet grows!
+
+Now close attend my lay, ye scribbling crew
+
+That bay the moon in numbers strange and new;
+
+That madly for the spark celestial bawl
+
+In metres short or long, or none at all;
+
+Curb your rash force, in numbers or at tea.
+
+Nor over-zealous for high fancies be;
+
+Reflect, ere ye the draught Pierian take.
+
+What worthy clerks or plumbers ye might make;
+
+Wax not too frenzied in the leaping line
+
+That neither sense nor measure can confine.
+
+Lest ye, like young LucuUus Launguish, groan
+
+Beneath Poe-etic nightmares of your own!
+
+
+
+
+The Rose of England
+
+At morn the rosebud greets the sun
+
+And sheds the evening dew.
+
+Expanding ere the day is done.
+
+In bloom of radiant hue
+
+And when the sun his rest hath found,
+
+Rose-Petals strew the garden round!
+
+Thus that blest Isle that owns the Rose
+
+From mist and darkness came,
+
+A million glories to disclose.
+
+And spread BRITANNIA'S name;
+
+And ere Life's Sun shall leave the blue,
+
+ENGLAND shall reign the whole world through!
+
+
+
+
+The Wood
+
+They cut it down, and where the pitch-black aisles
+Of forest night had hid eternal things.
+They scaled the sky with towers and marble piles
+To make a city for their revellings.
+
+White and amazing to the lands around
+
+That wondrous wealth of domes and turrets rose;
+
+Crystal and ivory, sublimely crowned
+
+With pinnacles that bore unmelting snows.
+
+And through its halls the pipe and sistrum rang.
+While wine and riot brought their scarlet stains;
+Never a voice of elder marvels sang.
+Nor any eye called up the hills and plains.
+
+Thus down the years, till on one purple night
+A drunken minstrel in his careless verse
+Spoke the vile words that should not see the light.
+And stirred the shadows of an ancient curse.
+
+Forests may fall, but not the dusk they shield;
+So on the spot where that proud city stood.
+The shuddering dawn no single stone revealed.
+But fled the blackness of a primal wood.
+
+
+
+
+To Edward John Moreton Drax
+Plunkelt, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany
+
+As when the sun above a dusky wold.
+
+Springs into sight and turns the gloom to gold.
+
+Lights with his magic beams the dew-deck'd bow'r.
+
+And wakes to life the gay responsive flow'r;
+
+So now o'er realms where dark'ning dulness lies.
+
+In solar state see shining PLUNKETT rise!
+
+Monarch of Fancy! whose ethereal mind
+
+Mounts fairy peaks, and leaves the throng behind;
+
+Whose soul untainted bursts the bounds of space.
+
+And leads to regions of supernal grace:
+
+Can any praise thee with too strong a tone.
+
+Who in this age of folly gleam'd alone?
+
+Thy quill, DUNSANY, with an art divine
+
+Recalls the gods to each deserted shrine;
+
+From mystic air a novel pantheon makes.
+
+And with new spirits fills the meads and brakes;
+
+With thee we wander thro' primeval bow'rs.
+
+For thou hast brought earth's childhood back, and ours!
+
+How leaps the soul, with sudden bliss increas'd.
+
+When led by thee to lands beyond the East!
+
+Sick of this sphere, in crime and conflict old.
+
+We yearn for wonders distant and untold;
+
+O'er Homer's page a second time we pore.
+
+And rack our brains for gleams of infant lore:
+
+But all in vain— for valiant tho' we strive
+
+No common means these pictures can revive.
+
+Then dawns DUNSANY with celestial Hght
+
+And fulgent visions break upon our sight:
+
+His barque enchanted each sad spirit bears
+
+To shores of gold, beyond the reach of cares.
+
+No earthly trammels now our thoughts may chain;
+
+For childhood's fancy hath come back again!
+
+What glitt'ring worlds now wait our eager eyes!
+
+What roads untrodden beckon thro' the skies!
+
+Wonders on wonders line the gorgeous ways.
+
+And glorious vistas greet the ravish'd gaze;
+
+Mountains of clouds, castles of crystal dreams.
+
+Ethereal cities and Elysian streams;
+
+
+
+
+Temples of blue, where myriad stars adore
+
+Forgotten gods of aeons gone before!
+
+Such are thine arts, DUNSANY, such thy skill.
+
+That scarce terrestrial seems thy moving quill;
+
+Can man, and man alone, successful draw
+
+Such scenes of wonder and domains of awe?
+
+Our hearts, enraptur'd, fix thy mind's abode
+
+In high PEG AN A: hail thee as a god;
+
+And sure, can aught more high or godlike be
+
+Than such a fancy as resides in thee?
+
+Delighted Pan a friend and peer perceives
+
+As thy sweet music stirs the sylvan leaves;
+
+The Nine, transported, bless thy golden lyre:
+
+Approve thy fancy, and applaud thy fire;
+
+Whilst Jove himself assumes a brother's tone.
+
+And vows the pantheon equal to his own.
+
+DUNSANY, may thy days be glad and long;
+
+Replete with visions, and atune with song;
+
+May thy rare notes increasing millions cheer.
+
+Thy name beloved, and thy mem'ry dear!
+
+'Tis thou who hast in hours of dulness brought
+
+New charms of language, and new gems of thought;
+
+Hast with a poet's grace enrich'd the earth
+
+With aureate dreams as noble as thy birth.
+
+Grateful we name thee, bright with fix'd renown.
+
+The fairest jewel in HIBERNIA'S crown.
+
+
+
+
+Tosh Bosh
+
+Dead Passion's Flame
+
+A Pome by Blank Frailty
+
+Ah, Passion, like a voice - that buds!
+With many thorns. . .that sharply stick:
+Recalls to me the longing of our bloods. .
+And - makes my wearied heart requick!
+
+Arcadia
+
+by Head Balledup
+
+give me the life of the Village,
+Uninhibited, free, and sweet.
+
+The place where the arts all flourish.
+Grove Court and Christopher Street.
+
+1 am sick of the old conventions.
+And critics who will not praise.
+So sing ho for the open spaces.
+And aesthetes with kindly ways.
+
+Here every bard is a genius.
+
+And artists are Raphaels,
+
+And above the roofs of Patchin Place
+
+The Muse of Talent dwells.
+
+
+
+
+Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound
+Insignificance
+
+
+
+Written 1922
+
+
+
+Out of the reaches of inimitable night
+
+The blazing planet grew, and forc'd to life
+
+Unending cycles of progressive strife
+
+And strange mutations of undying light
+
+And boresome books, than hell's own self more trite
+
+And thoughts repeated and become a blight.
+
+And cheap rum-hounds with moonshine hootch made tight.
+
+And quite contrite to see the flight of fright so bright
+
+I used to ride my bicycle in the night
+
+With a dandy acetylene lantern that cost $3.00
+
+In the evening, by the moonlight, you can hear those darkies singing
+
+Meet me tonight - in dreamland. . . BAH!
+
+I used to sit on the stairs of the house where I was born
+
+After we left it but before it was sold
+
+And play on a zobo with two other boys.
+
+We called ourselves the Blackstone Military Band
+
+Won't you come home. Bill Bailey, won't you come home?
+
+In the spring of the year, in the silver rain
+
+When petal by petal the blossoms fall
+
+And the mocking birds call
+
+And the whippoorwill sings. Marguerite.
+
+The first cinema show in our town opened in 1906
+
+At the old Olympic, which was then call'd Park,
+
+And moving beams shot weirdly thro' the dark
+
+And spit tobacco seldom hit the mark.
+
+Have you read Dickens' American Notes?
+
+My great-great-grandfather was born in a white house
+
+Under green trees in the country
+
+And he used to believe in religion and the weather.
+
+
+"Shantih, shantih, shantih"..." Shanty House"
+Was the name of a novel by I forget whom
+
+
+
+
+Published serially in the "All-Story Weekly"
+
+Before it was a weekly. Advt.
+
+Disillusion is wonderful, I've been told.
+
+And I take quinine to stop a cold
+
+But it makes my ears. . . always. . .
+
+Always ringing in my ears. . .
+
+It is the ghost of the Jew I murdered that Christmas day
+
+Because he played "Three O'Clock in the Morning" in the flat above me.
+
+Three O'Clock in the morning, I've danc'd the whole night through
+
+Dancing on the graves in the graveyard
+
+Where life is buried; life and beauty
+
+Life and art and love and duty
+
+Ah, there, sweet cutie.
+
+Stung!
+
+Out of the night that covers me
+
+Black as the pit from pole to pole
+
+I never quote things straight except by accident.
+
+Sophistication! Sophistication!
+
+You are the idol of our nation
+
+Each fellow has
+
+Fallen for jazz
+
+And we'll give the past a merry razz
+
+Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber
+
+And fellow-guestship with the glutless worm.
+
+Next stop is 57th St. - 57th St. the next stop.
+
+Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring.
+
+And the governor-general of Canada is Lord Byng
+
+Whose ancestor was shot or hung,
+
+I forget which, the good die young.
+
+Here's to your ripe old age.
+
+Copyright, 1847, by Joseph Miner,
+
+Entered according to act of Congress.
+
+
+In the office of the librarian of Congress
+
+America was discovered in 1492
+
+This way out.
+
+No, lady, you gotta change at Washington St. to the Everett train.
+
+Out in the rain on the elevated
+
+Crated, sated, all mismated.
+
+Twelve seats on this bench.
+
+How quaint.
+
+
+
+
+In a shady nook, beside a brook, two lovers stroll along.
+
+Express to Park Ave., Car Following.
+
+No, we had it cleaned with the sand blast.
+
+I know it ought to be torn down.
+
+Before the bar of a saloon there stood a reckless crew.
+
+When one said to another, "Jack, this message came for you."
+
+"It may be from a sweetheart, boys," said someone in the crowd.
+
+And here the words are missing. . . but Jack cried out aloud:
+
+"It's only a message from home, sweet home.
+
+From loved ones down on the farm
+
+Fond wife and mother, sister and brother. . ."
+
+Bootleggers all and you're another
+
+In the shade of the old apple tree
+
+'Neath the old cherry tree sweet Marie
+
+The Conchologist's First Book
+
+By Edgar Allan Poe
+
+Stubbed his toe
+
+On a broken brick that didn't show
+
+Or a banana peel
+
+In the fifth reel
+
+By George Creel
+
+It is to laugh
+
+And quaff
+
+It makes you stout and hale
+
+And all my days I'll sing the praise
+
+Of Ivory Soap
+
+Have you a little T. S. Eliot in your house?
+
+
+The stag at eve had drunk his fill
+
+The thirsty hart look'd up the hill
+
+And craned his neck just as a feeler
+
+To advertise the Double-Dealer.
+
+William Congreve was a gentleman
+
+O art what sins are committed in thy name
+
+For tawdry fame and fleeting flame
+
+And everything, ain't dat a shame?
+
+Mah Creole Belle, ah lubs yo' well;
+
+Aroun' mah heart you hab cast a spell
+
+But I can't learn to spell pseudocracy
+
+Because there ain't no such word.
+
+And I says to Lizzie, if Joe was my feller
+
+
+
+
+I'd teach him to go to dances with that
+
+Rat, bat, cat, hat, flat, plat, fat
+
+Fry the fat, fat the fry
+
+You'll be a drug-store by and by.
+
+Get the hook!
+
+Above the lines of brooding hills
+
+Rose spires that reeked of nameless ills.
+
+And ghastly shone upon the sight
+
+In ev'ry flash of lurid light
+
+To be continued.
+
+No smoking.
+
+Smoking on four rear seats.
+
+Fare win return to 5 cents after August 1st
+
+Except outside the Cleveland city limits.
+
+In the ghoul-haunted Woodland of Weir
+
+Strangers pause to shed a tear;
+
+Henry Fielding wrote "Tom Jones"
+
+And cursed be he that moves my bones.
+
+I saw the Leonard-Tendler fight
+
+Farewell, farewell, O go to hell.
+
+Nobody home
+
+In the shantih.
+
+(This poem is a parody of T. S. Elliot's The Waste Land, and mondernist poetry
+in general, which Lovecraft referred to as a "practically meaningless collection of
+phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general.")
+
+
+
+
+Where Once Poe Walked
+
+Eternal brood the shadows on this ground.
+Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;
+Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound.
+Arched high above a hidden world of yore.
+Round all the scene a light of memory plays.
+And dead leaves whisper of departed days.
+Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.
+Lonely and sad, a specter glides along
+Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;
+No common glance discerns him, though his song
+Peals down through time with a mysterious spell.
+Only the few who sorcery's secret know.
+Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.
+
+
+
+
+
projects / name-generation.git / commitdiff