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Full text of "The Collected Works of H.P. Lovecraft"
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11 



H. P Lovecraf t 



Cthulu Mythos 



Collected works 



11 



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. 



lU 



Table of Contents 

Notes On Writing Weird Fiction 1 

History of the Necronomicon 5 

At the Mountains of Madness 8 

Azathoth 92 

Beyond the Wall of Sleep 93 

Celephais 102 

Cool Air 107 

Dagon 114 

Dreams in the Witch-House 119 

Ex Oblivione 149 

Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family 151 

From Beyond 159 

He 165 

Herbert West: Reanimator 174 

Hypnos 199 

Ibid 205 

Imprisoned with the Pharaos 209 

InTheVauh 232 

Memory 239 

Nyarlathotep 240 

Pickman's Model 243 

Polaris 254 

The Alchemist 258 

The Beast in the Cave 265 

The Book 270 

The Call of Cthulhu 273 

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward 298 

The Cats of Ulthar 401 

The Colour Out of Space 404 

The Descendant 427 

The Doom That Came to Sarnath 430 

The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath 436 

The Dunwich Horror 518 

The Evil Clergyman 554 

The Festival 558 

The Haunter Of The Dark 566 

The Horror at Red Hook 586 



IV 



The Horror in the Museum 603 

1 603 

2 614 

The Hound 628 

The Music OF Erich Zann 635 

The Nameless City 642 

The Other Gods 652 

The Outsider 657 

The Picture in the House 663 

The Quest of Iranon 670 

The Rats in the Walls 676 

The Shadow Out of Time 693 

The Shadow Over Innsmouth 753 

The Shunned House 807 

The Silver Key 829 

The Statement of Randolph Carter 839 

The Strange High House in the Mist 845 

The Street 853 

The Temple 858 

The Terrible Old Man 869 

The Thing on the Doorstep 872 

The Tomb 894 

The Transition of Juan Romero 903 

The Tree 909 

The Unnamable 913 

The Very Old Folk 920 

The Whisperer in Darkness 925 

The White Ship 979 

What the Moon Brings 984 

Medusa's Coil - with Zealia Bishop 986 

Out of the Aeons - with Hazel Heald 1020 

Poetry and the Gods - with Anna Helen Crofts 1042 

The Crawling Chaos - with Elizabeth Berkeley 1048 

The Disinterment - with Duane W. Rimel 1054 

The Green Meadow - with Winifred V. Jackson 1064 

The Horror at Martin's Beach - with Sonia H. Greene 1069 

The Last Test - with Adolphe de Castro 1075 

The Man of Stone - with Hazel Heald 1117 

The Night Ocean - with R. H. Barlow 1130 

The Thing in the Moonlight - with J. Chapman Miske 1148 

The Trap - with Henry S. Whitehead 1150 

The Tree On The Hill - with Duane W. Rimel 1169 

Through the Gates of the Silver Key - with E. Hoffmann Price 1179 



V 



Till A' the Seas - with R. H Barlow 1210 

Two Black Bottles - with Wilfred Blai\ch Talman 1218 

Within the Walls of Eryx - with Kenneth Sterling 1229 

At the Root 1253 

Cats And Dogs 1255 

Letter to August Derleth 1267 

Metrical Regularity 1271 

The Allowable Rhyme 1274 

The Despised Pastoral 1278 

An American to Mother England 1280 

Astrophobos 1282 

Christmas Blessings 1284 

Christmastide 1285 

Despair 1286 

Fact and Fancy 1288 

Festival 1289 

Fungi from Yuggoth 1290 

I. The Book 1290 

II. Pursuit 1290 

III. The Key 1291 

IV. Recognition 1291 

V. Homecoming 1291 

VI. The Lamp 1292 

VIL Zaman's Hill 1292 

VIIL The Port 1293 

IX. The Courtyard 1293 

X. The Pigeon-Flyers 1294 

XL The Well 1294 

XIL The Howler 1294 

XIILHesperia 1295 

XIV. Star-Winds 1295 

XV. Antarktos 1296 

XVL The Window 1296 

XVIL A Memory 1297 

XVIIL The Gardens of Yin 1297 

XIX. The Bells 1297 

XX. Night-Gaunts 1298 

XXL Nyarlathotep 1298 

XXIL Azathoth 1299 

XXIIL Mirage 1299 

XXIV. The Canal 1300 

XXV. St Toad's 1300 

XXVL The Familiars 1300 



VI 



XXVII. The Elder Pharos 1301 

XXVIII. Expectaiicy 1301 

XXIX. Nostalgia 1302 

XXX. Backgroui\d 1302 

XXXI. The Dweller 1303 

XXXII. Alienation 1303 

XXXIII. Harbour Whistles 1303 

XXXIV. Recapture 1304 

XXXV. Evening Star 1304 

XXXVI. Continuity 1305 

Hallowe'en in a Suburb 1307 

Laeta; A Lament 1309 

Lines on General Robert Edward Lee 1311 

Little Tiger 1313 

Nathicana 1314 

Nemesis 1317 

Ode for July Fourth, 1917 1319 

On Reading Lord Dunsany's Book of Wonder 1320 

On Receiving a Picture of Swans 1321 

Pacifist War Song - 1917 1322 

Poemata Minora 1323 

Ode to Selene or Diana 1323 

To the Old Pagan Religion 1324 

On the Ruin of Rome 1324 

To Pan 1324 

On the Vanity of Human Ambition 1325 

Providence 1326 

Revelation 1328 

The Bride of the Sea 1330 

The Cats 1332 

The City 1333 

The Conscript 1335 

The Garden 1337 

The House 1338 

The Messenger 1340 

The Peace Advocate 1341 

Epilogue 1343 

The Poe-et's Nightmare 1344 

A Fable 1344 

Aletheia Phrikodes 1345 

The Rose of England 1352 

The Wood 1353 

To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkelt, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany 1354 



Vll 



Tosh Bosh 1356 

Dead Passion's Flame 1356 

Arcadia 1356 

Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance 1357 

1 1357 

II 1357 

III 1358 

IV 1359 

Where Once Poe Walked 1361 



vui 



IX 



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 

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 



10 



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. 



11 



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 



12 



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 



13 



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 



14 



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. 

II 

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 



15 



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: 



16 



"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 



17 



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. 



18 



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 



19 



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 



20 



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 



21 



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. 



22 



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. 



23 



"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?" 



24 



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 



25 



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 



26 



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 



27 



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. 

Ill 

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 



28 



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 



29 



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. 



30 



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 



31 



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 



32 



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. 



33 



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 



34 



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. 

IV 

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 



35 



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 



36 



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 



37 



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. 



38 



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 



39 



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. 



40 



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. 

V 

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 



41 



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 - 



42 



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 



43 



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. 



44 



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 



45 



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 



46 



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 



47 



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. 



48 



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 



49 



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. 

VI 

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 



50 



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 



51 



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. 



52 



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 



53 



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 



54 



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. 

VII 

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 



55 



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 



56 



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 



58 



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. 



59 



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 



60 



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 



61 



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. 

VIII 

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 



62 



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 



63 



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- 



64 



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 



65 



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 



66 



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 



67 



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. 

IX 

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. 



68 



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 



69 



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 



70 



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 



71 



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. 



72 



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 



73 



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 



74 



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. 

X 

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 



76 



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. 



78 



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. 



79 



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. 

XI 

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 



80 



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! 



81 



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 



82 



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 



83 



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 



84 



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 



85 



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 



86 



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. 

XII 

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 



87 



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 



88 



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 



89 



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," 



90 



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!" 



91 



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... 



92 



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. 



93 



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 



94 



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 



95 



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. 



96 



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 



97 



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 



98 



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 



99 



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 



100 



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 



101 



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. 



102 



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 



103 



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 



104 



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 



105 



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. 



106 



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 



107 



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 



108 



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 



109 



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 



110 



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. 



Ill 



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. 



112 



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." 



113 



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 



114 



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 



115 



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 



116 



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 



117 



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! 



118 



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 



119 



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 



120 



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 



121 



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. 



122 



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. 



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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. 



124 



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 



125 



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 



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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 



127 



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 



128 



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 



129 



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 



130 



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. 



131 



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 



132 



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 



133 



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 



134 



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 



135 



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. 



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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 



137 



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. 



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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. 



139 



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 



140 



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 



141 



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 



142 



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 



143 



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 



144 



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. 



145 



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 



146 



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. 



147 



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. 



148 



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. 



149 



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. 



150 



Facts Concerning the Late Arthur 
Jermyn and His Family 

Written 1920 

Published March 1921 in The Wolverine, No. 9, p. 3-11. 

I 

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 



151 



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 



152 



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. 



153 



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. 

II 

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 



154 



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 



155 



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 



156 



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 



157 



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. 



158 



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 



159 



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 



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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 



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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 



162 



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 



163 



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. 



164 



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 



165 



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 



166 



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 



167 



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 



168 



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 



169 



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. 



170 



"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 - " 



171 



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 



172 



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. 



173 



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. 



174 



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 



175 



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 



176 



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. 



177 



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. 



178 



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 



179 



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 



180 



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 



181 



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. 



182 



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 



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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 



184 



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 



185 



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 



186 



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 



187 



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 



188 



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 



189 



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 



190 



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 



191 



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 



192 



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. 



193 



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 



194 



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 



195 



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 



196 



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 



197 



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. 



198 



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 



199 



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 



200 



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. 



201 



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. 



202 



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. 



203 



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. 



204 



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 



205 



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. 



206 



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. 



207 



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. 



208 



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 



209 



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. 



210 



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. 



211 



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. 



212 



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. 



213 



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 



214 



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 



215 



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: 



216 



'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 



217 



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. 



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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. 

II 

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 



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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 



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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. 



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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 



222 



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? 



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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 



224 



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? 



225 



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 



226 



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 



227 



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 



228 



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 



229 



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 



230 



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. 



231 



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 



232 



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 



233 



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 



234 



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 



235 



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!". 



236 



"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 



237 



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!" 



238 



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. 



239 



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 



240 



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 



241 



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. 



242 



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 



243 



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 



244 



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 



245 



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 



246 



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 



247 



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! 



248 



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 



249 



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 



250 



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. 



251 



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 



252 



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! 



253 



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 



254 



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. 



255 



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 
I 




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." 



256 



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. 



257 



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 



258 



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 



259 



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 



260 



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 



261 



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 



262 



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 



263 



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!' 



264 



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 



265 



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 



266 



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 



267 



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 



268 



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!!! 



269 



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 



270 



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- 



271 



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. . . 



272 



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 



273 



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. 



274 



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 



275 



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 



276 



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 



277 



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 



278 



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 



279 



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 



280 



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. 



281 



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." 



282 



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 



283 



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 



284 



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 



285 



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 



286 



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 



287 



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 



288 



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 



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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 



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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 



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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 



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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 



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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. 



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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 



295 



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 



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survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see 
that it meets no other eye. 



297 



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 

1 

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. 



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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. 



299 



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. 



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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 



301 



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 



302 



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. 



303 



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 



304 



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. 



305 



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. 



306 



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 



307 



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. 



308 



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 



309 



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 



310 



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- 



311 



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 



312 



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. 



313 



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. 



314 



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. 



315 



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. 



316 



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 



317 



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. 



318 



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. 



319 



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. 



320 



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. 



321 



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. 



322 



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 



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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 



324 



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 



325 



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 



326 



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. 



327 



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 



328 



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 



329 



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. 



330 



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 



331 



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 



332 



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 



333 



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. 



334 



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 



335 



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; 



336 



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. 



337 



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 



338 



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 



339 



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 - 



340 



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.' 



341 



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 



342 



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 



343 



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 



344 



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 



345 



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: 



346 



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. 



347 



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.' 



348 



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. 



349 



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. 



350 



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. 



351 



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 



352 



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. 



353 



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 



354 



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 



355 



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 



356 



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 



357 



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 



358 



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 



359 



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 



360 



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 



361 



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 



362 



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. 



363 



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. 



364 



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 



365 



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 



366 



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:- 



367 



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 



368 



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. 



369 



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 



370 



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 



371 



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; 



372 



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 



373 



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 



374 



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. 



375 



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 



376 



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 



377 



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 



378 



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 



379 



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. 



380 



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. 



381 



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 



382 



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. 



383 



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. 



384 



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! 



385 



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 



386 



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 



387 



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 



388 



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 



389 



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 



390 



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. 



391 



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 



392 



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 



393 



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 



394 



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 



395 



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". 



396 



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: 



397 



'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 



398 



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. 



399 



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. 



400 



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. 



401 



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 



402 



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. 



403 



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 



404 



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 



405 



'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 



406 



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. 



407 



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 



408 



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 



409 



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 



410 



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 



411 



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 



412 



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 



413 



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 



414 



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 



415 



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 



416 



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 



417 



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. 



418 



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 



419 



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. 



420 



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 



421 



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 



422 



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 



423 



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 



424 



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 



425 



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. 



426 



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 



427 



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 



428 



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. 



429 



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. 



430 



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 



431 



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. 



432 



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 



433 



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 



434 



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. 



435 



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 



436 



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. 



437 



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 



438 



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 



439 



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 



440 



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. 



441 



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. 



442 



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 



443 



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 



444 



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 



445 



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 



446 



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 



447 



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 



448 



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 



449 



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 



450 



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 



451 



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 



452 



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. 



453 



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 



454 



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 



455 



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 



456 



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 



457 



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 



458 



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 



459 



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 



460 



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. 



461 



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 



462 



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 



463 



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. 



464 



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 



465 



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 



466 



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 



467 



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 



468 



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. 



469 



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. 



470 



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 



471 



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 



472 



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 



473 



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 



474 



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 



475 



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, 



476 



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, 



477 



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, 



478 



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 



479 



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. 



480 



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 



481 



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 



482 



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 



483 



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 



484 



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 



485 



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 



486 



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. 



487 



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. 



488 



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. 



489 



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. 



490 



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 



491 



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 



492 



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 



493 



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 



494 



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 



495 



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 



496 



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 



497 



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 



498 



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. 



499 



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 



500 



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 



501 



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 



502 



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. 



503 



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 



504 



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. 



505 



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 



506 



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 



507 



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. 



508 



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. 



509 



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 



510 



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 



511 



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 



512 



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." 



513 



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 



514 



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. 



515 



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. 



516 



517 



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. 



518 



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 



519 



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 



520 



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 



521 



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. 



522 



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 



523 



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. 



524 



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. 



525 



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 



526 



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. 



527 



'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 



528 



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 



529 



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. 



530 



'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?' 



531 



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. 



532 



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. 



533 



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. 



534 



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 



535 



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 



536 



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 



537 



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 



538 



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. 



539 



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 



540 



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 



541 



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. 



542 



'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. 



543 



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; 



544 



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!' 



545 



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 



546 



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' 



547 



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 



548 



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. . .' 



549 



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. 



550 



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 



551 



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. 



552 



'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.' 



553 



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 



554 



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 



555 



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 



556 



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 



557 



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 



558 



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. 



559 



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 



560 



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 



561 



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 



562 



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 



563 



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 



564 



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." 



565 



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 



566 



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. 



567 



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 



568 



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. 



569 



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 



570 



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 



571 



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. 



572 



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 



573 



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. 



574 



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 



bib 



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. 



576 



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 



bn 



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. 



578 



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 



579 



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 



580 



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 



581 



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. 



582 



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 



583 



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. . . 



584 



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. . . 



585 



The Horror at Red Hook 

Written in August of 1925 

Published in September of 1926 in Weird Tales 

I 

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. 



586 



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.' 

II 



587 



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 



588 



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. 



589 



Ill 

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 



590 



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 



591 



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. 

IV 

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. 



592 



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 



593 



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 



594 



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. 

V 

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 



595 



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 



596 



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. 

VI 

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 



597 



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 



598 



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 



599 



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. 

VII 

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. 



600 



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 



601 



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!' 



602 



The Horror in the Museum 

1 

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. 



603 



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 



604 



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 



605 



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 



606 



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. 



607 



"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 



608 



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 



609 



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 



610 



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. 



611 



"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. 



612 



"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 



613 



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 



614 



"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 



615 



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 



616 



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?" 



617 



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. 



618 



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. 



619 



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 



620 



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 



621 



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 



622 



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 



623 



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." 



624 



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. 

625 



"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. 



626 



Orabona continued to smile. 



627 



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 



628 



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 



629 



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, 



630 



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. 



631 



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. 



632 



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. 



633 



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. 



634 



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. 



635 



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. 



636 



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. 



637 



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 



638 



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 



639 



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. 



640 



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. 



641 



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. 



642 



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 



643 



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 



644 



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; 



645 



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. 



646 



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. 



647 



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 



648 



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. 



649 



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 



650 



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. 



651 



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 



652 



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. 



653 



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 



654 



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 



655 



way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the chmbing of 
inaccessible places. 



656 



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. 



657 



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 



658 



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. 



659 



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 



660 



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 



661 



frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of 
polished glass. 



662 



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. 



663 



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 



664 



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 



665 



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 



666 



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 



667 



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 



668 



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. 



669 



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 



670 



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." 



671 



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." 



672 



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 



673 



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 



674 



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. 



675 



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 



676 



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. 



677 



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 



678 



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. 



679 



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. 



680 



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 



681 



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 



682 



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 



683 



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 



684 



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. 



685 



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 



686 



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. 



687 



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 



688 



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 



689 



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 



690 



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. . . 



691 



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. 



692 



The Shadow Out of Time 

Written in March of 1935 

Published in June of 1936 in Astounding Stories 

I 

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 



693 



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 



694 



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 



695 



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. 



696 



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 



697 



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. 



698 



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. 

II 

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. 



699 



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. 



700 



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 



701 



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. 



702 



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 



703 



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 



704 



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. 



705 



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. 

Ill 

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 



706 



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 



707 



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 



708 



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. 



709 



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 



710 



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 



711 



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 



712 



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. 

IV 

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 



713 



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 



714 



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. 



715 



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 



716 



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. 



717 



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 



718 



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 



719 



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. 



720 



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. 



721 



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. 



722 



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. 

V 

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 



723 



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. 



724 



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. 



725 



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. 



726 



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 



727 



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 



728 



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. 



729 



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. 

VI 

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. 



730 



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. 



731 



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. 



732 



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 



733 



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 



734 



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 



735 



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. 



736 



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. 



737 



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. 

VII 

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 



738 



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. 



739 



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. 



740 



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. 



741 



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 



742 



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. 



743 



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. 

VIII 

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 



744 



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 



745 



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 



746 



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. 



747 



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 



748 



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. 



749 



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 



750 



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 



751 



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. 



752 



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 



753 



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 - 



754 



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 



7bb 



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 



756 



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 



7b7 



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. 



758 



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. 



759 



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. 



760 



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. 

II 

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 



761 



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 



762 



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 



763 



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. 



764 



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. 



765 



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 



766 



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 



767 



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 



768 



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 



769 



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 



770 



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 



771 



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. 

Ill 

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 



772 



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. 



773 



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' 



774 



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 



nb 



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 



776 



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 



m 



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 



778 



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 . . ." 



779 



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. 



780 



"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? 



781 



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. 



782 



"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? 



783 



"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. 

IV 

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 



784 



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. 



785 



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 



786 



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 



787 



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 



788 



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 



789 



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 



790 



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; 



791 



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 



792 



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. 



793 



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. 



794 



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 



795 



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 



796 



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 



797 



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. 



798 



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 



799 



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 



800 



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. 

V 

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. 



801 



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 



802 



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 



803 



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. 



804 



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? 



805 



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. 



806 



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. 



807 



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 



808 



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 



809 



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. 

II 

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. 



810 



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 



811 



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 



812 



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. 



813 



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. 

Ill 

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 



814 



- 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 



815 



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 



816 



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. 



817 



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 



818 



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. 

IV 

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 



819 



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. 



820 



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 



821 



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. 



822 



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. 



823 



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. 

V 

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 



824 



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 



825 



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 



826 



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 



827 



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. 



828 



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 



829 



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 



830 



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. 



831 



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. 



832 



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. 



833 



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 



834 



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 



835 



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 



836 



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 



837 



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. 



838 



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 



839 



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 



840 



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. 



841 



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 



842 



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 



843 



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!" 



844 



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 



845 



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. 



846 



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! 



847 



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 



848 



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 



849 



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 



850 



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 



851 



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. 



852 



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 



853 



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 



854 



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 



855 



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 



856 



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. 



857 



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; 



858 



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 



859 



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. 



860 



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 



861 



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 



862 



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 



863 



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 



864 



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 



865 



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. 



866 



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 



867 



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. 



868 



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. 



869 



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 



870 



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. 



871 



The Thing on the Doorstep 

Written 21-24 Aug 1933 

Published January 1937 in Weird Tales, Vol. 29, No. 1, p. 52-70. 

I 

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 



872 



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. 



873 



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. 

II 



874 



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 



875 



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 



876 



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. 

Ill 

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. 



877 



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 



878 



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 



879 



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. 

IV 

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 



880 



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 



881 



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. 



882 



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 



883 



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 



884 



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. 



885 



"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?" 



886 



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 



887 



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 



888 



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. 



889 



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. 

V 

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 



890 



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 



891 



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 



892 



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. 



893 



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 



894 



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 



895 



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. 



896 



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 



897 



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: 



898 



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 



899 



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 



900 



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 



901 



whose tarnished plate bears the single word: Jervas. In that coffin and in that 
vault they have promised me I shall be buried. 



902 



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 



903 



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 



904 



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!" 



905 



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 



906 



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 



907 



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 



908 



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 



909 



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 



910 



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 



911 



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!" 



912 



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 



913 



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. 



914 



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. 



915 



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 



916 



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." 



917 



"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 - 



918 



"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! 



919 



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. 



920 



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 



921 



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 



922 



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 



923 



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 ..." 



924 



The Whisperer in Darkness 

Written 24 Feb-26 Sept 1930 

Published August 1931 in Weird Tales, Vol. 18, No. 1, p. 32-73 

I 

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 



925 



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. 



926 



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 



927 



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. 



928 



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 



929 



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. 

II 

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 



930 



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., 


118 


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. 



931 



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 



932 



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 



933 



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 



934 



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. 



935 



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 



936 



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 



937 



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. 

Ill 

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 



938 



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! 



939 



(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. 



940 



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 



941 



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 



942 



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. 



943 



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. 

IV 

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. 



944 



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 



945 



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. 



946 



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 



947 



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, 



948 



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 



949 



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. 

V 

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 



950 



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 



951 



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 



952 



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 - 



953 



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 



954 



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 



955 



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. 

VI 

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. 



956 



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. 



957 



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 



958 



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- 



959 



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 - 



960 



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 



961 



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. 

VII 

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. 



962 



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. 



963 



"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 



964 



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 



965 



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 



966 



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 



967 



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 



968 



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 



969 



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. 



970 



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. 

VIII 

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. 



971 



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 



972 



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 



973 



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) 



974 



"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 



975 



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. 



976 



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. 



977 



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. 



978 



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 



979 



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. 



980 



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 



981 



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 



982 



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. 



983 



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 



984 



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. 



985 



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 



986 



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. 



987 



"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 - " 



988 



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. 

II 

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 



989 



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 



990 



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 



991 



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 



992 



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 



993 



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. 



994 



"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." 

Ill 

"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 



995 



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 



996 



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. 



997 



'"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. 



998 



"' 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!' 



999 



"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 



1000 



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. 

1001 



"'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!' 



1002 



"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." 

IV 

"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. 



1003 



"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 



1004 



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. 



1005 



'"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 



1006 



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. 



1007 



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. 



1008 



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 



1009 



panting words were something about the need of wiping out everything that had 
been connected with Marcehne, either by blood or marriage." 

V 

"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 



1010 



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. 



1011 



"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 



1012 



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." 

VI 



1013 



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 



1014 



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. 



1015 



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. 



1016 



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 



1017 



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 



1018 



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. 



1019 



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 



1020 



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. 



1021 



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. 



1022 



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 



1023 



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 



1024 



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 



1025 



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 



1026 



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. 



1027 



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 



1028 



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 



1029 



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. 



1030 



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. 



1031 



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 



1032 



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 



1033 



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. 



1034 



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 



1035 



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 



1036 



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 



1037 



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 



1038 



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 



1039 



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 



1040 



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. 



1041 



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. 



1042 



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, 



1043 



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 



1044 



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 



1045 



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 



1046 



"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." 



1047 



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. 



1048 



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. 



1049 



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. 



1050 



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 



1051 



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 



1052 



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. 



1053 



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. 



1054 



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. 



1055 



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; 



1056 



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 



1057 



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 



1058 



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 



1059 



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. 



1060 



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. 



1061 



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. 



1062 



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. 



1063 



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 



1064 



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 



1065 



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 



1066 



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 



1067 



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.) 



1068 



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 



1069 



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 



1070 



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 



1071 



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 



1072 



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. 



1073 



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. 



1074 



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 



1075 



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. 



1076 



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 



1077 



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. 



1078 



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. 



1079 



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 



1080 



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 



1081 



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 



1082 



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. 



1083 



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 



1084 



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 



1085 



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 



1086 



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 - " 



1087 



"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. 



1088 



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 



1089 



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." 



1090 



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 



1091 



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 



1092 



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? 



1093 



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. 



1094 



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 



1095 



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. 



1096 



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?" 



1097 



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 



1098 



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 



1099 



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 



1100 



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 



1101 



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!" 



1102 



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 



1103 



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 



1104 



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 



1105 



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 



1106 



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. 



1107 



"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. 



1108 



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! 



1109 



"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 



1110 



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 



1111 



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 



1112 



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 



1113 



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. 



1114 



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. 



1115 



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. 



1116 



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. 



1117 



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!" 



1118 



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. 



1119 



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 



1120 



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. 



1121 



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 



1122 



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. 



1123 



"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 



1124 



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. 



1125 



"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 



1126 



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. 



1127 



"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 



1128 



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...." 



1129 



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 



1130 



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. 



1131 



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 



1132 



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 



1133 



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 



1134 



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 



1135 



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 



1136 



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 



1137 



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 



1138 



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. 



1139 



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 



1140 



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 



1141 



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. 



1142 



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 



1143 



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. 



1144 



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. 



1145 



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 



1146 



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. 



1147 



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. 



1148 



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. 



1149 



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. 



1150 



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 



1151 



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. 



1152 



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. 



1153 



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 



1154 



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. 



1155 



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 



1156 



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 



1157 



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 



1158 



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. 



1159 



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 



1160 



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 



1161 



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 



1162 



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. 



1163 



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?" 



1164 



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 



1165 



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. 



1166 



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 



1167 



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. 



1168 



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. 



1169 



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. 



1170 



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. . . . 



1171 



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!" 



1172 



"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. 



1173 



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. 



1174 



"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 



1175 



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 . . . 



1176 



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. 



1177 



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. 



1178 



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 



1179 



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 



1180 



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 



1181 



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. 



1182 



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 



1183 



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 



1184 



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. 



1185 



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: - 



1186 



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 



1187 



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 



1188 



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. 



1189 



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 



1190 



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 



1191 



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. 



1192 



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 



1193 



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 



1194 



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 



1195 



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. 



1196 



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 



1197 



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 



1198 



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. 



1199 



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 



1200 



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 



1201 



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. 



1202 



"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 



1203 



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. 



1204 



"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?" 



1205 



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?" 



1206 



"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 



1207 



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 



1208 



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. 



1209 



Till A' the Seas - with R. H Barlow 

Written Jan 1935 

Published Summer 1935 in The Californian, 3, No. 1, 3-7. 

I 

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. 



1210 



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 



1211 



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 



1212 



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. . . 

II 



1213 



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 



1214 



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. 



1215 



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 



1216 



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. 



1217 



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. 



1218 



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 



1219 



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. 



1220 



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. 



1221 



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 



1222 



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. 



1223 



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." 



1224 



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!" 



1225 



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. 



1226 



"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 



1227 



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. 



1228 



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 



1229 



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 



1230 



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 



1231 



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 



1232 



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 



1233 



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 



1234 



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. 



1235 



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 



1236 



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 



1237 



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. 



1238 



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 



1239 



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 



1240 



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. 



1241 



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 



1242 



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. 



1243 



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. 



1244 



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 



1245 



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 



1246 



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 



1247 



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. 



1248 



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. 



1249 



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. 



1250 



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 



1251 



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. 



1252 



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. 



1253 



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. 



1254 



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 



1255 



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. 



1256 



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. 



1257 



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. 



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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 



1259 



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 



1260 



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 



1261 



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 



1262 



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. 



1263 



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 



1264 



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 



1265 



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. 



1266 



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 



1267 



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 



1268 



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 



1269 



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.) 



1270 



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 



1271 



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. 



1272 



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. 



1273 



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 



1274 



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 



1275 



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 



1276 



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. 



1277 



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 



1278 



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. 



1279 



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 



1280 



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! 



1281 



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. ... 



1282 



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! 



1283 



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! 



1284 



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! 



1285 



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. 



1286 



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. 



1287 



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! 



1288 



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.") 



1289 



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. 



1290 



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 



1291 



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 - 



1292 



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! 



1293 



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 



1294 



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. 



1295 



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. 



1296 



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. 



1297 



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 



1298 



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. 



1299 



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 



1300 



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. 



1301 



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. 



1302 



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. 



1303 



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 



1304 



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. 



1305 



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! 



1306 



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 



1307 



Of horror and death are penned. 
For the hounds of Time to rend. 



1308 



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. 



1309 



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. 



1310 



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; 



1311 



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? 



1312 



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? 



1313 



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. 



1314 



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. 



1315 



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." ) 



1316 



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 



1317 



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. 



1318 



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! 



1319 



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. 



1320 



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." 



1321 



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! 



1322 



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. 



1323 



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. 



1324 



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. 



1325 



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. 



1326 



While thy stern fathers 'neath the mould 
Make blest thy sacred ground. 



1327 



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. 



1328 



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. 



1329 



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! 



1330 



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. 



1331 



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. 



1332 



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. 



1333 



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. 



1334 



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. 



1335 



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! 



1336 



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. 



1337 



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. 



1338 



(This poem is about the house at 135 Benefit Street in Providence that also 
inspired the short story "The Shunned House".) 



1339 



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.") 



1340 



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; 



1341 



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 



1342 



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. 



1343 



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; 



1344 



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. 



1345 



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. 



1346 



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. 



1347 



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 



1348 



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. 



1349 



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; 



1350 



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! 



1351 



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! 



1352 



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. 



1353 



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; 



1354 



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. 



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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. 



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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. 

II 

"Shantih, shantih, shantih"..." Shanty House" 
Was the name of a novel by I forget whom 



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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. 

Ill 

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. 



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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? 

IV 

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 



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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.") 



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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. 



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