DAGON

By H. P. Lovecraft (1917)

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 coast-line 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 vastnesses 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
awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish
black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I
could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.

Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at
so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality
more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil
a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with
the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw
protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not
hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in
absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and
nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of
the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a
nauseating fear.

The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its
cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I
crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain
my position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the
ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for
innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery
depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me,
that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears
as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.

For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side
and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day
progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry
sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little,
and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water,
preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible
rescue.

On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The
odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver
things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day
I forged steadily westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher
than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on
the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object
seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I
attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it
had appeared from a distance; an intervening valley setting it out in sharper
relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of
the hill.

I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and
fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake
in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had
experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the
moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the
parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt
quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up
my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.

I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling 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 of 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 foot-holds 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 an hundred yards ahead of me; an
object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending
moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but
I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not
altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I
cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an
abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young,
I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped
monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the
worship of living and thinking creatures.

Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist’s or
archaeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon,
now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that
hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water
flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost
lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed
the base of the Cyclopean monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both
inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics
unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for
the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi,
crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously
represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but
whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.
It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound.
Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size,
were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a
Doré. I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a
certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn 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 shewn 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 know that I heard peals of
thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.
When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought
thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in
mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been
given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew
nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they
could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him
with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the
Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not
press my inquiries.
It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the
thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has
drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having
written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of
my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure
phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open
boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever
does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of
the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very
moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their
ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine
obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above
the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-
exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean
floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body
lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The
window!
 NYARLATHOTEP
By H. P. Lovecraft (1920)

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 daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the
autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and
perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to
that of gods or forces which were unknown.
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could
tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin
knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out
of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages
from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep,
swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and
metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of
the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power
which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to
exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and
shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours
were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of
nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they
could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less
horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding
under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.
I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city—the great, the old, the
terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the
impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with
eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were
horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; that what was
thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but
Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the sputter of his sparks there was
taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed
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 drave 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 sware 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 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 shew 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 felt a chill which was not of the hot
autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the
hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept
asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering
walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf.
I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I
thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions
vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had
gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid,
into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.
Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A
sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled
blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with
sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them
flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen
columns of unsanctified 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.
 THE NAMELESS CITY
By H. P. Lovecraft (1921)

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling 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-grandmother 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 ever 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 on the night before he sang his unexplainable
couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even 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 roseal 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 the desert still. Then suddenly above the desert’s far rim came the
blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing
away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there
came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from
the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my
camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal stone place; that place too old for
Egypt and Meroë to remember; that place which I alone of living men had
seen.

In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and palaces I

wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of those men, if men
they were, who built the 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 awaked 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 the 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 splendours 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 Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind
existed.

All at once I came upon a place where the bed-rock 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 since effaced any carvings which may have been
outside.

Very low and sand-choked were all of 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 nor frescoes, there were
many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The
lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly more
than kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch shewed only part
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 other 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 moon-cast 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 of 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 primeval 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 I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and
judged it was a normal thing. I decided that 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 about the
weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till
finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral
stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as
though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but
not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone
I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those
I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern, since it bore winds
from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the
stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and
roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient
race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away;
and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned
curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of
the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric
cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been
vast.

Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame shewed me that for 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 foot-holds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling
with mad thoughts, and the words and warnings of Arab prophets seemed to
float across the desert from the lands that men know to the nameless city that
men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only 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 had 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
feet first along the rocky floor, holding my 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 high above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with
that instinct for the strange and the unknown which has 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 daemoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab,
paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines
from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer
extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him
down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord
Dunsany’s tales—“the unreverberate 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 darkness, black

As witches’ cauldrons are, when fill’d
With moon-drugs in th’ eclipse distill’d
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro’ that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish’d o’er
With that dark pitch the Sea of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.”
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 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 the
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 on stumbling ahead into
the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was
no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the
most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and
pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural painting whose lines and
colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood,
with fronts of exquisite glass, and contained 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 evidently flexible feet curiously like human hands
and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour
violating all known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well
compared—in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the
bulldog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had so
colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and
the alligator-like jaw placed the 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 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
the 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 thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the
nameless city; the tale of a mighty sea-coast 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 afterward 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 through the rocks in
some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told
them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connexion with the awesome
descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognised the passages.
As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light 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 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 civilisation, which
included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those
immeasurably later civilisations 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 shewn concerning natural death. It was as though
an ideal of earthly immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage were 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 or 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, a golden nimbus hovering over
the fallen walls and half revealing the splendid perfection of former times,
shewn 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 anti-climax. The paintings were less skilful, 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 about 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 the end
of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a great 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 as one
might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of
sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright
in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight
of steps—small numerous steps like those of the 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 vegetation 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 should 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 had involved a crawling in
imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain
why the level passage 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
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, hills, and valleys in this lower realm, and my
fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the
physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and
antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another
world of eerie 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
in 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 outline. Of what could have happened in the
geological aeons 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 and 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 much 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 soon it 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 served to reveal the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my
watch and saw that sunrise was near, so braced myself to resist the gale which
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 that 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
other human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces
by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there
seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely
impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last—I was almost mad—but
if I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths.
I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even
hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown
world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped, for I fell to babbling over and
over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of
the nameless city:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place—what
indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon
guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night-
wind till oblivion—or worse—claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was
the thing—too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the
silent damnable small hours 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 those 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-peopled blackness 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.
 AZATHOTH
By H. P. Lovecraft (1922)
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 earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save
of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these
things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was
a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s
dreams had fled.
Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of the
waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know
that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he
toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room
whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on 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 far out and
peered aloft at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and
windows must soon drive to madness a man 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 greyness of 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 existence no common eye suspects. 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 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
with 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 deeps. Noiseless infinity eddied
around the dreamer and wafted him away without even touching the body
that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men’s
calendars the tides of far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which
he longed; the dreams that men have lost. And in the course of many cycles
they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore; a green shore fragrant
with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes.
 THE HOUND
By H. P. Lovecraft (1922)

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 eldritch
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 sombre
philosophy of the Decadents could hold us, and this we found potent only by
increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire
and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us
only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and
adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that
detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and
timidity—that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of
grave-robbing.

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even

partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared
in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our
museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste
of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite
our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far underground; where huge
winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning
mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into
kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand
woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the
odours 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, life-like 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 unnamable drawings which it was
rumoured 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, that 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 rumour and legendry, the tales of one buried for five
centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent
thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments—
the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the
grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the
crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against
the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid
sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in
a distant corner; the odours 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 selfsame spot, torn and
mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.

I remembered how we delved in this 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 odours, 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 on
its features was repellent in the extreme, savouring 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 recognised it as
the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible
Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described
by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some
obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and
gnawed at the dead.

Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-
eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened
from that 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.

II.

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 frequent fumblings 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 alone—that
same curiously disturbed 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
strangely scented candles before it. We read much in Alhazred’s
Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghouls’ souls to
the objects it symbolised; 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 that night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to
us a certain and dreaded reality. Four days later, whilst we were both in the
hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the single door
which led to the secret library staircase. Our alarm was now divided, for
besides our fear of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread that our
grisly collection might be discovered. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to
the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable
rush of air, and heard as if receding far away a queer combination of rustling,
tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our
senses, we did not try to determine. We only realised, 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 dramatise 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 windswept 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 distant 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-litten moor a wide nebulous shadow sweeping
from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the
ground. When I arose trembling, I know not how much later, I staggered into
the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of
green jade.

Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on
the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by
fire and burial the rest of the impious collection in the museum. But after three
nights I heard the baying again, and before a week was over felt strange eyes
upon me whenever it was dark. One evening as I strolled on Victoria
Embankment for some needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one of the
reflections of the lamps in the water. A wind stronger than the night-wind
rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St. John must soon befall me.

The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland.
What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I
knew not; but I felt that I must at least try any step conceivably logical. What
the hound was, and why it 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
neighbourhood. 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 above the usual clamour of drunken voices a faint, deep, insistent note
as of a gigantic hound.

So at last I stood again in that unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter

moon cast hideous shadows, and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the
withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a
jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from
over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it
ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and
frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been hovering
curiously around it.

I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and
apologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I
attacked the half-frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of
a dominating will outside myself. Excavation was much easier than I expected,
though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture
darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth until
I killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box
and removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last rational act I ever
performed.

For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed

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 night-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 circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my
revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and
unnamable.
 THE FESTIVAL
By H. P. Lovecraft (1925)

“Efficiunt Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen

quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.”
—Lactantius.

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the
twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill
where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars
of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I
pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared
lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very
ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts
it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It
was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my
people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was
forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once
every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine
were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three
hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark
furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another
tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they
were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could
understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing
town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.
Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming;
snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-
pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless
labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central
peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and
scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity
hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs;
fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk
to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea
pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in
the elder time.

Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept,
and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck
ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.
The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant
horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of
mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.

As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds of
a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and
felt that these old Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange to
me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for
merriment or look for wayfarers, but 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 story, 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 overhanging part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in a tunnel,
with the low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no sidewalk,
but many houses had high doors reached by double flights of steps with iron
railings. It was an odd scene, and because I was strange to New England I had
never known its like before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it
better if there had been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and
a few windows without drawn curtains.

When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been
gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the
bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the silence in that aged town
of curious customs. And when my knock was answered I was fully afraid,
because I had not heard any footsteps before the door creaked open. But I was
not afraid long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland
face that reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote
a quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.

He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters and
dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid
there, for not an attribute was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and a
spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper and deep poke-
bonnet sat back toward me, silently spinning despite the festive season. An
indefinite dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled that no fire
should be blazing. The high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows
at the left, and seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like
everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This fear grew
stronger from what had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the old
man’s bland face the more its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never
moved, and the skin was too 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 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 Marvells of Science, the terrible
Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking
Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the
unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus
Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of
which I had heard monstrous things whispered. No one spoke to me, but I
could hear the creaking of signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel
as the bonneted old woman continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought
the room and the books and the people very morbid and disquieting, but
because an old tradition of my fathers had summoned me to strange feastings,
I resolved to expect queer things. So I tried to read, and soon became
tremblingly absorbed by something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a
thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness. But I disliked it
when I fancied I heard the closing of one of the windows that the settle faced,
as if it had been stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring that was
not of the old woman’s spinning-wheel. This was not much, though, for the old
woman was spinning very hard, and the aged clock had been striking. After
that I lost the feeling that there were persons on the settle, and was reading
intently and shudderingly when the old man came back booted and dressed in
a loose antique costume, and sat down on that very bench, so that I could not
see him. It was certainly nervous waiting, and the blasphemous book in my
hands made it doubly so. When eleven struck, however, the old man stood up,
glided to a massive carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks; one
of which he donned, and the other of which he draped round the old woman,
who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the
outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking up the
very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood over that
unmoving face or mask.

We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly
ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one
by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that
poured silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this
street and that, past the creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched
roofs and diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where
decaying houses overlapped and crumbled together, gliding across open
courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken
constellations.

Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows

that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that
seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and hearing never a word.
Up, up, up the eerie 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 lanthorn 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. Then I finally went, the sinister man and the old
spinning woman before me. Crossing the threshold into that swarming temple
of unknown darkness, I turned once to look at the outside world as the
churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on the hill-top 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 white pews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely
open just before the pulpit, and were now squirming noiselessly in. I followed
dumbly down the footworn steps and into the dank, suffocating crypt. The tail
of that sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them
wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed
that the tomb’s floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and
in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn
stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that wound
endlessly down into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls of dripping
stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, and I
observed after a horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in
nature, as if chiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that
the myriad footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons
of descent I saw some side passages or burrows leading from unknown
recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became
excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their
pungent odour of decay grew quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed
down through the mountain and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I
shivered that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.

Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious lapping
of sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the things that the night
had brought, and wished bitterly that no forefather had summoned me to this
primal rite. As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard another sound,
the thin, whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out
before me the boundless vista of an inner world—a vast fungous shore litten
by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river
that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs
of immemorial ocean.

Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools,

leprous fire, and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle
around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to
survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the
snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the Stygian grotto
I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the
water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in
the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far
away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I
thought I heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I
could not see. But what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting
volcanically from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as
healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone above 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 semicircle 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 nor 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 membraneous wings; and as
they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted
them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into
pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and
undiscoverable cataracts.

The old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man remained
only because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an animal and ride
like the rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that the amorphous flute-player
had rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts were patiently standing by.
As I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that he
was the true deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this
ancient place; that it had been decreed I should come back, and that the most
secret mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient
hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a
watch, both with my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But it was
a hideous proof, because I knew from old papers that that watch had been
buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.

Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family
resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face
was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now scratching
restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless
himself. When one of the things began to waddle and edge away, he turned
quickly to stop it; so that the suddenness of his motion dislodged the waxen
mask from what should have been his head. And then, because that
nightmare’s position barred me from the stone staircase down which we had
come, I flung myself into the oily underground river that bubbled somewhere
to the caves of the sea; flung myself into that putrescent juice of earth’s inner
horrors before the madness of my screams could bring down upon me all the
charnel legions these pest-gulfs might conceal.

At the hospital they told me I had been found half frozen in Kingsport Harbour
at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told
me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night before, and fallen over
the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced from prints found in the snow.
There was nothing I could say, because everything was wrong. Everything was
wrong, with the broad window shewing 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 again that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was
indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might;
and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no one—in
waking hours—who could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with
terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph,
put into such English as I can make from the awkward Low Latin.

“The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the fathoming of
eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground
where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held
by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no
wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For
it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel
clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption
horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and
swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s
pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
 THE CALL OF CTHULHU
By H. P. Lovecraft (1926)

(Found Among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

“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 deadly light into the peace
and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle

wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted
at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a
bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of
forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I
dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper
item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish
this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so
hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent
regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had
not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death of
my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic
Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell
was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently
been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at
the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was
intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been
stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses
said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from
one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short
cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians
were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate
that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep
a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no
reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and
more than wonder.

As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was

expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose
moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the
material which I correlated will be later published by the American
Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly
puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been
locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal
ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded
in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and
more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay
bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found?
Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial
impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this
apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by
six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far
from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of
cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that
cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind
the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite
much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way
to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent,

though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It
seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form
which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat
extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a
dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the
thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with
rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it
most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a
Cyclopean architectural background.

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings,
in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style.
What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in
characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so
unheard-of. The manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which
was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St.,
Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121
Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof.
Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them
accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations
from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot’s Atlantis and
the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies
and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and
anthropological source-books as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s
Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental
illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears
that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect
had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was
then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony
Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him as the youngest son of an excellent
family slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the
Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near
that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great
eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange
stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself
“psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city
dismissed him as merely “queer”. Never mingling much with his kind, he had
dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small
group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious
to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor
abruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in
identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted
manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed
some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied
kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which
impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of
a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation,
and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new,
indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are
older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled
Babylon.”

It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a
sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a
slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New
England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected.
Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities
of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and
sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and
from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice;
a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which
he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters,
“Cthulhu fhtagn”.

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed
Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and
studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had
found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, when waking
had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox
afterward said, for his slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial
design. Many of his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor,
especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or
societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence
which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some
widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became
convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of
cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams.
This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily
calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of
nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of
dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting
monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish.
The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters
“Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”.

On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and

inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure
sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He had
cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had
manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My
uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close
watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom
he learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling
on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of
them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed,
but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked or lumbered
about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words,
as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical
with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture.
Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the
young man’s subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was
not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwise such as to
suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly ceased.
He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely
ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the night of March
22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three
days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of
strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record
of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of
thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the
scattered notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact, that
only the ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my
continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive
of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that in which
young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly
instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the
friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly
reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time
past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he must, at
the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man could
have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not
preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest.
Average people in society and business—New England’s traditional “salt of the
earth”—gave an almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of
uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always
between March 23d and April 2nd—the period of young Wilcox’s delirium.
Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague
description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case
there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know
that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As
it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having
asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued
to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had
possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from
aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large
proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the
dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor’s
delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and
half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the
dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward
the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The
subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and
occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and
expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some
escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead
of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and
personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few.
All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all
the objects of the professor’s questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It
is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.

The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and
eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a
cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and the sources
scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London,
where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here
likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a
fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A despatch from
California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for
some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak
guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies
multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American
officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and
New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of
March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and
a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous “Dream
Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the
recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the
medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified
conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely
envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then
convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters mentioned by
the professor.
II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so
significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long
manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish
outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as
“Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small
wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.

The earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the
American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor
Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent
part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the
several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions
for correct answering and problems for expert solution.

The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the
entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had
travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information
unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse,
and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject
of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette
whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that
Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his
wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations.
The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months
before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a
supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites
connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled
on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even
the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic
and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely
nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any
antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and
through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.

Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering
created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men
of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding
around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air
of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic
vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet
centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and
greenish surface of unplaceable stone.

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and
careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely
artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline,
but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly,
rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long,
narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and
unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted
evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable
characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat
occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up,
crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way
down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent
forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore
paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. The aspect of the whole
was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so
totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable;
yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to
civilisation’s youth—or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart,
its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its
golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology
or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no
member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning
in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic
kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly
remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully
suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our
conceptions have no part.

And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at
the Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected
a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who
presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was
the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton
University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been
engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search
of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on
the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of
degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled
him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of
which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with
shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before
ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there
were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or
tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from
an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as
best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this
cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped
high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of
stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he
could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing
now lying before the meeting.
This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled
members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once
to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual
among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the
professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the
diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details,
and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed
on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many
worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and
the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something
very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in
the phrase as chanted aloud:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his
mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them
the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:

“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse

related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling
a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It
savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed
an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and
pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.

On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic
summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters
there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte’s men, were
in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them
in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than
they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared
since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the
black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts
and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the
frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out
in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the
passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the
terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant
hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank
stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation
a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to
create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in
sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing
lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead;
and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A
reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond
endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each
one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch
toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen
colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them
had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute,
substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of
a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless
white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-
winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight.
They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the
Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was
nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they
knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the
merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence
perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than
the shocking sounds and incidents.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men
as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the
muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal
qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source
should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped
themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore
and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from
the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and
from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in sing-
song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came
suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and
two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy
fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the
fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.

In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre’s

extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more
indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola
could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and
writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which,
revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite
monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its
diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten
scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre
hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who
had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped
and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right
in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which
induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal
responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the
wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met
and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so
far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining
eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose
he had been hearing too much native superstition.

Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration.
Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel
celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged
determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and
chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and
escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-
seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line
between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two
severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their
fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed
and carried back by Legrasse.

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the

prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally
aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes,
largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a
colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions
were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than
negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the
creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their
loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there
were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old
Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies
had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had
never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and
always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world
until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty
city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath
his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret
cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could
not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of
earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were
not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol
was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were
precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told
by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—that was never
spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at
R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest
were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders,
and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had
come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But
of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the
police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named
Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying
leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of
theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed.
There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had
great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him,
were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all
died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could
revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the
cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and
brought Their images with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of
flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove
it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They
could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were
wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would
never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh,
preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the
stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some
force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that
preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move,
and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions
of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their
mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their
tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones
spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus
could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols
which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark
stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret
priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and
resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind
would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good
and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing
and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways
to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame
with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate
rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the
prophecy of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with
its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep
waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can
pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-
priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came
out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim
rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old
Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of
persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old
Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he
thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the
City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European
witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever
really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double
meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the
initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain
concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the
truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane
University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective
had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than
the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroborated

as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of
those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications
of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional
charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor
Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him and remains in his
possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and
unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.

That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what
thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had
learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the
figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland
devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise
words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel
Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmost
thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young
Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented
a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle’s
expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were,
of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the
extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most
sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and
correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative
of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the
rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.

Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous
Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts
its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and
under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him
at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered
about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some
time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in
clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which
Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse
and in painting.

Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock

and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he
displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his
strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not
enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw
him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he
spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their
subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me
a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of
its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing
except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves
insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of
in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my
uncle’s relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove
to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird
impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with
terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose
geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy
the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”,
“Cthulhu fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told
of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply
moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in
some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally
weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had
found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible
statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very
innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-
mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit
both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all
the success his talent promises.

The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions
of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New
Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw
the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still
survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now
heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed
confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure
that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion
whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was
still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with
almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd
cuttings collected by Professor Angell.

One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle’s
death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an
ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from
a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-
members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods
and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and
beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a
certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my
uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think
Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to
learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have
learned much now.

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 Paterson, New Jersey; the
curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the
reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the
museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread
beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend
has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-
tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse
had found in the swamp.

Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail;
and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested,
however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully
tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:

MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New
Zealand Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of
Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of
Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow.

The Morrison Co.’s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this
morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled
but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April
12th in S. Latitude 34° 21′, W. Longitude 152° 17′ with one living and one dead
man aboard.

The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven
considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster
waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently
deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious
condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week.
The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a
foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the
Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete
bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in
a small carved shrine of common pattern.

This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of
piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence,
and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland,
which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The
Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the
great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51′, W.
Longitude 128° 34′, encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking
crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back,
Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and
without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The Emma’s men shewed fight,
says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath
the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her,
grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill
them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly
abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.

Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were
killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to
navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if
any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they
raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that
part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen
is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling
into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht
and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd.
From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he
does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden’s death
reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure.
Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an
island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned
by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to
the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just
after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent
gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is
described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry
on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made
to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of
ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu
Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What
motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about
with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the
Emma’s crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive?
What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation brought out, and what was known
of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and
more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now
undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my
uncle?

March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the

earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome
crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other
side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank
Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of
the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown
island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men
assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s
malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed
suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which
all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the
bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro
about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult
and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors
beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone,
for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous
menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.

That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu
and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin;
where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members
who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common
for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these
mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted
on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with
yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at
Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his
wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends
no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to
give me his Oslo address.

After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members
of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use,
at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal
bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings,
and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I
studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship,
and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness
of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the
curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the
world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro
had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They had come from the stars,
and had brought Their images with Them.”

Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now
resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at
once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim
wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’s address, I discovered, lay in
the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo
during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as “Christiana”. I
made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of
a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black
answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told
me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had
broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left
a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he said—written in English,
evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a
walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers
falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once
helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead.
Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble
and a weakened constitution.

I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I,
too, am at rest; “accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my
connexion with her husband’s “technical matters” was sufficient to entitle me
to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the
London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-
facto diary—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot
attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will
tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel’s
sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.

Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and
the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that
lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed
blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and
favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world
whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to
the sun and air.

Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The

Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full
force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the
sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control,
the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd,
and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking.
Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There
was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their
destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the
charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the
court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under
Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea,
and in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line of
mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less
than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-
city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast,
loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great
Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last,
after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the
sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of
liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he
soon saw enough!

I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned

citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters.
When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost
wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic
majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed
without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the
unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the
great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues
and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is
poignantly visible in every line of the mate’s frightened description.

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very

close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite
structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and
stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for
this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk
about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful
dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was
abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and
dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing
whilst gazing at the terrible reality.

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous

Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have
been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when
viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked
perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily
elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after
the first shewed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything
more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled
had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that
they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and
shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at
the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was,
Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door
because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could
not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-
door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One
could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the
relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt
over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went.
He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one
would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men
wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and
slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that
it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along
the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession
of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it
moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and
perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness
was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as
ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-
long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the
shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising
from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared
Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone
listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into
sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black
doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six
men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that
accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for
such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions
of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God!
What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor
Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the
green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were
right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of
innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu
was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God
rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera,
and Ångstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over
endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was
swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an
angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and
Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the
mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated
floundering at the edge of the water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all
hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish
rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way.
Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to
churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was
not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like
Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied
Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with
vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went
mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him
one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely
overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance;
and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed
the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and
as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel
head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the
stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came
nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on
relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness
as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound
that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was
befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a
venomous seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity
of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original
form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus
from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and
attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his
side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had
taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a
gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral
whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling
universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon
and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus
of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps
of Tartarus.

Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the
streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the
Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad. He would write of what
he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a
boon if only it could blot out the memories.

That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside
the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of
mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope
may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe
has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer
must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As
my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the
cult still lives.

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has
shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more,
for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on
earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely
places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss,
or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who
knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.
Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the
tottering cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let
me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution
before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
 THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE
By H. P. Lovecraft (1927)

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 gentler 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 the
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 be 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, and ceased to wonder at anything besides its own
elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there.
The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New
England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them,
and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of
decay.

In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little
hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only
one 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
those 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 curving
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 answers, except that all the mystery was
much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at
all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in
the ’eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not
be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce’s
crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone
in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It
was a fearsomely archaic 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
I 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
grasped quite as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham.
He was not like other rustics I had 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 shewed; 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 despite the summer day. Often I had
to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew
only by a fading parrot memory of professors’ talk, or bridge over gaps where
his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not
wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would
not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel,
unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day
returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos
of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath
where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The
reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever
under watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that
country by night—at least, not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing
could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.

It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had
been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western
woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic
where the devil held court beside a curious stone 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 had 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 shewing no occluded gases
when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon
proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including
that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable,
and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow
cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon
heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known
colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new
elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of
science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.

Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water
did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia
merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had
difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognised some solvents as I
mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia 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 shew 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 Widmannstätten 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 certainly 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
imbedded 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 brittleness 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 had been. Aside from
being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling
slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in
air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it
presented no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the
college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was
nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered
with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.

That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to
Nahum’s the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone,
magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for
it had “drawn the lightning”, as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six
times within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front
yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the
ancient well-sweep, half-choked with 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 of bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons
and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to
connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and
thanked heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the
road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual,
and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family, too,
seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their churchgoing
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
Corners. 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 the horses near
Nahum’s house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for
a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.

People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum’s than it did
anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter’s
general store at Clark’s Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner’s in the
morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by
the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and
they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes
were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen
as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see
the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to
sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned,
and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum’s ground.
Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from
the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter
to them.

One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore
were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd,
but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and odour 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 aërolite
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 a half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had
been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shewn 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 shewed 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 connexion with these
saxifrages.

April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of
the road past Nahum’s which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the
vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and
through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a
bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of
the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in
the green grass and leafage; but everywhere 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 neighbours 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 all 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 the trouble
ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to
the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular
quality of brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the
place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the
Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do
their errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally,
and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner’s madness stole
around.

It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor’s fall, and the poor
woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her
raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns.
Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which
were not wholly sounds. Something was taken away—she was being drained
of something—something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be—
someone must make it keep off—nothing was ever still in the night—the walls
and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let
her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others.
Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew
afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him,
he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and
crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad
notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was
the case with the nearby vegetation.

It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had
aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had
been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when
Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland
deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be
quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and
each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi
for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and
whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while
the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the
hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning
grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were
greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The
asters and goldenrod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas
and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that
Nahum’s oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died
about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.

By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and
Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil.
His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a
constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school
opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who
first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that
was not exactly foetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig
another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum,
however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to
strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted
supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and
ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the
aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if
they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a
certain and familiar doom.

Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a
pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and
sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about “the moving colours
down there”. Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave
about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and
hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his
mother’s. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked
doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in
some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully
imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the
brother who had been his greatest playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced.
Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and
noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to
undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of
course useless, and Nahum was at his wit’s end. No rural veterinary would
approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled.
The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they
died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very
inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then
something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would
be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or
disintegrations were common. In the last stages—and death was always the
result—there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the
hogs. There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a
locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could have brought
the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It must
be only natural disease—yet what disease could wreak such results was
beyond any mind’s guessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal
surviving on the place, for the stock and poultry were dead and the dogs had
run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanished one night and were
never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going
was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs.
Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.

On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi’s house with

hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it
had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the
railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There
could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked
door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his
wife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did
so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and
the very presence of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and
unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance,
and did what he might to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas
needed no calming. He had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and
obey what his father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very
merciful. Now and then Merwin’s screams were answered faintly from the
attic, and in response to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting
very feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get away; for not even
friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the
vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It
was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things
were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he been able to connect and
reflect upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have turned a total
maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and
the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.

Three days later Nahum lurched 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 bail and twisted iron hoops beside it,
both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all.
Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had
reached home and heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and
there would be no use in telling the people around, who shunned all Gardners
now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at
everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was
creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt 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 on the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and
after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.

It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the
crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked
floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had
to retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air.
When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it
more clearly he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a
momentary cloud eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself
brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced
before his eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have
thought of the globule in the meteor that the geologist’s hammer had
shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it
was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him,
and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and
the livestock. But the terrible thing about this horror was that it very slowly
and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.

Ammi would give me no added particulars to this scene, but the shape in the
corner 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 steps—and merciful heaven! . . . the faint but unmistakable luminosity
of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike!

Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi’s horse outside, followed
at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse
and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark
stairs to guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been
another sound out there. A sort of liquid splash—water—it must have been
the well. He had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy-wheel must have brushed
the coping and knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed
in that detestably ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it
built before 1670, and the gambrel roof not 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 force, 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 o’ smoke . . . jest like the flowers
last spring . . . the well shone at night . . . Thad an’ Mernie 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 that 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 gits 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 senct I
fed her . . . it’ll git her ef we ain’t keerful . . . jest a colour . . . her face is gettin’
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 horse had run away. He had looked at it
through the window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim.
Then the lurching buggy had not dislodged anything after all—the splash had
been something else—something which went into the well after it had done
with poor Nahum. . . .
When Ammi reached his house the horse 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
livestock. 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 smaller animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed
inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who descended on hand-holds
with a long pole found that he could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the
mud of the floor without meeting any solid obstruction.

Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then,
when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone
went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent
light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The
men were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing
common element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown
disease of livestock 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 analyse it. But what peculiar
madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so
similar—and the fragments shewed 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 aërolite 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 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 daemoniac tint.

It does credit to the alertness of Ammi’s mind that he puzzled even at that
tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but
wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the
daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal
exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted
landscape. It wasn’t right—it was against Nature—and he thought of those
terrible last words of his stricken friend, “It come from some place whar things
ain’t as they is here . . . one o’ them professors said so. . . .”

All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, were
now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door to
do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. “Dun’t go out thar,”
he whispered. “They’s more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin’
lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some’at growed
from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago
June. Sucks an’ burns, he said, an’ is jest a cloud of colour like that light out
thar now, that ye can hardly see an’ can’t tell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds
on everything livin’ an’ gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it this last
week. It must be somethin’ from away off in the sky like the men from the
college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it’s made an’ the way it
works ain’t like no way o’ God’s world. It’s some’at from beyond.”

So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and
the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an
awful moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four
monstrous sets of fragments—two from the house and two from the well—in
the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from
the slimy depths in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse,
forgetting how uninjured he himself was after the clammy brushing of that
coloured vapour in the attic room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted
as he did. No one will ever know what was abroad that night; and though the
blasphemy from beyond had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind,
there is no telling what it might not have done at that last moment, and with
its seemingly increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon
to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.

All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The
others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the
point at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need
for words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer,
and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in
whispering later on that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It
is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening.
One did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even
the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe
on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that
tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were
moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in
convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently
in the noxious air as if jerked by some alien 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 treetop height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed
radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that came
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 recognise 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 a
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 realised that the span of frantic greys had broke their
sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.

The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were
exchanged. “It spreads on everything organic that’s been around here,”
muttered the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in
the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something
intangible. “It was awful,” he added. “There was no bottom at all. Just ooze
and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking under there.” Ammi’s horse
still pawed and screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned
its owner’s faint quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. “It come from
that stone . . . it growed down thar . . . it got everything livin’ . . . it fed itself on
’em, mind and body . . . Thad an’ Mernie, 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
later 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 shewed 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. All the farm was shining with the hideous
unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as
had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all
straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of
the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house,
barn, and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest
reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned
rainbow of cryptic poison from the well—seething, feeling, lapping, reaching,
scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognisable
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 re-
closing 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 realised it would be no use waiting for the moon
to shew 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 nighted, 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 recognised 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 over half a century now since
the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the
new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the
sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I
hope the water will always be very deep—but even so, I shall never drink it. I
do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who
had been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight,
but there were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones
of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of
that nefandous well. Save for Ammi’s dead horse, which they towed away and
buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him, everything that had
ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained,
nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky
like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have
ever dared glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it “the blasted
heath”.

The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college
chemists could be interested enough to analyse the water from that disused
well, or the grey dust that no wind seems ever 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 neighbouring 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 stores 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 traveller 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 spirit 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 aërolite 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 that miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so
perhaps there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever
daemon hatchling 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 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 townfolk had forewarned. Something terrible
came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible—though
I know not in what proportion—still remains. I shall be glad to see the water
come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the
thing—and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move
away? How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum’s—“can’t git away
. . . draws ye . . . ye know summ’at’s comin’, but ’tain’t no use. . . .” Ammi is
such a good old man—when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the
chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as
the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in
troubling my sleep.
 THE HISTORY OF THE NECRONOMICON
By H. P. Lovecraft (1927)

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 Sanaá, 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 Bibliothèque 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
 THE CURSE OF YIG
By H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop (1928)

In 1925 I went into Oklahoma looking for snake lore, and I came out with a fear
of snakes that will last me the rest of my life. I admit it is foolish, since there
are natural explanations for everything I saw and heard, but it masters me
none the less. If the old story had been all there was to it, I would not have
been so badly shaken. My work as an American Indian ethnologist has
hardened me to all kinds of extravagant legendry, and I know that simple white
people can beat the redskins at their own game when it comes to fanciful
inventions. But I can’t forget what I saw with my own eyes at the insane asylum
in Guthrie.

I called at that asylum because a few of the oldest settlers told me I would find
something important there. Neither Indians nor white men would discuss the
snake-god legends I had come to trace. The oil-boom newcomers, of course,
knew nothing of such matters, and the red men and old pioneers were plainly
frightened when I spoke of them. Not more than six or seven people
mentioned the asylum, and those who did were careful to talk in whispers. But
the whisperers said that Dr. McNeill could shew me a very terrible relic and tell
me all I wanted to know. He could explain why Yig, the half-human father of
serpents, is a shunned and feared object in central Oklahoma, and why old
settlers shiver at the secret Indian orgies which make the autumn days and
nights hideous with the ceaseless beating of tom-toms in lonely places.

It was with the scent of a hound on the trail that I went to Guthrie, for I had
spent many years collecting data on the evolution of serpent-worship among
the Indians. I had always felt, from well-defined undertones of legend and
archaeology, that great Quetzalcoatl—benign snake-god of the Mexicans—
had had an older and darker prototype; and during recent months I had well-
nigh proved it in a series of researches stretching from Guatemala to the
Oklahoma plains. But everything was tantalising and incomplete, for above the
border the cult of the snake was hedged about by fear and furtiveness.

Now it appeared that a new and copious source of data was about to dawn,
and I sought the head of the asylum with an eagerness I did not try to cloak.
Dr. McNeill was a small, clean-shaven man of somewhat advanced years, and
I saw at once from his speech and manner that he was a scholar of no mean
attainments in many branches outside his profession. Grave and doubtful
when I first made known my errand, his face grew thoughtful as he carefully
scanned my credentials and the letter of introduction which a kindly old ex-
Indian agent had given me.

“So you’ve been studying the Yig legend, eh?” he reflected sententiously. “I
know that many of our Oklahoma ethnologists have tried to connect it with
Quetzalcoatl, but I don’t think any of them have traced the intermediate steps
so well. You’ve done remarkable work for a man as young as you seem to be,
and you certainly deserve all the data we can give.

“I don’t suppose old Major Moore or any of the others told you what it is I have
here. They don’t like to talk about it, and neither do I. It is very tragic and very
horrible, but that is all. I refuse to consider it anything supernatural. There’s a
story about it that I’ll tell you after you see it—a devilish sad story, but one
that I won’t call magic. It merely shews the potency that belief has over some
people. I’ll admit there are times when I feel a shiver that’s more than physical,
but in daylight I set all that down to nerves. I’m not a young fellow any more,
alas!

“To come to the point, the thing I have is what you might call a victim of Yig’s
curse—a physically living victim. We don’t let the bulk of the nurses see it,
although most of them know it’s here. There are just two steady old chaps
whom I let feed it and clean out its quarters—used to be three, but good old
Stevens passed on a few years ago. I suppose I’ll have to break in a new group
pretty soon; for the thing doesn’t seem to age or change much, and we old
boys can’t last forever. Maybe the ethics of the near future will let us give it a
merciful release, but it’s hard to tell.

“Did you see that single ground-glass basement window over in the east wing
when you came up the drive? That’s where it is. I’ll take you there myself now.
You needn’t make any comment. Just look through the moveable panel in the
door and thank God the light isn’t any stronger. Then I’ll tell you the story—or
as much as I’ve been able to piece together.”

We walked downstairs very quietly, and did not talk as we threaded the
corridors of the seemingly deserted basement. Dr. McNeill unlocked a grey-
painted steel door, but it was only a bulkhead leading to a further stretch of
hallway. At length he paused before a door marked B 116, opened a small
observation panel which he could use only by standing on tiptoe, and pounded
several times upon the painted metal, as if to arouse the occupant, whatever
it might be.

A faint stench came from the aperture as the doctor unclosed it, and I fancied
his pounding elicited a kind of low, hissing response. Finally he motioned me
to replace him at the peep-hole, and I did so with a causeless and increasing
tremor. The barred, ground-glass window, close to the earth outside, admitted
only a feeble and uncertain pallor; and I had to look into the malodorous den
for several seconds before I could see what was crawling and wriggling about
on the straw-covered floor, emitting every now and then a weak and vacuous
hiss. Then the shadowed outlines began to take shape, and I perceived that
the squirming entity bore some remote resemblance to a human form laid flat
on its belly. I clutched at the door-handle for support as I tried to keep from
fainting.
The moving object was almost of human size, and entirely devoid of clothing.
It was absolutely hairless, and its tawny-looking back seemed subtly squamous
in the dim, ghoulish light. Around the shoulders it was rather speckled and
brownish, and the head was very curiously flat. As it looked up to hiss at me I
saw that the beady little black eyes were damnably anthropoid, but I could not
bear to study them long. They fastened themselves on me with a horrible
persistence, so that I closed the panel gaspingly and left the creature to wriggle
about unseen in its matted straw and spectral twilight. I must have reeled a
bit, for I saw that the doctor was gently holding my arm as he guided me away.
I was stuttering over and over again: “B-but for God’s sake, what is it?”

Dr. McNeill told me the story in his private office as I sprawled opposite him in
an easy-chair. The gold and crimson of late afternoon changed to the violet of
early dusk, but still I sat awed and motionless. I resented every ring of the
telephone and every whir of the buzzer, and I could have cursed the nurses
and internes whose knocks now and then summoned the doctor briefly to the
outer office. Night came, and I was glad my host switched on all the lights.
Scientist though I was, my zeal for research was half forgotten amidst such
breathless ecstasies of fright as a small boy might feel when whispered witch-
tales go the rounds of the chimney-corner.

It seems that Yig, the snake-god of the central plains tribes—presumably the
primal source of the more southerly Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan—was an odd,
half-anthropomorphic devil of highly arbitrary and capricious nature. He was
not wholly evil, and was usually quite well-disposed toward those who gave
proper respect to him and his children, the serpents; but in the autumn he
became abnormally ravenous, and had to be driven away by means of suitable
rites. That was why the tom-toms in the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo country
pounded ceaselessly week in and week out in August, September, and
October; and why the medicine-men made strange noises with rattles and
whistles curiously like those of the Aztecs and Mayas.
Yig’s chief trait was a relentless devotion to his children—a devotion so great
that the redskins almost feared to protect themselves from the venomous
rattlesnakes which thronged the region. Frightful clandestine tales hinted of
his vengeance upon mortals who flouted him or wreaked harm upon his
wriggling progeny; his chosen method being to turn his victim, after suitable
tortures, to a spotted snake.

In the old days of the Indian Territory, the doctor went on, there was not quite
so much secrecy about Yig. The plains tribes, less cautious than the desert
nomads and Pueblos, talked quite freely of their legends and autumn
ceremonies with the first Indian agents, and let considerable of the lore spread
out through the neighbouring regions of white settlement. The great fear came
in the land-rush days of ’89, when some extraordinary incidents had been
rumoured, and the rumours sustained, by what seemed to be hideously
tangible proofs. Indians said that the new white men did not know how to get
on with Yig, and afterward the settlers came to take that theory at face value.
Now no old-timer in middle Oklahoma, white or red, could be induced to
breathe a word about the snake-god except in vague hints. Yet after all, the
doctor added with almost needless emphasis, the only truly authenticated
horror had been a thing of pitiful tragedy rather than of bewitchment. It was
all very material and cruel—even that last phase which had caused so much
dispute.

Dr. McNeill paused and cleared his throat before getting down to his special
story, and I felt a tingling sensation as when a theatre curtain rises. The thing
had begun when Walker Davis and his wife Audrey left Arkansas to settle in
the newly opened public lands in the spring of 1889, and the end had come in
the country of the Wichitas—north of the Wichita River, in what is at present
Caddo County. There is a small village called Binger there now, and the railway
goes through; but otherwise the place is less changed than other parts of
Oklahoma. It is still a section of farms and ranches—quite productive in these
days—since the great oil-fields do not come very close.
Walker and Audrey had come from Franklin County in the Ozarks with a
canvas-topped wagon, two mules, an ancient and useless dog called “Wolf”,
and all their household goods. They were typical hill-folk, youngish and
perhaps a little more ambitious than most, and looked forward to a life of
better returns for their hard work than they had had in Arkansas. Both were
lean, raw-boned specimens; the man tall, sandy, and grey-eyed, and the
woman short and rather dark, with a black straightness of hair suggesting a
slight Indian admixture.

In general, there was very little of distinction about them, and but for one thing
their annals might not have differed from those of thousands of other pioneers
who flocked into the new country at that time. That thing was Walker’s almost
epileptic fear of snakes, which some laid to prenatal causes, and some said
came from a dark prophecy about his end with which an old Indian squaw had
tried to scare him when he was small. Whatever the cause, the effect was
marked indeed; for despite his strong general courage the very mention of a
snake would cause him to grow faint and pale, while the sight of even a tiny
specimen would produce a shock sometimes bordering on a convulsion
seizure.

The Davises started out early in the year, in the hope of being on their new
land for the spring ploughing. Travel was slow; for the roads were bad in
Arkansas, while in the Territory there were great stretches of rolling hills and
red, sandy barrens without any roads whatever. As the terrain grew flatter, the
change from their native mountains depressed them more, perhaps, than they
realised; but they found the people at the Indian agencies very affable, while
most of the settled Indians seemed friendly and civil. Now and then they
encountered a fellow-pioneer, with whom crude pleasantries and expressions
of amiable rivalry were generally exchanged.

Owing to the season, there were not many snakes in evidence, so Walker did
not suffer from his special temperamental weakness. In the earlier stages of
the journey, too, there were no Indian snake-legends to trouble him; for the
transplanted tribes from the southeast do not share the wilder beliefs of their
western neighbours. As fate would have it, it was a white man at Okmulgee in
the Creek country who gave the Davises the first hint of Yig beliefs; a hint which
had a curiously fascinating effect on Walker, and caused him to ask questions
very freely after that.

Before long Walker’s fascination had developed into a bad case of fright. He
took the most extraordinary precautions at each of the nightly camps, always
clearing away whatever vegetation he found, and avoiding stony places
whenever he could. Every clump of stunted bushes and every cleft in the great,
slab-like rocks seemed to him now to hide malevolent serpents, while every
human figure not obviously part of a settlement or emigrant train seemed to
him a potential snake-god till nearness had proved the contrary. Fortunately
no troublesome encounters came at this stage to shake his nerves still further.

As they approached the Kickapoo country they found it harder and harder to
avoid camping near rocks. Finally it was no longer possible, and poor Walker
was reduced to the puerile expedient of droning some of the rustic anti-snake
charms he had learned in his boyhood. Two or three times a snake was really
glimpsed, and these sights did not help the sufferer in his efforts to preserve
composure.

On the twenty-second evening of the journey a savage wind made it

imperative, for the sake of the mules, to camp in as sheltered a spot as
possible; and Audrey persuaded her husband to take advantage of a cliff which
rose uncommonly high above the dried bed of a former tributary of the
Canadian River. He did not like the rocky cast of the place, but allowed himself
to be overruled this once; leading the animals sullenly toward the protecting
slope, which the nature of the ground would not allow the wagon to approach.
Audrey, examining the rocks near the wagon, meanwhile noticed a singular
sniffing on the part of the feeble old dog. Seizing a rifle, she followed his lead,
and presently thanked her stars that she had forestalled Walker in her
discovery. For there, snugly nested in the gap between two boulders, was a
sight it would have done him no good to see. Visible only as one convoluted
expanse, but perhaps comprising as many as three or four separate units, was
a mass of lazy wriggling which could not be other than a brood of new-born
rattlesnakes.

Anxious to save Walker from a trying shock, Audrey did not hesitate to act, but
took the gun firmly by the barrel and brought the butt down again and again
upon the writhing objects. Her own sense of loathing was great, but it did not
amount to a real fear. Finally she saw that her task was done, and turned to
cleanse the improvised bludgeon in the red sand and dry, dead grass near by.
She must, she reflected, cover the nest up before Walker got back from
tethering the mules. Old Wolf, tottering relic of mixed shepherd and coyote
ancestry that he was, had vanished, and she feared he had gone to fetch his
master.

Footsteps at that instant proved her fear well founded. A second more, and
Walker had seen everything. Audrey made a move to catch him if he should
faint, but he did no more than sway. Then the look of pure fright on his
bloodless face turned slowly to something like mingled awe and anger, and he
began to upbraid his wife in trembling tones.

“Gawd’s sake, Aud, but why’d ye go for to do that? Hain’t ye heerd all the
things they’ve been tellin’ about this snake-devil Yig? Ye’d ought to a told me,
and we’d a moved on. Don’t ye know they’s a devil-god what gets even if ye
hurts his children? What for d’ye think the Injuns all dances and beats their
drums in the fall about? This land’s under a curse, I tell ye—nigh every soul
we’ve a-talked to sence we come in’s said the same. Yig rules here, an’ he
comes out every fall for to git his victims and turn ’em into snakes. Why, Aud,
they won’t none of them Injuns acrost the Canayjin kill a snake for love nor
money!

“Gawd knows what ye done to yourself, gal, a-stompin’ out a hull brood o’ Yig’s
chillen. He’ll git ye, sure, sooner or later, unlessen I kin buy a charm offen some
o’ the Injun medicine-men. He’ll git ye, Aud, as sure’s they’s a Gawd in
heaven—he’ll come outa the night and turn ye into a crawlin’ spotted snake!”

All the rest of the journey Walker kept up the frightened reproofs and
prophecies. They crossed the Canadian near Newcastle, and soon afterward
met with the first of the real plains Indians they had seen—a party of blanketed
Wichitas, whose leader talked freely under the spell of the whiskey offered
him, and taught poor Walker a long-winded protective charm against Yig in
exchange for a quart bottle of the same inspiring fluid. By the end of the week
the chosen site in the Wichita country was reached, and the Davises made
haste to trace their boundaries and perform the spring ploughing before even
beginning the construction of a cabin.

The region was flat, drearily windy, and sparse of natural vegetation, but
promised great fertility under cultivation. Occasional outcroppings of granite
diversified a soil of decomposed red sandstone, and here and there a great flat
rock would stretch along the surface of the ground like a man-made floor.
There seemed to be a very few snakes, or possible dens for them; so Audrey
at last persuaded Walker to build the one-room cabin over a vast, smooth slab
of exposed stone. With such a flooring and with a good-sized fireplace the
wettest weather might be defied—though it soon became evident that
dampness was no salient quality of the district. Logs were hauled in the wagon
from the nearest belt of woods, many miles toward the Wichita Mountains.

Walker built his wide-chimneyed cabin and crude barn with the aid of some of
the other settlers, though the nearest one was over a mile away. In turn, he
helped his helpers at similar house-raisings, so that many ties of friendship
sprang up between the new neighbours. There was no town worthy the name
nearer than El Reno, on the railway thirty miles or more to the northeast; and
before many weeks had passed, the people of the section had become very
cohesive despite the wideness of their scattering. The Indians, a few of whom
had begun to settle down on ranches, were for the most part harmless, though
somewhat quarrelsome when fired by the liquid stimulation which found its
way to them despite all government bans.

Of all the neighbours the Davises found Joe and Sally Compton, who likewise
hailed from Arkansas, the most helpful and congenial. Sally is still alive, known
now as Grandma Compton; and her son Clyde, then an infant in arms, has
become one of the leading men of the state. Sally and Audrey used to visit
each other often, for their cabins were only two miles apart; and in the long
spring and summer afternoons they exchanged many a tale of old Arkansas
and many a rumour about the new country.

Sally was very sympathetic about Walker’s weakness regarding snakes, but
perhaps did more to aggravate than cure the parallel nervousness which
Audrey was acquiring through his incessant praying and prophesying about the
curse of Yig. She was uncommonly full of gruesome snake stories, and
produced a direfully strong impression with her acknowledged masterpiece—
the tale of a man in Scott County who had been bitten by a whole horde of
rattlers at once, and had swelled so monstrously from poison that his body had
finally burst with a pop. Needless to say, Audrey did not repeat this anecdote
to her husband, and she implored the Comptons to beware of starting it on
the rounds of the countryside. It is to Joe’s and Sally’s credit that they heeded
this plea with the utmost fidelity.

Walker did his corn-planting early, and in midsummer improved his time by
harvesting a fair crop of the native grass of the region. With the help of Joe
Compton he dug a well which gave a moderate supply of very good water,
though he planned to sink an artesian later on. He did not run into many
serious snake scares, and made his land as inhospitable as possible for
wriggling visitors. Every now and then he rode over to the cluster of thatched,
conical huts which formed the main village of the Wichitas, and talked long
with the old men and shamans about the snake-god and how to nullify his
wrath. Charms were always ready in exchange for whiskey, but much of the
information he got was far from reassuring.

Yig was a great god. He was bad medicine. He did not forget things. In the
autumn his children were hungry and wild, and Yig was hungry and wild, too.
All the tribes made medicine against Yig when the corn harvest came. They
gave him some corn, and danced in proper regalia to the sound of whistle,
rattle, and drum. They kept the drums pounding to drive Yig away, and called
down the aid of Tiráwa, whose children men are, even as the snakes are Yig’s
children. It was bad that the squaw of Davis killed the children of Yig. Let Davis
say the charms many times when the corn harvest comes. Yig is Yig. Yig is a
great god.

By the time the corn harvest did come, Walker had succeeded in getting his
wife into a deplorably jumpy state. His prayers and borrowed incantations
came to be a nuisance; and when the autumn rites of the Indians began, there
was always a distant wind-borne pounding of tom-toms to lend an added
background of the sinister. It was maddening to have the muffled clatter
always stealing over the wide red plains. Why would it never stop? Day and
night, week on week, it was always going in exhaustless relays, as persistently
as the red dusty winds that carried it. Audrey loathed it more than her husband
did, for he saw in it a compensating element of protection. It was with this
sense of a mighty, intangible bulwark against evil that he got in his corn crop
and prepared cabin and stable for the coming winter.

The autumn was abnormally warm, and except for their primitive cookery the
Davises found scant use for the stone fireplace Walker had built with such care.
Something in the unnaturalness of the hot dust-clouds preyed on the nerves
of all the settlers, but most of all on Audrey’s and Walker’s. The notions of a
hovering snake-curse and the weird, endless rhythm of the distant Indian
drums formed a bad combination which any added element of the bizarre
went far to render utterly unendurable.

Notwithstanding this strain, several festive gatherings were held at one or

another of the cabins after the crops were reaped; keeping naively alive in
modernity those curious rites of the harvest-home which are as old as human
agriculture itself. Lafayette Smith, who came from southern Missouri and had
a cabin about three miles east of Walker’s, was a very passable fiddler; and his
tunes did much to make the celebrants forget the monotonous beating of the
distant tom-toms. Then Hallowe’en drew near, and the settlers planned
another frolic—this time, had they but known it, of a lineage older than even
agriculture; the dread Witch-Sabbath of the primal pre-Aryans, kept alive
through ages in the midnight blackness of secret woods, and still hinting at
vague terrors under its latter-day mask of comedy and lightness. Hallowe’en
was to fall on a Thursday, and the neighbours agreed to gather for their first
revel at the Davis cabin.

It was on that thirty-first of October that the warm spell broke. The morning
was grey and leaden, and by noon the incessant winds had changed from
searingness to rawness. People shivered all the more because they were not
prepared for the chill, and Walker Davis’ old dog Wolf dragged himself wearily
indoors to a place beside the hearth. But the distant drums still thumped on,
nor were the white citizenry less inclined to pursue their chosen rites. As early
as four in the afternoon the wagons began to arrive at Walker’s cabin; and in
the evening, after a memorable barbecue, Lafayette Smith’s fiddle inspired a
very fair-sized company to great feats of saltatory grotesqueness in the one
good-sized but crowded room. The younger folk indulged in the amiable
inanities proper to the season, and now and then old Wolf would howl with
doleful and spine-tickling ominousness at some especially spectral strain from
Lafayette’s squeaky violin—a device he had never heard before. Mostly,
though, this battered veteran slept through the merriment; for he was past
the age of active interests and lived largely in his dreams. Tom and Jennie Rigby
had brought their collie Zeke along, but the canines did not fraternise. Zeke
seemed strangely uneasy over something, and nosed around curiously all the
evening.

Audrey and Walker made a fine couple on the floor, and Grandma Compton
still likes to recall her impression of their dancing that night. Their worries
seemed forgotten for the nonce, and Walker was shaved and trimmed into a
surprising degree of spruceness. By ten o’clock all hands were healthily tired,
and the guests began to depart family by family with many handshakings and
bluff assurances of what a fine time everybody had had. Tom and Jennie
thought Zeke’s eerie howls as he followed them to their wagon were marks of
regret at having to go home; though Audrey said it must be the far-away tom-
toms which annoyed him, for the distant thumping was surely ghastly enough
after the merriment within.

The night was bitterly cold, and for the first time Walker put a great log in the
fireplace and banked it with ashes to keep it smouldering till morning. Old Wolf
dragged himself within the ruddy glow and lapsed into his customary coma.
Audrey and Walker, too tired to think of charms or curses, tumbled into the
rough pine bed and were asleep before the cheap alarm-clock on the mantel
had ticked out three minutes. And from far away, the rhythmic pounding of
those hellish tom-toms still pulsed on the chill night-wind.

Dr. McNeill paused here and removed his glasses, as if a blurring of the
objective world might make the reminiscent vision clearer.

“You’ll soon appreciate,” he said, “that I had a great deal of difficulty in piecing
out all that happened after the guests left. There were times, though—at
first—when I was able to make a try at it.” After a moment of silence he went
on with the tale.

Audrey had terrible dreams of Yig, who appeared to her in the guise of Satan
as depicted in cheap engravings she had seen. It was, indeed, from an absolute
ecstasy of nightmare that she started suddenly awake to find Walker already
conscious and sitting up in bed. He seemed to be listening intently to
something, and silenced her with a whisper when she began to ask what had
roused him.

“Hark, Aud!” he breathed. “Don’t ye hear somethin’ a-singin’ and buzzin’ and
rustlin’? D’ye reckon it’s the fall crickets?”

Certainly, there was distinctly audible within the cabin such a sound as he had
described. Audrey tried to analyse it, and was impressed with some element
at once horrible and familiar, which hovered just outside the rim of her
memory. And beyond it all, waking a hideous thought, the monotonous
beating of the distant tom-toms came incessantly across the black plains on
which a cloudy half-moon had set.

“Walker—s’pose it’s—the—the—curse o’ Yig?”

She could feel him tremble.

“No, gal, I don’t reckon he comes that away. He’s shapen like a man, except ye
look at him clost. That’s what Chief Grey Eagle says. This here’s some varmints
come in outen the cold—not crickets, I calc’late, but summat like ’em. I’d orter
git up and stomp ’em out afore they make much headway or git at the
cupboard.”
He rose, felt for the lantern that hung within easy reach, and rattled the tin
match-box nailed to the wall beside it. Audrey sat up in bed and watched the
flare of the match grow into the steady glow of the lantern. Then, as their eyes
began to take in the whole of the room, the crude rafters shook with the frenzy
of their simultaneous shriek. For the flat, rocky floor, revealed in the new-born
illumination, was one seething, brown-speckled mass of wriggling
rattlesnakes, slithering toward the fire, and even now turning their loathsome
heads to menace the fright-blasted lantern-bearer.

It was only for an instant that Audrey saw the things. The reptiles were of every
size, of uncountable numbers, and apparently of several varieties; and even as
she looked, two or three of them reared their heads as if to strike at Walker.
She did not faint—it was Walker’s crash to the floor that extinguished the
lantern and plunged her into blackness. He had not screamed a second time—
fright had paralysed him, and he fell as if shot by a silent arrow from no
mortal’s bow. To Audrey the entire world seemed to whirl about fantastically,
mingling with the nightmare from which she had started.

Voluntary motion of any sort was impossible, for will and the sense of reality
had left her. She fell back inertly on her pillow, hoping that she would wake
soon. No actual sense of what had happened penetrated her mind for some
time. Then, little by little, the suspicion that she was really awake began to
dawn on her; and she was convulsed with a mounting blend of panic and grief
which made her long to shriek out despite the inhibiting spell which kept her
mute.

Walker was gone, and she had not been able to help him. He had died of
snakes, just as the old witch-woman had predicted when he was a little boy.
Poor Wolf had not been able to help, either—probably he had not even
awaked from his senile stupor. And now the crawling things must be coming
for her, writhing closer and closer every moment in the dark, perhaps even
now twining slipperily about the bedposts and oozing up over the coarse
woollen blankets. Unconsciously she crept under the clothes and trembled.

It must be the curse of Yig. He had sent his monstrous children on All-Hallows’
Night, and they had taken Walker first. Why was that—wasn’t he innocent
enough? Why not come straight for her—hadn’t she killed those little rattlers
alone? Then she thought of the curse’s form as told by the Indians. She
wouldn’t be killed—just turned to a spotted snake. Ugh! So she would be like
those things she had glimpsed on the floor—those things which Yig had sent
to get her and enroll her among their number! She tried to mumble a charm
that Walker had taught her, but found she could not utter a single sound.

The noisy ticking of the alarm-clock sounded above the maddening beat of the
distant tom-toms. The snakes were taking a long time—did they mean to delay
on purpose to play on her nerves? Every now and then she thought she felt a
steady, insidious pressure on the bedclothes, but each time it turned out to be
only the automatic twitchings of her overwrought nerves. The clock ticked on
in the dark, and a change came slowly over her thoughts.

Those snakes couldn’t have taken so long! They couldn’t be Yig’s messengers
after all, but just natural rattlers that were nested below the rock and had been
drawn there by the fire. They weren’t coming for her, perhaps—perhaps they
had sated themselves on poor Walker. Where were they now? Gone? Coiled
by the fire? Still crawling over the prone corpse of their victim? The clock
ticked, and the distant drums throbbed on.

At the thought of her husband’s body lying there in the pitch blackness a thrill
of purely physical horror passed over Audrey. That story of Sally Compton’s
about the man back in Scott County! He, too, had been bitten by a whole bunch
of rattlesnakes, and what had happened to him? The poison had rotted the
flesh and swelled the whole corpse, and in the end the bloated thing had burst
horribly—burst horribly with a detestable popping noise. Was that what was
happening to Walker down there on the rock floor? Instinctively she felt she
had begun to listen for something too terrible even to name to herself.

The clock ticked on, keeping a kind of mocking, sardonic time with the far-off
drumming that the night-wind brought. She wished it were a striking clock, so
that she could know how long this eldritch vigil must last. She cursed the
toughness of fibre that kept her from fainting, and wondered what sort of
relief the dawn could bring, after all. Probably neighbours would pass—no
doubt somebody would call—would they find her still sane? Was she still sane
now?

Morbidly listening, Audrey all at once became aware of something which she
had to verify with every effort of her will before she could believe it; and which,
once verified, she did not know whether to welcome or dread.The distant
beating of the Indian tom-toms had ceased. They had always maddened her—
but had not Walker regarded them as a bulwark against nameless evil from
outside the universe? What were some of those things he had repeated to her
in whispers after talking with Grey Eagle and the Wichita medicine-men?

She did not relish this new and sudden silence, after all! There was something
sinister about it. The loud-ticking clock seemed abnormal in its new loneliness.
Capable at last of conscious motion, she shook the covers from her face and
looked into the darkness toward the window. It must have cleared after the
moon set, for she saw the square aperture distinctly against the background
of stars.

Then without warning came that shocking, unutterable sound—ugh!—that

dull, putrid pop of cleft skin and escaping poison in the dark. God!—Sally’s
story—that obscene stench, and this gnawing, clawing silence! It was too
much. The bonds of muteness snapped, and the black night waxed reverberant
with Audrey’s screams of stark, unbridled frenzy.

Consciousness did not pass away with the shock. How merciful if only it had!
Amidst the echoes of her shrieking Audrey still saw the star-sprinkled square
of window ahead, and heard the doom-boding ticking of that frightful clock.
Did she hear another sound? Was that square window still a perfect square?
She was in no condition to weigh the evidence of her senses or distinguish
between fact and hallucination.

No—that window was not a perfect square.Something had encroached on the

lower edge. Nor was the ticking of the clock the only sound in the room. There
was, beyond dispute, a heavy breathing neither her own nor poor Wolf’s. Wolf
slept very silently, and his wakeful wheezing was unmistakable. Then Audrey
saw against the stars the black, daemoniac silhouette of something
anthropoid—the undulant bulk of a gigantic head and shoulders fumbling
slowly toward her.

“Y’aaaah! Y’aaaah! Go away! Go away! Go away, snake-devil! Go ’way, Yig! I

didn’t mean to kill ’em—I was feared he’d be scairt of ’em. Don’t, Yig, don’t! I
didn’t go for to hurt yore chillen—don’t come nigh me—don’t change me into
no spotted snake!”

But the half-formless head and shoulders only lurched onward toward the bed,
very silently.

Everything snapped at once inside Audrey’s head, and in a second she had
turned from a cowering child to a raging madwoman. She knew where the axe
was—hung against the wall on those pegs near the lantern. It was within easy
reach, and she could find it in the dark. Before she was conscious of anything
further it was in her hands, and she was creeping toward the foot of the bed—
toward the monstrous head and shoulders that every moment groped their
way nearer. Had there been any light, the look on her face would not have
been pleasant to see.

“Take that, you! And that, and that, and that!”

She was laughing shrilly now, and her cackles mounted higher as she saw that
the starlight beyond the window was yielding to the dim prophetic pallor of
coming dawn.

Dr. McNeill wiped the perspiration from his forehead and put on his glasses
again. I waited for him to resume, and as he kept silent I spoke softly.

“She lived? She was found? Was it ever explained?”

The doctor cleared his throat.

“Yes—she lived, in a way. And it was explained. I told you there was no
bewitchment—only cruel, pitiful, material horror.”

It was Sally Compton who had made the discovery. She had ridden over to the
Davis cabin the next afternoon to talk over the party with Audrey, and had
seen no smoke from the chimney. That was queer. It had turned very warm
again, yet Audrey was usually cooking something at that hour. The mules were
making hungry-sounding noises in the barn, and there was no sign of old Wolf
sunning himself in the accustomed spot by the door.
Altogether, Sally did not like the look of the place, so was very timid and
hesitant as she dismounted and knocked. She got no answer but waited some
time before trying the crude door of split logs. The lock, it appeared, was
unfastened; and she slowly pushed her way in. Then, perceiving what was
there, she reeled back, gasped, and clung to the jamb to preserve her balance.

A terrible odour had welled out as she opened the door, but that was not what
had stunned her. It was what she had seen. For within that shadowy cabin
monstrous things had happened and three shocking objects remained on the
floor to awe and baffle the beholder.

Near the burned-out fireplace was the great dog—purple decay on the skin
left bare by mange and old age, and the whole carcass burst by the puffing
effect of rattlesnake poison. It must have been bitten by a veritable legion of
the reptiles.

To the right of the door was the axe-hacked remnant of what had been a
man—clad in a nightshirt, and with the shattered bulk of a lantern clenched in
one hand.He was totally free from any sign of snake-bite. Near him lay the
ensanguined axe, carelessly discarded.

And wriggling flat on the floor was a loathsome, vacant-eyed thing that had
been a woman, but was now only a mute mad caricature. All that this thing
could do was to hiss, and hiss, and hiss.

Both the doctor and I were brushing cold drops from our foreheads by this
time. He poured something from a flask on his desk, took a nip, and handed
another glass to me. I could only suggest tremulously and stupidly:
“So Walker had only fainted that first time—the screams roused him, and the
axe did the rest?”

“Yes.” Dr. McNeill’s voice was low. “But he met his death from snakes just the
same. It was his fear working in two ways—it made him faint, and it made him
fill his wife with the wild stories that caused her to strike out when she thought
she saw the snake-devil.”

I thought for a moment.

“And Audrey—wasn’t it queer how the curse of Yig seemed to work itself out
on her? I suppose the impression of hissing snakes had been fairly ground into
her.”

“Yes. There were lucid spells at first, but they got to be fewer and fewer. Her
hair came white at the roots as it grew, and later began to fall out. The skin
grew blotchy, and when she died—”

I interrupted with a start.

“Died? Then what was that—that thing downstairs?”

McNeill spoke gravely.

“That is what was born to her three-quarters of a year afterward. There were
three more of them—two were even worse—but this is the only one that
lived.”
 THE DUNWICH HORROR
By H. P. Lovecraft (1929)

“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 archetypes 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 at 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”

I.

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the
junction of the 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-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent
and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with
which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings
the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange
uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give
a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with
especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of
them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude
wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again
there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed
almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies
come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent
rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the
Miskatonic’s upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds
close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-
crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes
they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them.
Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream
and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of
rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of
the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that
most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-
steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of
the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there
is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint,
malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of
centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow
road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it
rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward 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 toward it have been taken down. The
scenery, judged by any 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
unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or
three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept
somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk
into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to
the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their
eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to
the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were
born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say
just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed
rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes
of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that
were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In
1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church
at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of
Satan and his imps; in which he said:
“It must be allow’d, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons
are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny’d; the cursed Voices of
Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under
Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I my self 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 cou’d raise up, and
which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can
discover, and only the Divell unlock.”

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the text,
printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported
from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone
pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from
stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain
the Devil’s Hop Yard—a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-
blade will grow. Then too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous
whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are
psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their
eerie cries in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath. If they can catch the
fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in
daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed
silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down
from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old—older by far than any
of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still
spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built
before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the
most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here,
and the nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of
all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hill-tops, 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
worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed
scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote
farmhouse had always been feared because of Old Whateley’s reputation for
black magic, and the unexplained death by violence of Mrs. Whateley when
Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to make the place popular.
Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-
dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by
household cares in a home from which all standards of order and cleanliness
had long since disappeared.

There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and
the dogs’ barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or
midwife presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week
afterward, when Old Whateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich
Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborn’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 shewed 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
hereabaouts. 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’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel
Hill!”
The only persons 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 Whateley 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
farmhouse, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic,
bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps
sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of
the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd
wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict
the visible cattle; and once or twice during the earlier months certain callers
fancied they could discern similar sores about the throats of the grey,
unshaven old man and his slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur’s birth Lavinia resumed her customary rambles in the
hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy child. Public interest in
the Whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and
no one bothered to comment on the swift development which that newcomer
seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur’s growth was indeed phenomenal, for
within three months of his birth he had attained a size and muscular power
not usually found in infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his
vocal sounds shewed 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. Afterward he could not
be sure about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a
pair of dark trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive
and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the
disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill
him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and
grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror of 1928
suggested the most valid of reasons.

The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that “Lavinny’s
black brat” had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His
speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its difference from the
ordinary accents of the region, and because it displayed a freedom from
infantile lisping of which many children of three or four might well be proud.
The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some
elusive element wholly unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The
strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he
used; but seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs
that produced the spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for
its maturity; for though he shared his mother’s and grandfather’s chinlessness,
his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large,
dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh
preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly ugly despite his
appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic
about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly
elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and
grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the
bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked
the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great
book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always
obliged to take various defensive measures against their barking menace.

III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably

increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the
unused parts of his house—a spacious, peaked-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 shew 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 story of the house, he was a no less
thorough craftsman. His mania shewed 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 story. 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 sot 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 diligently over the queer pictures and charts in his
grandfather’s books, while Old Whateley would instruct and catechise him
through long, hushed afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was
finished, and those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows
had been made into a solid 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 synchronised 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 toward 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 story. 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-
peddler tried the locked door leading to the stairway. That peddler told the
store loungers at Dunwich Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping
on that floor above. The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway,
and of the cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they
recalled tales of Old Whateley’s youth, and of the strange things that are called
out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain
heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate
and fear the whole Whateley place as violently as they hated and feared young
Wilbur personally.

In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the local
draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to
be sent to a 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, the shelves of strange books, the
sealed second story 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 tool-shed abandoned when the house was finally
repaired; and like the faint odours which he sometimes thought he caught near
the stone circles 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 farmhouse. In the course of time callers
professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper story even when all the family
were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or
bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; but nothing ever came of it, since
Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world’s attention to
themselves.

About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and
bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of
carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the sealed upper part, and
from bits of discarded lumber people concluded that the youth and his
grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic
floor, leaving only one vast open void between the ground story and the
peaked roof. They had torn down the great central chimney, too, and fitted
the rusty range with a flimsy outside tin stovepipe.

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.
Toward 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 sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the
long chant that ye’ll find on page 751 of the complete edition, an’ then put a
match to the prison. Fire from airth can’t burn it nohaow.”

He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of
whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while some
indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he added another
sentence or two.

“Feed it reg’lar, Willy, an’ mind the quantity; but dun’t let it grow too fast fer
the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth,
it’s all over an’ no use. Only them from beyont kin make it multiply an’ work. .
. . Only them, the old uns as wants to come back. . . .”

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the
whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour,
when the final throaty rattle came. Dr. Houghton drew shrunken lids over the
glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia
sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

“They didn’t git him,” he muttered in his heavy bass voice.

Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-
sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in
distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept. He was
more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain
youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was
always able to silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-
time gold which still, as in his grandfather’s time, went forth regularly and
increasingly for cattle-buying. He was now tremendously mature of aspect,
and his height, having reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax
beyond that figure. In 1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic
University called upon him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was
fully six and three-quarters feet tall.

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with
a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May-
Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie
Bishop of being afraid of him.

“They’s more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,” she said, “an’
naowadays they’s more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun’t
know what he wants nor what he’s a-tryin’ to dew.”

That Hallowe’en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on
Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical
screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed
to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After midnight their
shrill notes burst into a kind of pandaemoniac 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 country folk
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 afterward 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’s disappearance, and
very few ever approached his neighbourhood now. His height had increased
to more than seven feet, and shewed 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 Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the
University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University of 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 Osborn’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
chain.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr. Dee’s English
version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access
to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of
discovering a certain passage which would have come on the 751st page of his
own defective volume. This much he could not civilly refrain from telling the
librarian—the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph. D.
Princeton, Litt. D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who
now politely plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a
kind of formula or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and
it puzzled him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made
the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he finally
chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages;
the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous
threats to the peace and sanity of the world.

“Nor is it to be thought,” ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it, “that
man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk
of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and
the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They
walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows
the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the
gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old
Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He
knows where They have 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 engraven, but who
hath 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. Iä! 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, and after winter summer. They
wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.”

Dr. Armitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of
Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim,
hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable
matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb’s cold
clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of
another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked
to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond
all spheres of force and matter, space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his
head and began speaking in that strange, resonant fashion which hinted at
sound-producing organs unlike the run of mankind’s.

“Mr. Armitage,” he said, “I calc’late I’ve got to take that book home. They’s
things in it I’ve got to try under sarten conditions that I can’t git here, an’ 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 wa’n’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 responsiblity 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 wun’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 tri-dimensional 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! Shew 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-dimensioned earth—was Wilbur Whateley’s father? Born
on Candlemas—nine months after May-Eve of 1912, when the talk about the
queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham— What walked on the mountains
that May-Night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-
human flesh and blood?”

During the ensuing weeks Dr. Armitage set about to collect all possible data on
Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in
communication with Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended Old
Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the
grandfather’s last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich Village
failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of the
Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly, seemed to
supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and desires of the
strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks with several students of
archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many others elsewhere, gave him a
growing amazement which passed slowly through varied degrees of alarm to
a state of really acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that
something ought to be done about the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic
valley, and about the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur
Whateley.

VI.

The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928,
and Dr. Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue. He
had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley’s grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his
frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at the Widener
Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had issued warnings of
the keenest intensity to all librarians having charge of the dreaded volume.
Wilbur had been shockingly nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet
almost equally anxious to get home again, as if he feared the results of being
away long.

Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hours
of the 3d 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 afterward—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
shewed black and gaping in the moonlight. What had come had indeed
completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading
into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within.
Some instinct warned Armitage that what was taking place was not a thing for
unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with authority as he
unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice
and Dr. Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and
misgivings; and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward
sounds, except for a watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time
quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a loud
chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably
rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a dying man.

The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr. Armitage knew too well,
and the three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-
room whence the low whining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on
the light, then Armitage summoned up his courage and snapped the switch.
One of the three—it is not certain which—shrieked aloud at what sprawled
before them among disordered tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice
declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not
stumble or fall.

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor
and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the
clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and
spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping
of the expectant whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of
apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty
canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a
revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why
it had not been fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images
at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human
pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly
visualised 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 man-like hands
and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon
it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so
that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth
unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the
dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of
a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly
suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though,
it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy
began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the
abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths
protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the
symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system.
On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what
seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind
of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of
being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur,
roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians; and
terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the
thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from
some circulatory cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry. In the
tentacles this was observable as a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in
the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a
sickly greyish-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
discolouration 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 toward 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
crescendoes of unholy anticipation.

Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long,
lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate
thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the
shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs of
the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck whirring and
fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced
from sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey.

All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and leaped
nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose from the
crowd, and Dr. Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one must be
admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was thankful that the
windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and drew the dark curtains
carefully down over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived; and Dr.
Morgan, meeting them in the vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes
to postpone entrance to the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came
and the prostrate thing could be covered up.

Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not
describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before
the eyes of Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is permissible to say that,
aside from the external appearance of face and hands, the really human
element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small. When the medical
examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards,
and the monstrous odour had nearly disappeared. Apparently Whateley had
had no skull or bony skeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken
somewhat after his unknown father.

VII.

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities
were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept
from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look
up property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur Whateley.
They found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growing
rumblings beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and
the surging, lapping sounds which came increasingly from the great empty
shell formed by Whateley’s boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended
the horse and cattle during Wilbur’s absence, had developed a woefully acute
case of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded
place; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased’s living quarters,
the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a ponderous report at the
court-house 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 always paid their debts has
yet been discovered.

It was in the dark of September 9th 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 10th noticed a peculiar stench in the air. About seven
o’clock Luther Brown, the hired boy at George Corey’s, between Cold Spring
Glen and the village, rushed frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre
Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled
into the kitchen; and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were
pawing and lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they
shared with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs.
Corey.

“Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis’ Corey—they’s suthin’ ben thar! It
smells like thunder, an’ all the bushes an’ little trees is pushed back from the
rud like they’d a haouse ben moved along of it. An’ that ain’t the wust, nuther.
They’s prints in the rud, Mis’ Corey—great raound prints as big as barrel-heads,
all sunk daown 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 daown
into the rud. An’ the smell was awful, like what it is araound 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 toward 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 haff talk fer bein’ scairt! He says Ol’
Whateley’s haouse is all blowed up, with the 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 blown 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 blowed-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,
frighted 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
Whateley’s cattle ever senct Lavinny’s black brat was born. Seth he’s gone aout
naow to look at ’em, though I’ll vaow he wun’t keer ter git very nigh Wizard
Whateley’s! Cha’ncey didn’t look keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown
swath led arter it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p’inted towards
the glen rud to the village.
“I tell ye, Mis’ Corey, they’s suthin’ abroad as hadn’t orter be abroad, an’ I for
one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad eend he desarved,
is at the bottom of the breedin’ of it. He wa’n’t all human hisself, I allus says to
everybody; an’ I think he an’ Ol’ Whateley must a raised suthin’ in that there
nailed-up haouse as ain’t even so human as he was. They’s allus ben unseen
things araound Dunwich—livin’ things—as ain’t human an’ ain’t good fer
human folks.

“The graoun’ was a-talkin’ lass night, an’ towards mornin’ Cha’ncey he heerd
the whippoorwills so laoud in Col’ Spring Glen he couldn’t sleep nun. Then he
thought he heerd 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
allus 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 daown 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 new-made 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 roadsides. Whatever had burst
loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into the great sinister ravine;
for all the trees on the banks were bent and broken, and a great avenue had
been gouged in the precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a house,
launched by an avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the
almost vertical slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant,
undefinable foetor; and it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to
stay on the edge and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown
Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked
furiously at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen.
Someone telephoned the news to the Aylesbury Transcript; but the editor,
accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a humorous
paragraph about it; an item soon afterward 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 womenfolk 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 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 half way 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 organise for real
defence. In a few cases closely related families would band together and watch
in the gloom under one roof; but in general there was only a repetition of the
barricading of the night before, and a futile, ineffective gesture of loading
muskets and setting pitchforks handily about. Nothing, however, occurred
except some hill noises; and when the day came there were many who hoped
that the new horror had gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold
souls who proposed an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did
not venture to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.

When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less
huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth
Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague sounds
and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of
the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of
the road shewed 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 upward, 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 around to the
hill’s summit by safer routes they saw that the trail ended—or rather,
reversed—there.

It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and chant their
hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May-Eve and Hallowmass. Now that
very stone formed the centre of a vast space thrashed around by the
mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick and
foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined
Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. Men looked at one another
and muttered. Then they looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had
descended by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was
futile. Reason, logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only
old Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the
situation or suggested a plausible explanation.

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The
whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that
many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party telephones rang
tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice
shriek out, “Help, oh, my Gawd! . . .” and some thought a crashing sound
followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more. No one
dared do anything, and no one knew till morning whence the call came. Then
those who had heard it called everyone on the line, and found that only the
Fryes did not reply. The truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily
assembled group of armed men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of
the glen. It was horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and
monstrous prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like 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 languages 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
Sanscrit 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 massed 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 Vigenère’s Traité des
Chiffres, Falconer’s Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys’ and Thicknesse’s
eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, von
Marten, and Klüber’s Kryptographik. He interspersed his study of the books
with attacks on the manuscript 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 2nd 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 shewing 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’ collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would
kill me if he dast. I guess he won’t. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho
formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I
shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can’t break through
with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at
Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess
grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the
planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside
will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks
it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or
blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May-Eve on the
Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the
earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo
Sabaoth said I may be transfigured, there being much of outside to work on.”

Morning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful
concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table
under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as
he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he
would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he
could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then
halted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary.
Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of
either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but
soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and
menaces to man’s existence that he had uncovered.
On the morning of September 4th 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 an easy-chair in his office, but was at the manuscript
again before dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr. Hartwell, called
to see him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was
of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the diary, and
promising an explanation in due course of time.

That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sank back
exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose state;
but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her
eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the
scribbled papers and sealed them all in a great envelope, which he
immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had sufficient strength to get
home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr. Hartwell was
summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over
and over again, “But what, in God’s name, can we do?”

Dr. Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no
explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative
need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were
very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up
farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the
extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the
earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would
shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it
and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other
plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons
ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the
Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some
formula to check the peril he conjured up.

“Stop them, stop them!” 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
whiskey of Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only
telephone for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next
day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he
would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way
to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before
him.

IX.

Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich,
arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but
even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to
hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of the
stricken region. Now and then on some mountain-top a gaunt circle of stones
could be glimpsed against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn’s
store they knew something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the
annihilation of the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon
they rode around Dunwich; questioning the natives concerning all that had
occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye
ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks
in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of
disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill
seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at
the sinister altar-like stone on the summit.

At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from
Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye
tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and compare notes as far as
practicable. This, however, they found more easily planned than performed;
since no sign of the party could be found in any direction. There had been five
of them in a car, but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard.
The natives, all of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as
perplexed as Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of
something and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep
hollow that yawned close by.

“Gawd,” he gasped, “I telled ’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
perambulans in tenebris. . . . The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had
memorised, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had not
memorised. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice,
beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating
insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he relied 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 northwest. The men from
Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the increasing
rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated
the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the
glen in quest of their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in
heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet
lightning shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if
descending into the accursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the
watchers hoped that the storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by
clear weather.
It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused
babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a
frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even
whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out words, and
the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherent
form.

“Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,” the voice choked out. “It’s a-goin’ agin, an’ this time
by day! It’s aout—it’s aout an’ a-movin’ this very minute, an’ only the Lord
knows when it’ll be on us all!”

The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.

“Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heerd the ’phone a-ringin’, an’ it was
Mis’ Corey, George’s wife, that lives daown by the junction. She says the hired
boy Luther was aout drivin’ in the caows from the storm arter the big bolt,
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 furst 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 had 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 ter 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 all 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 hed blowed it over, only the wind wa’n’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 agin, 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’ ol’ Seth Bishop a-yellin’ tew, an’
Sally was shriekin’ aout that suthin’ heavy hed struck the haouse—not lightnin’
nor nothin’, but suthin’ heavy agin the front, that kep’ a-launchin’ itself agin
an’ agin, though ye couldn’t see nothin’ aout the front winders. An’ then . . .
an’ then . . .”

Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had
barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.
“An’ then . . . Sally she yelled aout, ’O help, the haouse is a-cavin’ in’ . . . an’ on
the wire we could hear a turrible crashin’, an’ a hull flock o’ screamin’ . . . jest
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’ raounded up as many able-
bodied menfolks 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—I knew it would be—but
there’s a powder in this long-distance sprayer that might make it shew 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 has 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’ acrost the lower medder
here, wadin’ the brook at the low place, an’ climbin’ through Carrier’s mowin’
and 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 shew the
right one. Courage and confidence were mounting; though the twilight of the
almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay toward 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 shewed what had passed by. Only a few moments were
consumed in surveying the ruins just around 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 toward 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 focussed the lenses with Armitage’s aid. When he did so
his cry was less restrained than Morgan’s had been.

“Gawd almighty, the grass an’ bushes is a-movin’! It’s a-goin’ up—slow-like—
creepin’ up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!”

Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing
to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all
right—but suppose they weren’t? Voices began questioning Armitage about
what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone
seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being
utterly forbidden, and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.

X.

In the end the three men from Arkham—old, white-bearded Dr. Armitage,
stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr. Morgan—ascended
the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focussing 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 around. 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 re-passed 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 this 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 vantage 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 had held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the
ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumpled to the
ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do
was moan half-inaudibly,

“Oh, oh, great Gawd . . . that . . . that . . .”

There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought
to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all
coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.

“Bigger’n a barn . . . all made o’ squirmin’ ropes . . . hull thing sort o’ shaped
like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything, with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads 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
stovepipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’ . . . all grey, with kinder blue
or purple rings . . . an’ Gawd in 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 toward the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these—
nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the
deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was
the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there
seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing
on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable
distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its
head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the
crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a
loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that
remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and
impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. “I
guess he’s sayin’ the spell,” whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the
telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious
irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visible ritual.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any

discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked
by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely
with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed
aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The
chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler
saw through the glass that they were all raising their arms in the rhythmic
incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.

The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed about
the horizon in wonder. A purplish 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 shewed 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.

“Ygnaiih . . . 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-ya-ya-ya-yahaah—e’yayayayaaaa . . . ngh’aaaaa . . . ngh’aaaa . . . h’yuh . .

. h’yuh . . . HELP! HELP! . . . ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH! . . .”

But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably
English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the
frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such
syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which
seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it
inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning-bolt shot
from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless
force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside.
Trees, grass, and underbrush 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 forever,” 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 Whateleys . . . 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 crystallised into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who
wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent heretofore,
spoke aloud.

“Fifteen year’ gone,” he rambled, “I heerd Ol’ 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 Whateleys 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 Whateleys raised it for a terrible
part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason
that Wilbur grew fast and big—but it beat him because it had a greater share
of the outsideness in it. You needn’t ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He
didn’t call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than
he did.”
 THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS
By H. P. Lovecraft (1930)

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 extent to
which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I
saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of 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 organised 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 rumours.

The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings;
though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a
letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was
essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate
instances involved—one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier,
another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and
a third centring 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 membraneous 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 summarised, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which
lurked somewhere among the remoter hills—in the deep woods of the highest
peaks, and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources.
These beings were seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were
reported by those who had ventured farther than usual up the slopes of certain
mountains or into certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even the wolves
shunned.

There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins and

barren patches, and curious circles of stones, with the grass around them worn
away, which did not seem to have been placed or entirely shaped by Nature.
There were, too, certain caves of problematical depth in the sides of the hills;
with mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with
more than an average quota of the queer prints leading both toward and away
from them—if indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated.
And worst of all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen
very rarely in the twilight of the remotest valleys and the dense perpendicular
woods above the limits of normal hill-climbing.
It would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these things
had not agreed so well. As it was, nearly all the rumours 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 bat-like 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
travellers 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 dooryards. In the final layer of legends—the layer just
preceding the decline of superstition and the abandonment of close contact
with the dreaded places—there are shocked references to hermits and remote
farmers who at some period of life appeared to have undergone a repellent
mental change, and who were shunned and whispered about as mortals who
had sold themselves to the strange beings. In one of the northeastern counties
it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to accuse eccentric and unpopular
recluses of being allies or representatives of the abhorred things.

As to what the things were—explanations naturally varied. The common name

applied to them was “those ones”, or “the old ones”, though other terms had
a local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the Puritan settlers set them
down bluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them a basis of awed
theological speculation. Those with Celtic legendry in their heritage—mainly
the Scotch-Irish element of New Hampshire, and their kindred who had settled
in Vermont on Governor Wentworth’s colonial grants—linked them vaguely
with the malign fairies and “little people” of the bogs and raths, and protected
themselves with scraps of incantation handed down through many
generations. But the Indians had the most fantastic theories of all. While
different tribal legends differed, there was a marked consensus of belief in
certain vital particulars; it being unanimously agreed that the creatures were
not native to this earth.

The Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque,
taught that the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and had
mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get
on any other world. They did not live here, said the myths, but merely
maintained outposts and flew back with vast cargoes of stone to their own
stars in the north. They harmed only those earth-people who got too near
them or spied upon them. Animals shunned them through instinctive hatred,
not because of being hunted. They could not eat the things and animals of
earth, but brought their own food from the stars. It was bad to get near them,
and sometimes young hunters who went into their hills never came back. It
was not good, either, to listen to what they whispered at night in the forest
with voices like a bee’s that tried to be like the voices of men. They knew the
speech of all kinds of men—Pennacooks, Hurons, men of the Five Nations—
but did not seem to have or need any speech of their own. They talked with
their heads, which changed colour in different ways to mean different things.

All the legendry, of course, white and Indian alike, died down during the
nineteenth century, except for occasional atavistical flareups. The ways of the
Vermonters became settled; and once their habitual paths and dwellings were
established according to a certain fixed plan, they remembered less and less
what fears and avoidances had determined that plan, and even that there had
been any fears or avoidances. Most people simply knew that certain hilly
regions were considered as highly unhealthy, unprofitable, and generally
unlucky to live in, and that the farther one kept from them the better off one
usually was. In time the ruts of custom and economic interest became so
deeply cut in approved places that there was no longer any reason for going
outside them, and the haunted hills were left deserted by accident rather than
by design. Save during infrequent local scares, only wonder-loving
grandmothers and retrospective nonagenarians ever whispered of beings
dwelling in those hills; and even such whisperers 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 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 kallikanzari 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 non-terrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles
Fort with their claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have
often visited 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 sceptical
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 now 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 tentative 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
circumstances deserving investigation, however little it might have to do with
the fantastic causes he assigned. Later on I received from him certain material
proofs which placed the matter on a somewhat different and bewilderingly
bizarre basis.

I cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible, the long letter in
which Akeley introduced himself, and which formed such an important
landmark in my own intellectual history. It is no longer in my possession, but
my memory holds almost every word of its portentous message; and again I
affirm my confidence in the sanity of the man who wrote it. Here is the text—
a text which reached me in the cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who
had obviously not mingled much with the world during his sedate, scholarly
life.

R.F.D. #2,
Townshend, Windham Co.,
Vermont.
May 5, 1928.

Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq.,

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 57) 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. Elliot
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 arguing with
you, in the Rutland Herald, and guess I know about where your controversy
stands at the present time.

What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are nearer right
than yourself, even though all reason seems to be on your side. They are
nearer right than they realise themselves—for of course they go only by
theory, and cannot know what I know. If I knew as little of the matter as they,
I would not 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 there—with 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 shew 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
ether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them
about on earth. I will tell you about this later if you do not dismiss me at once
as a madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under
the hills, and I think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us if we
let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we get too curious about
them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out their mining colony. That
is what they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from
outside—any number of them. They could easily conquer the earth, but have
not tried so far because they have not needed to. They would rather leave
things as they are to save bother.

I think they mean to get rid of me because of what I have discovered. There is
a great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found
in the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything
became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or
take me off the earth to where they come from. They like to take away men of
learning once in a while, to keep informed on the state of things in the human
world.

This leads me to my secondary purpose in addressing you—namely, to urge

you to hush up the present debate rather than give it more publicity. People
must be kept away from these hills, and in order to effect this, their curiosity
ought not to be aroused any further. Heaven knows there is peril enough
anyway, with promoters and real estate men flooding Vermont with herds of
summer people to overrun the wild places and cover the hills with cheap
bungalows.

I shall welcome further communication with you, and shall try to send you that
phonograph record and black stone (which is so worn that photographs don’t
shew 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 to 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 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 authorise
me to send, for the express offices there are more to be trusted. I might say
that I live quite alone now, since I can’t keep hired help any more. They won’t
stay because of the things that try to get near the house at night, and that keep
the dogs barking continually. I am glad I didn’t get as deep as this into the
business while my wife was alive, for it would have driven her mad.
Hoping that I am not bothering you unduly, and that you will decide to get in
touch with me rather than throw this letter into the waste basket as a
madman’s raving, I am
Yrs. very truly,

HENRY W. AKELEY

P.S. I am making some extra prints of certain photographs taken by me, which
I think will help to prove a number of the points I have touched on. The old
people think they are monstrously true. I shall send you these very soon if you
are interested. H.W.A.

It would be difficult to describe my sentiments upon reading this strange

document for the first time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to have laughed more
loudly at these extravagances than at the far milder theories which had
previously moved me to mirth; yet something in the tone of the letter made
me take it with paradoxical seriousness. Not that I believed for a moment in
the hidden race from the stars which my correspondent spoke of; but that,
after some grave preliminary doubts, I grew to feel oddly sure of his sanity and
sincerity, and of his confrontation by some genuine though singular and
abnormal phenomenon which he could not explain except in this imaginative
way. It could not be as he thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand it could
not be otherwise than worthy of investigation. The man seemed unduly
excited and alarmed about something, but it was hard to think that all cause
was lacking. He was so specific and logical in certain ways—and after all, his
yarn did fit in so perplexingly well with some of the old myths—even the
wildest Indian legends.

That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had really found
the black stone he spoke about, was wholly possible despite the crazy
inferences he had made—inferences probably suggested by the man who had
claimed to be a spy of the outer beings and had later killed himself. It was easy
to deduce that this man must have been wholly insane, but that he probably
had a streak of perverse outward logic which made the naive Akeley—already
prepared for such things by his folklore studies—believe his tale. As for the
latest developments—it appeared from his inability to keep hired help that
Akeley’s humbler rustic neighbours were as convinced as he that his house was
besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs really barked, too.

And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but believe
he had obtained in the way he said. It must mean something; whether animal
noises deceptively like human speech, or the speech of some hidden, night-
haunting human being decayed to a state not much above that of lower
animals. From this my thoughts went back to the black hieroglyphed stone,
and to speculations upon what it might mean. Then, too, what of the
photographs which Akeley said he was about to send, and which the old
people had found so convincingly terrible?

As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my credulous

opponents might have more on their side than I had conceded. After all, there
might be some queer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen outcasts in those
shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born monsters as folklore
claimed. And if there were, then the presence of strange bodies in the flooded
streams would not be wholly beyond belief. Was it too presumptuous to
suppose that both the old legends and the recent reports had this much of
reality behind them? But even as I harboured these doubts I felt ashamed that
so fantastic a piece of bizarrerie as Henry Akeley’s wild letter had brought them
up.

In the end I answered Akeley’s letter, adopting a tone of friendly interest and
soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by return mail; and
contained, true to promise, a number of kodak views of scenes and objects
illustrating what he had to tell. Glancing at these pictures as I took them from
the envelope, I felt a curious sense of fright and nearness to forbidden things;
for in spite of the vagueness of most of them, they had a damnably suggestive
power which was intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs—
actual optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an impersonal
transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity.

The more I looked at them, the more I saw that my serious 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 grass-blades 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 crab-like, 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
picture shewed 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 me rather a shock.
Of course they might be fraudulent, for others besides myself had read the
monstrous and abhorred Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; but
it nevertheless made me shiver to recognise certain ideographs which study
had taught me to link with the most blood-curdling 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 connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu,
Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, 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 rivulet from one of those streams which had become
entangled with the destinies of our own earth.

My brain whirled; and where before I had attempted to explain things away, I
now began to believe in the most abnormal and incredible wonders. The array
of vital evidence was damnably vast and overwhelming; and the cool, scientific
attitude of Akeley—an attitude removed as far as imaginable from the
demented, the fanatical, the hysterical, or even the extravagantly
speculative—had a tremendous effect on my thought and judgment. By the
time I laid the frightful letter aside I could understand the fears he had come
to entertain, and was ready to do anything in my power to keep people away
from those wild, haunted hills. Even now, when time has dulled the impression
and made me half question my own experience and horrible doubts, there are
things in that letter of Akeley’s which I would not quote, or even form into
words on paper. I am almost glad that the letter and record and photographs
are gone now—and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the new
planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.
With the reading of that letter my public debating about the Vermont horror
permanently ended. Arguments from opponents remained unanswered or put
off with promises, and eventually the controversy petered out into oblivion.
During late May and June I was in constant correspondence with Akeley;
though once in a while a letter would be lost, so that we would have to retrace
our ground and perform considerable laborious copying. What we were trying
to do, as a whole, was to compare notes in matters of obscure mythological
scholarship and arrive at a clearer correlation of the Vermont horrors with the
general body of primitive world legend.

For one thing, we virtually decided that these morbidities and the hellish
Himalayan Mi-Go were one and the same order of incarnated nightmare.
There were also absorbing zoölogical 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.

III.

Toward the end of June the phonograph record came—shipped from

Brattleboro, since Akeley was unwilling to trust conditions on the branch line
north of there. He had begun to feel an increased sense of espionage,
aggravated by the loss of some of our letters; and said much about the
insidious deeds of certain men whom he considered tools and agents of the
hidden beings. Most of all he suspected the surly farmer Walter Brown, who
lived alone on a run-down hillside place near the deep woods, and who was
often seen loafing around corners in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and
South Londonderry in the most inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way.
Brown’s voice, he felt convinced, was one of those he had overheard on a
certain occasion in a very terrible conversation; and he had once found a
footprint or claw-print 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 centred.

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 first of May, 1915, near the closed mouth of a cave where the
wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee’s Swamp. The place had
always been unusually plagued with strange voices, this being the reason he
had brought the phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results.
Former experience had told him that May-Eve—the hideous Sabbat-night of
underground European legend—would probably be more fruitful than any
other date, and he was not disappointed. It was noteworthy, though, that he
never again heard voices at that particular spot.

Unlike most of the overheard forest voices, the substance of the record was
quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice which Akeley had
never been able to place. It was not Brown’s, but seemed to be that of a man
of greater cultivation. The second voice, however, was the real crux of the
thing—for this was the accursed buzzing which had no likeness to humanity
despite the human words which it uttered in good English grammar and a
scholarly accent.

The recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly well,
and had of course been at a great disadvantage because of the remote and
muffled nature of the overheard ritual; so that the actual speech secured was
very fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript of what he believed the
spoken words to be, and I glanced through this again as I prepared the machine
for action. The text was darkly mysterious rather than openly horrible, though
a knowledge of its origin and manner of gathering gave it all the associative
horror which any words could well possess. I will present it here in full as I
remember it—and I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by heart, not
only from reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and
over again. It is not a thing which one might readily forget!

(INDISTINGUISHABLE SOUNDS)

(A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)

. . . is the Lord of the Woods, 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. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!

(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)

Iä! 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 hast taught us marv(els) . . . on the wings of night out beyond space, out
beyond th . . . to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in
black aether at the rim. . . .

(BUZZING VOICE)

. . . go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf may know.
To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put
on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come
down from the world of Seven Suns to mock. . . .

(HUMAN VOICE)

. . . (Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through

the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among. . . .

(SPEECH CUT OFF BY END OF RECORD)

Such were the words for which I was to listen when I started the phonograph.
It was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that I pressed the lever
and heard the preliminary scratching of the sapphire point, and I was glad that
the first faint, fragmentary words were in a human voice—a mellow, educated
voice which seemed vaguely Bostonian in accent, and which was certainly not
that of any native of the Vermont hills. As I listened to the tantalisingly feeble
rendering, I seemed to find the speech identical with Akeley’s carefully
prepared transcript. On it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice . . . “Iä!
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 heard 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.

“Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!”

But though that voice is always in my ears, I have not even yet been able to
analyse it well enough for a graphic description. It was like the drone of some
loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an
alien species, and I am perfectly certain that the organs producing it can have
no resemblance to the vocal organs of man, or indeed to those of any of the
mammalia. There were singularities in timbre, range, and overtones which
placed this phenomenon wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life.
Its sudden advent that first time almost stunned me, and I heard the rest of
the record through in a sort of abstracted daze. When the longer passage of
buzzing came, there was a sharp intensification of that feeling of blasphemous
infinity which had struck me during the shorter and earlier passage. At last the
record ended abruptly, during an unusually clear speech of the human and
Bostonian voice; but I sat stupidly staring long after the machine had
automatically stopped.

I hardly need say that I gave that shocking record many another playing, and
that I made exhaustive attempts at analysis and comment in comparing notes
with Akeley. It would be both useless and disturbing to repeat here all that we
concluded; but I may hint that we agreed in believing we had secured a clue to
the source of some of the most repulsive primordial customs in the cryptic
elder religions of mankind. It seemed plain to us, also, that there were ancient
and elaborate alliances 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 county 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, I received a telegram from Bellows

Falls, in which Akeley said he was expressing the black stone over the B. & M.
on Train No. 5508, leaving Bellows Falls at 12:15 p.m., standard time, and due
at the North Station in Boston at 4:12 p.m. It ought, I calculated, to get up to
Arkham at least by the next noon; and accordingly I stayed in all Thursday
morning to receive it. But noon came and went without its advent, and when
I telephoned down to the express office I was informed that no shipment for
me had arrived. My next act, performed amidst a growing alarm, was to give a
long-distance call to the express agent at the Boston North Station; and I was
scarcely surprised to learn that my consignment had not appeared. Train No.
5508 had pulled in only 35 minutes late on the day before, but had contained
no box addressed to me. The agent promised, however, to institute a searching
inquiry; and I ended the day by sending Akeley a night-letter outlining the
situation.

With commendable promptness a report came from the Boston office on the
following afternoon, the agent telephoning as soon as he learned the facts. It
seemed that the railway express clerk on No. 5508 had been able to recall an
incident which might have much bearing on my loss—an argument with a very
curious-voiced man, lean, sandy, and rustic-looking, when the train was
waiting at Keene, N.H., shortly after one o’clock standard time.

The man, he said, was greatly excited about a heavy box which he claimed to
expect, but which was neither on the train nor entered on the company’s
books. He had given the name of Stanley Adams, and had had such a queerly
thick droning voice, that it made the clerk abnormally dizzy and sleepy to listen
to him. The clerk could not remember quite how the conversation had ended,
but recalled starting into a fuller awakeness when the train began to move.
The Boston agent added that this clerk was a young man of wholly
unquestioned veracity and reliability, of known antecedents and long with the
company.

That evening I went to Boston to interview the clerk in person, having obtained
his name and address from the office. He was a frank, prepossessing fellow,
but I saw that he could add nothing to his original account. Oddly, he was
scarcely sure that he could even recognise the strange inquirer again. Realising
that he had no more to tell, I returned to Arkham and sat up till morning writing
letters to Akeley, to the express company, and to the police department and
station agent in Keene. I felt that the strange-voiced man who had so queerly
affected the clerk must have a pivotal place in the ominous business, and
hoped that Keene station employees and telegraph-office records might tell
something about him and about how he happened to make his inquiry when
and where he did.
I must admit, however, that all my investigations came to nothing. The queer-
voiced man had indeed been noticed around the Keene station in the early
afternoon of July 18, and one lounger seemed to couple him vaguely with a
heavy box; but he was altogether unknown, and had not been seen before or
since. He had not visited the telegraph office or received any message so far
as could be learned, nor had any message which might justly be considered a
notice of the black stone’s presence on No. 5508 come through the office for
anyone. Naturally Akeley joined with me in conducting these inquiries, and
even made a personal trip to Keene to question the people around the station;
but his attitude toward the matter was more fatalistic than mine. He seemed
to find the loss of the box a portentous and menacing fulfilment 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 immediate 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
5th and 6th; a shot grazing his car on one occasion, and the barking of the dogs
telling of unholy woodland presences on the other.

On August 15th 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 happenings 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 telephone cable neatly cut
at a point where it ran through the deserted hills north of Newfane. But he was
about to start home with four fine new dogs, and several cases of ammunition
for his big-game repeating rifle. The letter was written at the post office in
Brattleboro, and came through to me without delay.

My attitude toward the matter was by this time quickly slipping 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
connexion 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 shewed him the original text as scrawled in pencil by the sender, but the
handwriting was wholly unfamiliar. It was noticeable that the signature was
misspelled—A-K-E-L-Y, without the second “E”. Certain conjectures were
inevitable, but amidst the obvious crisis he did not stop to elaborate upon
them.

He spoke of the death of more dogs and the purchase of still others, and of the
exchange of gunfire which had become a settled feature each moonless night.
Brown’s prints, and the prints of at least one or two more shod human figures,
were now found regularly among the claw-prints in the road, and at the back
of the farmyard. It was, Akeley admitted, a pretty bad business; and before
long he would probably have to go to live with his California son whether or
not he could sell the old place. But it was not easy to leave the only spot one
could really think of as home. He must try to hang on a little longer; perhaps
he could scare off the intruders—especially if he openly gave up all further
attempts to penetrate their secrets.

Writing Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again of visiting
him and helping him convince the authorities of his dire peril. In his reply he
seemed less set against that plan than his past attitude would have led one to
predict, but said he would like to hold off a little while longer—long enough to
get his things in order and reconcile himself to the idea of leaving an almost
morbidly cherished birthplace. People looked askance at his studies and
speculations, and it would be better to get quietly off without setting the
countryside in a turmoil and creating widespread doubts of his own sanity. He
had had enough, he admitted, but he wanted to make a dignified exit if he
could.
This letter reached me on the twenty-eighth 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, beside 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 by aiming too low, for he was shot in the back. Now I am setting
the panes the shots broke, and am going to Brattleboro for more dogs. I guess
the men at the kennels think I am crazy. Will drop another note later. Suppose
I’ll be ready for moving in a week or two, though it nearly kills me to think of
it. Hastily—

AKELEY

But this was not the only letter from Akeley to cross mine. On the next
morning—September 6th—still another came; this time a frantic scrawl which
utterly unnerved me and put me at a loss what to say or do next. Again I cannot
do better than quote the text as faithfully as memory will let me.

Tuesday.

Clouds didn’t break, so no moon again—and going into the wane anyhow. I’d
have the house wired for electricity and put in a searchlight if I didn’t know
they’d cut the cables as fast as they could be mended.

I think I am going crazy. It may be that all I have ever written you is a dream or
madness. It was bad enough before, but this time it is too much. They talked
to me last night—talked in that cursed buzzing voice and told me things that I
dare not repeat to you. I heard them plainly over the barking of the dogs, and
once when they were drowned out a human voice helped them. Keep out of
this, Wilmarth—it is worse than either you or I ever suspected. They don’t
mean to let me get to California now—they want to take me off alive, or what
theoretically and mentally amounts to alive—not only to Yuggoth, but beyond
that—away outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last curved rim of
space. I told them I wouldn’t go where they wish, or in the terrible way they
propose to take me, but I’m afraid it will be no use. My place is so far out that
they may come by day as well as by night before long. Six more dogs killed,
and I felt presences all along the wooded parts of the road when I drove to
Brattleboro today.

It was a mistake for me to try to send you that phonograph record and black
stone. Better smash the record before it’s too late. Will drop you another line
tomorrow if I’m still here. Wish I could arrange to get my books and things to
Brattleboro and board there. I would run off without anything if I could, but
something inside my mind holds me back. I can slip out to Brattleboro, where
I ought to be safe, but I feel just as much a prisoner there as at the house. And
I seem to know that I couldn’t get much farther even if I dropped everything
and tried. It is horrible—don’t get mixed up in this.

Yrs—AKELEY

I did not sleep at all the night after receiving this terrible thing, and was utterly
baffled as to Akeley’s remaining degree of sanity. The substance of the note
was wholly insane, yet the manner of expression—in view of all that had gone
before—had a grimly potent quality of convincingness. I made no attempt to
answer it, thinking it better to wait until Akeley might have time to reply to my
latest communication. Such a reply indeed came on the following day, though
the fresh material in it quite overshadowed any of the points brought up by
the letter it 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—
Yr 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—I 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.O. This may be goodbye—if it is, write my son George
Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., but don’t come up here.
Write the boy if you don’t hear from me in a week, and watch the papers for
news.

I’m going to play my last two cards now—if I have the will power left. First to
try poison gas on the things (I’ve got the right chemicals and have fixed up
masks for myself and the dogs) and then if that doesn’t work, tell the sheriff.
They can lock me in a madhouse if they want to—it’ll be better than what the
other creatures would do. Perhaps I can get them to pay attention to the prints
around the house—they are faint, but I can find them every morning. Suppose,
though, police would say I faked them somehow; for they all think I’m a queer
character.

Must try to have a state policeman spend a night here and see for himself—
though it would be just like the creatures to learn about it and hold off that
night. They cut my wires whenever I try to telephone in the night—the linemen
think it is very queer, and may testify for me if they don’t go and imagine I cut
them myself. I haven’t tried to keep them repaired for over a week now.

I could get some of the ignorant people to testify for me about the reality of
the horrors, but everybody laughs at what they say, and anyway, they have
shunned my place for so long that they don’t know any of the new events. You
couldn’t get one of those run-down 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 shew 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 shewing 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

The 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 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 shewed 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 connexion with the earth, are wholly the result of an ignorant
misconception of allegorical speech—speech, of course, moulded by cultural
backgrounds and thought-habits vastly different from anything we dream of.
My own conjectures, I freely own, shot as widely past the mark as any of the
guesses of illiterate farmers and savage Indians. What I had thought morbid
and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and
even glorious—my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal
tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.

Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and incredible beings
in the course of our nightly skirmishes. If only I had consented to talk peacefully
and reasonably with them in the first place! But they bear me no grudge, their
emotions being organised very differently from ours. It is their misfortune to
have had as their human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens—
the late Walter Brown, for example. He prejudiced me vastly against them.
Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly
wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil
men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them
with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them
down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other
dimensions. It is against these aggressors—not against normal humanity—that
the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed. Incidentally, I learned
that many of our lost letters were stolen not by the Outer Ones but by the
emissaries of this malign cult.

All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation and an
increasing intellectual rapport. This latter is absolutely necessary now that our
inventions and devices are expanding our knowledge and motions, and making
it more and more impossible for the Outer Ones’ necessary outposts to exist
secretly on this planet. The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully,
and to have a few of mankind’s philosophic and scientific leaders know more
about them. With such an exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a
satisfactory modus vivendi be established. The very idea of any attempt to
enslave or degrade mankind is ridiculous.

As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have naturally chosen
me—whose knowledge of them is already so considerable—as their primary
interpreter on earth. Much was told me last night—facts of the most
stupendous and vista-opening nature—and more will be subsequently
communicated to me both orally and in writing. I shall not be called upon to
make any trip outside just yet, though I shall probably wish to do so later on—
employing special means and transcending everything which we have hitherto
been accustomed to regard as human experience. My house will be besieged
no longer. Everything has reverted to normal, and the dogs will have no further
occupation. In place of terror I have been given a rich boon of knowledge and
intellectual adventure which few other mortals have ever shared.

The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond
all space and time—members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-
forms are merely degenerate variants. They are more vegetable than animal,
if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have
a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like
substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether
from true cormophytic fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter
totally alien to our part of space—with electrons having a wholly different
vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary
camera films and plates of our known universe, even though our eyes can see
them. With proper knowledge, however, any good chemist could make a
photographic emulsion which would record their images.

The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and airless interstellar
void in full corporeal form, and some of its variants cannot do this without
mechanical aid or curious surgical transpositions. Only a few species have the
ether-resisting wings characteristic of the Vermont variety. Those inhabiting
certain remote peaks in the Old World were brought in other ways. Their
external resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we understand
as material, is a matter of parallel evolution rather than of close kinship. Their
brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving life-form, although the
winged types of our hill country are by no means the most highly developed.
Telepathy is their usual means of discourse, though they have rudimentary
vocal organs which, after a slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly expert
and every-day 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 became
sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the
Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-
stone. The main body of the beings inhabits strangely organised abysses
wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time
globule which we recognise 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
marvellously 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 time-table 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 week-days. Let me know the date and I’ll have my
car on hand at the station.
Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting has grown shaky of late, as you
know, and I don’t feel equal to long stretches of script. I got this new Corona
in Brattleboro yesterday—it seems to work very well.

Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph record and
all my letters—and the kodak prints—

I am
Yours in anticipation,
HENRY W. AKELEY.

To Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq.,

Miskatonic University,
Arkham, Mass.

The complexity of my emotions upon reading, re-reading, and pondering over

this strange and unlooked-for letter is past adequate description. I have said
that I was at once relieved and made uneasy, but this expresses only crudely
the overtones of diverse and largely subconscious feelings which comprised
both the relief and the uneasiness. To begin with, the thing was so antipodally
at variance with the whole chain of horrors preceding it—the change of mood
from stark terror to cool complacency and even exultation was so unheralded,
lightning-like, and complete! I could scarcely believe that a single day could so
alter the psychological perspective of one who had written that final frenzied
bulletin of Wednesday, no matter what relieving disclosures that day might
have brought. At certain moments a sense of conflicting unrealities made me
wonder whether this whole distantly reported drama of fantastic forces were
not a kind of half-illusory dream created largely within my own mind. Then I
thought of the phonograph record and gave way to still greater bewilderment.

The letter seemed so unlike anything which could have been expected! As I
analysed my impression, I saw that it consisted of two distinct phases. First,
granting that Akeley had been sane before and was still sane, the indicated
change in the situation itself was so swift and unthinkable. And secondly, the
change in Akeley’s own manner, attitude, and language was so vastly beyond
the normal or the predictable. The man’s whole personality seemed to have
undergone an insidious mutation—a mutation so deep that one could scarcely
reconcile his two aspects with the supposition that both represented equal
sanity. Word-choice, spelling—all were subtly different. And with my academic
sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profound divergences in his
commonest reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional
cataclysm or revelation which could produce so radical an overturn must be
an extreme one indeed! Yet in another way the letter seemed quite
characteristic of Akeley. The same old passion for infinity—the same old
scholarly inquisitiveness. I could not a moment—or more than a moment—
credit the idea of spuriousness or malign substitution. Did not the invitation—
the willingness to have me test the truth of the letter in person—prove its
genuineness?

I did not retire Saturday night, but sat up thinking of the shadows and marvels
behind the letter I had received. My mind, aching from the quick succession of
monstrous conceptions it had been forced to confront during the last four
months, worked upon this startling 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 1:08 TRAIN WEDNESDAY. DON’T

FORGET RECORD AND LETTERS AND PRINTS. KEEP DESTINATION QUIET.
EXPECT GREAT REVELATIONS. AKELEY.
Receipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeley—and
necessarily delivered to his house from the Townshend station either by
official messenger or by a restored telephone service—removed any lingering
subconscious doubts I may have had about the authorship of the perplexing
letter. My relief was marked—indeed, it was greater than I could account for
at that 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 in
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, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity
has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose
deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape—the
continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and
fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.

Now and then I saw the blue Connecticut River gleaming in the sun, and after
leaving Northfield we crossed it. Ahead loomed green and cryptical hills, and
when the conductor came around I learned that I was at last in Vermont. He
told me to set my watch back an hour, since the northern hill country will have
no dealings with new-fangled daylight time schemes. As I did so it seemed to
me that I was likewise turning the calendar back a century.

The train kept close to the river, and across in New Hampshire I could see the
approaching slope of steep Wantastiquet, about which singular old legends
cluster. Then streets appeared on my left, and a green island shewed 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 urban 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 licence plates with the amusing “sacred codfish” device
of that year. My guide, I concluded, must be a summer transient in the
Townshend region.

Noyes climbed into the car beside me and started it at once. I was glad that he
did not overflow with conversation, for some peculiar atmospheric tensity
made me feel disinclined to talk. The town seemed very attractive in the
afternoon sunlight as we swept up an incline and turned to the right into the
main street. It drowsed like the older New England cities which one
remembers from boyhood, and something in the collocation of roofs and
steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed contours touching deep viol-
strings of ancestral emotion. I could tell that I was at the gateway of a region
half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a
region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because
they have never been stirred up.

As we passed out of Brattleboro my sense of constraint and foreboding

increased, for a vague quality in the hill-crowded countryside with its towering,
threatening, close-pressing green and granite slopes hinted at obscure secrets
and immemorial survivals which might or might not be hostile to mankind. For
a time our course followed a broad, shallow river which flowed down from
unknown hills in the north, and I shivered when my companion told me it was
the West River. It was in this stream, I recalled from newspaper items, that one
of the morbid crab-like 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 shewing grey and
austere through the verdure that scaled the crests. There were gorges where
untamed streams leaped, bearing down toward the river the unimagined
secrets of a thousand pathless peaks. Branching away now and then were
narrow, half-concealed roads that bored their way through solid, luxuriant
masses of forest among whose primal trees whole armies of elemental spirits
might well lurk. As I saw these I thought of how Akeley had been molested by
unseen agencies on his drives along this very route, and did not wonder that
such things could be.

The quaint, sightly village of Newfane, reached in less than an hour, was our
last link with that world which man can definitely call his own by virtue of
conquest and complete occupancy. After that we cast off all allegiance to
immediate, tangible, and time-touched things, and entered a fantastic world
of hushed unreality in which the narrow, ribbon-like road rose and fell and
curved with an almost sentient and purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless
green peaks and half-deserted valleys. Except for the sound of the motor, and
the faint stir of the few lonely farms we passed at infrequent intervals, the only
thing that reached my ears was the gurgling, insidious trickle of strange waters
from numberless hidden fountains in the shadowy woods.

The nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, domed hills now became veritably
breath-taking. Their steepness and abruptness were even greater than I had
imagined from hearsay, and suggested nothing in common with the prosaic
objective world we know. The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible
slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very
outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning,
as if they were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories
live only in rare, deep dreams. All the legends of the past, and all the stupefying
imputations of Henry Akeley’s letters and exhibits, welled up in my memory to
heighten the atmosphere of tension and growing menace. The purpose of my
visit, and the frightful abnormalities it postulated, struck me all at once with a
chill sensation that nearly overbalanced my ardour for strange delvings.

My guide must have noticed my disturbed attitude; for as the road grew wilder
and more irregular, and our motion slower and more jolting, his occasional
pleasant comments expanded into a steadier flow of discourse. He spoke of
the beauty and weirdness of the country, and revealed some acquaintance
with the folklore studies of my prospective host. From his polite questions it
was obvious that he knew I had come for a scientific purpose, and that I was
bringing data of some importance; but he gave no sign of appreciating the
depth and awfulness of the knowledge which Akeley had finally reached.

His manner was so cheerful, normal, and urbane that his remarks ought to
have calmed and reassured me; but oddly enough, I felt only the more
disturbed as we bumped and veered onward into the unknown wilderness of
hills and woods. At times it seemed as if he were pumping me to see what I
knew of the monstrous secrets of the place, and with every fresh utterance
that vague, teasing, baffling familiarity in his voice increased. It was not an
ordinary or healthy familiarity despite the thoroughly wholesome and
cultivated nature of the voice. I somehow linked it with forgotten nightmares,
and felt that I might go mad if I recognised it. If any good excuse had existed, I
think I would have turned back from my visit. As it was, I could not well do so—
and it occurred to me that a cool, scientific conversation with Akeley himself
after my arrival would help greatly to pull me together.
Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the
hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time
had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the
flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries—
the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms,
and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees
beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the
sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or
exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in
the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives.
Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and
through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily
through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing
I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly
searching.

Suddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp ascent, the car
came to a standstill. On my left, across a well-kept lawn which stretched to the
road and flaunted a border of whitewashed stones, rose a white, two-and-a-
half-story house of unusual size and elegance for the region, with a congeries
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 mail-box
near the road. For some distance back of the house a level stretch of marshy
and sparsely wooded land extended, beyond which soared a steep, thickly
forested hillside ending in a jagged leafy crest. This latter, I knew, was the
summit of Dark Mountain, half way up which we must have climbed already.

Alighting from the car and taking my valise, Noyes asked me to wait while he
went in and notified Akeley of my advent. He himself, he added, had important
business elsewhere, and could not stop for more than a moment. As he briskly
walked up the path to the house I climbed out of the car myself, wishing to
stretch my legs a little before settling down to a sedentary conversation. My
feeling of nervousness and tension had risen to a maximum again now that I
was on the actual scene of the morbid beleaguering described so hauntingly in
Akeley’s letters, and I honestly dreaded the coming discussions which were to
link me with such alien and forbidden worlds.

Close contact with the utterly bizarre is often more terrifying than inspiring,
and it did not cheer me to think that this very bit of dusty road was the place
where those monstrous tracks and that foetid green ichor had been found
after moonless nights of fear and death. Idly I noticed that none of Akeley’s
dogs seemed to be about. Had he sold them all as soon as the Outer Ones
made peace with him? Try as I might, I could not have the same confidence in
the depth and sincerity of that peace which appeared in Akeley’s final and
queerly different letter. After all, he was a man of much simplicity and with
little worldly experience. Was there not, perhaps, some deep and sinister
undercurrent beneath the surface of the new alliance?

Led by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the powdery road surface

which had held such hideous testimonies. The last few days had been dry, and
tracks of all sorts cluttered the rutted, irregular highway despite the
unfrequented nature of the district. With a vague curiosity I began to trace the
outline of some of the heterogeneous impressions, trying meanwhile to curb
the flights of macabre fancy which the place and its memories suggested.
There was something menacing and uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in
the muffled, subtle trickle of distant brooks, and in the crowding green peaks
and black-wooded precipices that choked the narrow horizon.

And then an image shot into my consciousness which made those vague
menaces and flights of fancy seem mild and insignificant indeed. I have said
that I was scanning the miscellaneous prints in the road with a kind of idle
curiosity—but all at once that curiosity was shockingly snuffed out by a sudden
and paralysing gust of active terror. For though the dust tracks were in general
confused and overlapping, and unlikely to arrest any casual gaze, my restless
vision had caught certain details near the spot where the path to the house
joined the highway; and had recognised beyond doubt or hope the frightful
significance of those details. It was not for nothing, alas, that I had pored for
hours over the kodak views of the Outer Ones’ claw-prints which Akeley had
sent. Too well did I know the marks of those loathsome nippers, and that hint
of ambiguous direction which stamped the horrors as no creatures of this
planet. No chance had been left me for merciful mistake. Here, indeed, in
objective form before my own eyes, and surely made not many hours ago,
were at least three marks which stood out blasphemously among the
surprising plethora of blurred footprints leading to and from the Akeley
farmhouse. They were the hellish tracks of the living fungi from Yuggoth.

I pulled myself together in time to stifle a scream. After all, what more was
there than I might have expected, assuming that I had really believed Akeley’s
letters? He had spoken of making peace with the things. Why, then, was it
strange that some of them had visited his house? But the terror was stronger
than the reassurance. Could any man be expected to look unmoved for the
first time upon the claw-marks of animate beings from outer depths of space?
Just then I saw Noyes emerge from the door and approach with a brisk step. I
must, I reflected, keep command of myself, for the chances were this genial
friend knew nothing of Akeley’s profoundest and most stupendous probings
into the forbidden.

Akeley, Noyes hastened to inform me, was glad and ready to see me; although
his sudden attack of asthma would prevent him from being a very competent
host for a day or two. These spells hit him hard when they came, and were
always accompanied by a debilitating fever and general weakness. He never
was good for much while they lasted—had to talk in a whisper, and was very
clumsy and feeble in getting about. His feet and ankles swelled, too, so that he
had to bandage them like a gouty old beef-eater. Today he was in rather bad
shape, so that I would have to attend very largely to my own needs; but he
was none the less eager for conversation. I would find him in the study at the
left of the front hall—the room where the blinds were shut. He had to keep
the sunlight out when he was ill, for his eyes were very sensitive.

As Noyes bade me adieu and rode off northward in his car I began to walk
slowly toward the house. The door had been left ajar for me; but before
approaching and entering I cast a searching glance around the whole place,
trying to decide what had struck me as so intangibly queer about it. The barns
and sheds looked trimly prosaic enough, and I noticed Akeley’s battered Ford
in its capacious, unguarded shelter. Then the secret of the queerness reached
me. It was the total silence. Ordinarily a farm is at least moderately murmurous
from its various kinds of livestock, but here all signs of life were missing. What
of the hens and the hogs? 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, this face was that of a very sick man. I felt that there must be
something more than asthma behind that strained, rigid, immobile expression
and unwinking glassy stare; and realised how terribly the strain of his frightful
experiences must have told on him. Was it not enough to break any human
being—even a younger man than this intrepid delver into the forbidden? The
strange and sudden relief, I feared, had come too late to save him from
something like a general breakdown. There was a touch of the pitiful in the
limp, lifeless way his lean hands rested in his lap. He had on a loose dressing-
gown, and was swathed around the head and high around the neck with a vivid
yellow scarf or hood.

And then I saw that he was trying to talk in the same hacking whisper with
which he had greeted me. It was a hard whisper to catch at first, since the grey
moustache concealed all movements of the lips, and something in its timbre
disturbed me greatly; but by concentrating my attention I could soon make out
its purport surprisingly well. The accent was by no means a rustic one, and the
language was even more polished than correspondence had led me to expect.

“Mr. Wilmarth, I presume? You must pardon my not rising. I am quite ill, as
Mr. Noyes must have told you; but I could not resist having you come just the
same. You know what I wrote in my last letter—there is so much to tell you
tomorrow when I shall feel better. I can’t say how glad I am to see you in
person after all our many letters. You have the file with you, of course? And
the kodak prints and record? 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
record 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 and
philosophy.

“Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can
move with a velocity greater than that of light? With proper aid I expect to go
backward and forward in time, and actually see and feel the earth of remote
past and future epochs. You can’t imagine the degree to which those beings
have carried science. There is nothing they can’t do with the mind and body of
living organisms. I expect to visit other planets, and even other stars and
galaxies. The first trip will be to Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by
the beings. It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system—
unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about
this. At the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct thought-
currents toward us and cause it to be discovered—or perhaps let one of their
human allies give the scientists a hint.

“There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of

black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The
sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They
have other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and
temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist
at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from
originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad—yet I am going
there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean
bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the
things came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make
any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has
seen.

“But remember—that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities

isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world
seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal
age. You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was
over, and remember all about sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters.
They’ve been inside the earth, too—there are openings which human beings
know nothing of—some of them in these very Vermont hills—and great worlds
of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black,
lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came—you know, the
amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts
and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the
Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.
“But we will talk of all this later on. It must be four or five o’clock by this time.
Better bring the stuff from your bag, take a bite, and then come back for a
comfortable chat.”

Very slowly I turned and began to obey my host; fetching my valise, extracting
and depositing the desired articles, and finally ascending to the room
designated as mine. With the memory of that roadside claw-print fresh in my
mind, Akeley’s whispered paragraphs had affected me queerly; and the hints
of familiarity with this unknown world of fungous life—forbidden Yuggoth—
made my flesh creep more than I cared to own. I was tremendously sorry about
Akeley’s illness, but had to confess that his hoarse whisper had a hateful as
well as pitiful quality. If only he wouldn’t gloat so about Yuggoth and its black
secrets!

My room proved a very pleasant and well-furnished one, devoid alike of the
musty odour and disturbing sense of vibration; and after leaving my valise
there I descended again to greet Akeley and take the lunch he had set out for
me. The dining-room was just beyond the study, and I saw that a kitchen ell
extended still farther in the same direction. On the dining-table an ample array
of sandwiches, cake, and cheese awaited me, and a Thermos-bottle beside a
cup and saucer testified that hot coffee had not been forgotten. After a well-
relished meal I poured myself a liberal cup of coffee, but found that the
culinary standard had suffered a lapse in this one detail. My first spoonful
revealed a faintly unpleasant acrid taste, so that I did not take more.
Throughout the lunch I thought of Akeley sitting silently in the great chair in
the darkened next room. Once I went in to beg him to share the repast, but he
whispered that he could eat nothing as yet. Later on, just before he slept, he
would take some malted milk—all he ought to have that day.

After lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them in the
kitchen sink—incidentally emptying the coffee which I had not been able to
appreciate. Then returning to the darkened study I drew up a chair near my
host’s corner and prepared for such conversation as he might feel inclined to
conduct. The letters, pictures, and record were still on the large centre-table,
but for the nonce we did not have to draw upon them. Before long I forgot
even the bizarre odour and curious suggestions of vibration.

I have said that there were things in some of Akeley’s letters—especially the
second and most voluminous one—which I would not dare to quote or even
form into words on paper. This hesitancy applies with still greater force to the
things I heard whispered that evening in the darkened room among the lonely
haunted 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 refuse to believe what he
implied about the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of
dimensions, and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time
in the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate
super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic
organisation.

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity—
never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that
transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence Cthulhu first
came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I
guessed—from hints which made even my informant pause timidly—the
secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth
veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao. The nature of the Doels was plainly
revealed, and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of
Tindalos. The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer,
and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond
angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name
of Azathoth. It was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of secret myth
cleared up in concrete terms whose stark, morbid hatefulness exceeded the
boldest hints of ancient and mediaeval mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe
that the first whisperers of these accursed tales must have had discourse with
Akeley’s Outer Ones, and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms as Akeley
now proposed visiting them.

I was told of the Black Stone and what it implied, and was glad that it had not
reached me. My guesses about those hieroglyphics had been all too correct!
And yet Akeley now seemed reconciled to the whole fiendish system he had
stumbled upon; reconciled and eager to probe farther into the monstrous
abyss. I wondered what beings he had talked with since his last letter to me,
and whether many of them had been as human as that first emissary he had
mentioned. The tension in my head grew insufferable, and I built up all sorts
of wild theories about the 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 corpse-like. He seemed half-incapable of motion, though I saw him nod
stiffly once in a while.

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
shewed 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 seemedthat complete human
bodies did not indeed make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical,
biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way
to convey human brains without their concomitant physical structure.

There was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the organic
residue alive during its absence. The bare, compact cerebral matter was then
immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid within an ether-tight cylinder of
a metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes reaching through and connecting
at will with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital
faculties of sight, hearing, and speech. For the winged fungus-beings to carry
the brain-cylinders intact through space was an easy matter. Then, on every
planet covered by their civilisation, they would find plenty of adjustable
faculty-instruments capable of being connected with the encased brains; so
that after a little fitting these travelling intelligences could be given a full
sensory and articulate life—albeit a bodiless and mechanical one—at each
stage of their journeying through and beyond the space-time continuum. It
was as simple as carrying a phonograph record about and playing it wherever
a phonograph of the 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 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 presented in those cylinders up there. Three
humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate space corporeally, two beings
from Neptune (God! if you could see the body this type has on its own planet!),
and the rest entities from the central caverns of an especially interesting dark
star beyond the galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill you’ll now
and then find more cylinders and machines—cylinders of extra-cosmic brains
with different senses from any we know—allies and explorers from the
uttermost Outside—and special machines for giving them impressions and
expression in the several ways suited at once to them and to the
comprehensions of different types of listeners. Round Hill, like most of the
beings’ main outposts all through the various universes, is a very cosmopolitan
place! Of course, only the more common types have been lent to me for
experiment.

“Here—take the three machines I point to and set them on the table. That tall
one with the two glass lenses in front—then the box with the vacuum tubes
and sounding-board—and now the one with the metal disc on top. Now for
the cylinder with the label ‘B-67’ pasted on it. Just stand in that Windsor chair
to reach the shelf. Heavy? Never mind! Be sure of the number—B-67. Don’t
bother that fresh, shiny cylinder 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
machines 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 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 watching speaker? Even now I am unwilling to swear just what I heard,
or just what phenomenon really took place before me. But something certainly
seemed to take place.

To be brief and plain, the machine with the tubes and sound-box began to
speak, and with a point and intelligence which left no doubt that the speaker
was actually present and observing us. The voice was loud, metallic, lifeless,
and plainly mechanical in every detail of its production. It was incapable of
inflection or expressiveness, but scraped and rattled on with a deadly precision
and deliberation.

“Mr. Wilmarth,” it said, “I hope I do not startle you. I am a human being like
yourself, though my body is now resting safely under proper vitalising
treatment inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half east of here. I myself am
here with you—my brain is in that cylinder and I see, hear, and speak through
these electronic vibrators. In a week I am going across the void as I have been
many times before, and I expect to have the pleasure of Mr. Akeley’s company.
I wish I might have yours as well; for I know you by sight and reputation, and
have kept close track of your correspondence with our friend. I am, of course,
one of the men who have become allied with the outside beings visiting our
planet. I met them first in the Himalayas, and have helped them in various
ways. In return they have given me experiences such as few men have ever
had.

“Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different
celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—including
eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and
time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from
my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation
surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make these extractions easy
and almost normal—and one’s body never ages when the brain is out of it. The
brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a
limited nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.

“Altogether, I hope most heartily that you will decide to come with Mr. Akeley
and me. The visitors are eager to know men of knowledge like yourself, and to
shew them the great abysses that most of us have had to dream about in
fanciful ignorance. It may seem strange at first to meet them, but I know you
will be above minding that. I think Mr. Noyes will go along, too—the man who
doubtless brought you up here in his car. He has been one of us for years—I
suppose you recognised his voice as one of those on the record Mr. Akeley
sent you.”

At my violent start the speaker paused a moment before concluding.

“So, Mr. Wilmarth, I will leave the matter to you; merely adding that a man
with your love of strangeness and folklore ought never to miss such a chance
as this. There is nothing to fear. All transitions are painless, and there is much
to enjoy in a wholly mechanised state of sensation. When the electrodes are
disconnected, one merely drops off into a sleep of especially vivid and fantastic
dreams.

“And now, if you don’t mind, we might adjourn our session till tomorrow. Good
night—just turn all the switches back to the left; never mind the exact order,
though you might let the lens machine be last. Good night, Mr. Akeley—treat
our guest well! Ready now with those switches?”

That was all. I obeyed mechanically and shut off all three switches, though
dazed with doubt of everything that had occurred. My head was still reeling as
I heard Akeley’s whispering voice telling me that I might leave all the apparatus
on the table just as it was. He did not essay any comment on what had
happened, and indeed no comment could have conveyed much to my
burdened faculties. I heard him telling me I could take the lamp to use in my
room, and deduced that he wished to rest alone in the dark. It was surely time
he rested, for his discourse of the afternoon and evening had been such as to
exhaust even a vigorous man. Still dazed, I bade my host good night and went
upstairs with the lamp, although I had an excellent pocket flashlight with me.

I was glad to be out of that downstairs study with the queer odour and vague
suggestions of vibration, yet could not of course escape a hideous sense of
dread and peril and cosmic abnormality as I thought of the place I was in and
the forces I was meeting. The wild, lonely region, the black, mysteriously
forested slope towering so close behind the house, the footprints 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 corpse-like—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 wheezings 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 cosmic linkages do exist—but such things are
surely not meant for normal human beings to meddle with.

Blasphemous influences seemed to surround me and press chokingly upon my

senses. Sleep, I decided, would be out of the question; so I merely extinguished
the lamp and threw myself on the bed fully dressed. No doubt it was absurd,
but I kept ready for some unknown emergency; gripping in my right hand the
revolver I had brought along, and holding the pocket flashlight in my left. Not
a sound came from below, and I could imagine how my host was sitting there
with cadaverous stiffness in the dark.

Somewhere I heard a clock ticking, and was vaguely grateful for the normality
of the sound. It reminded me, though, of another thing about the region which
disturbed me—the total absence of animal life. There were certainly no farm
beasts about, and now I realised that even the accustomed night-noises of wild
living things were absent. Except for the sinister trickle of distant unseen
waters, that stillness was anomalous—interplanetary—and I wondered what
star-spawned, intangible blight could be hanging over the region. I recalled
from old legends that dogs and other beasts had always hated the Outer Ones,
and thought of what those tracks in the road might mean.

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 awaked 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 even 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 memorise the licence-number of his car—
or perhaps it is better after all that I did not. For I, despite all you can say, and
despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside
influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hills—and that those
influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men. To keep as far as
possible from such influences and such emissaries is all that I ask of life in
future.

When my frantic story sent a sheriff’s posse out to the farmhouse, Akeley was
gone without leaving a trace. His loose dressing-gown, yellow scarf, and foot-
bandages lay on the study floor near his corner easy-chair, and it could not be
decided whether any of his other apparel had vanished with him. The dogs and
livestock were indeed missing, and there were some curious bullet-holes both
on the house’s exterior and on some of the walls within; but beyond this
nothing unusual could be detected. No cylinders or machines, none of the
evidences I had brought in my valise, no queer odour or vibration-sense, no
footprints 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 purchases 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 shewed some of these rustics his
photographs and black stone, and had played the hideous record for them;
and they all said the footprints and buzzing voice were like those described in
ancestral legends.

They said, too, that suspicious sights and sounds had been noticed increasingly
around Akeley’s house after he found the black stone, and that the place was
now avoided by everybody except the mail man and other casual, tough-
minded people. Dark Mountain and Round Hill were both notoriously haunted
spots, and I could find no one who had ever closely explored either. Occasional
disappearances of natives throughout the district’s history were well attested,
and these now included the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom Akeley’s
letters had mentioned. I even came upon one farmer who thought he had
personally glimpsed one of the queer bodies at flood-time in the swollen West
River, but his tale was too confused to be really valuable.

When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and I feel quite
certain I shall keep my resolution. Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a
frightful cosmic race—as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth
planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it
would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little
suspect, have named this thing “Pluto”. I feel, beyond question, that it is
nothing less than nighted Yuggoth—and I shiver when I try to figure out the
real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this
especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are
not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal
inhabitants.

But I have still to tell of the ending of that terrible night in the farmhouse. As I
have said, I did finally drop into a troubled doze; a doze filled with bits of dream
which involved monstrous landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me I cannot
yet say, but that I did indeed awake at this given point I feel very certain. My
first confused impression was of stealthily creaking floor-boards in the hall
outside my door, and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at the latch. This, however,
ceased almost at once; so that my really clear impressions began with the
voices heard from the study below. There seemed to be several speakers, and
I judged that they were controversially engaged.

By the time I had listened a few seconds I was broad awake, for the nature of
the voices was such as to make all thought of sleep ridiculous. The tones were
curiously varied, and no one who had listened to that accursed phonograph
record could harbour any doubts about the nature of at least two of them.
Hideous though the idea was, I knew that I was under the same roof with
nameless things from abysmal space; for those two voices were unmistakably
the blasphemous buzzings which the Outside Beings used in their
communication with men. The two were individually different—different in
pitch, accent, and tempo—but they were both of the same damnable general
kind.

A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine

connected with one of the detached brains in the cylinders. There was as little
doubt about that as about the buzzings; for the loud, metallic, lifeless voice of
the previous evening, with its inflectionless, expressionless scraping and
rattling, and its impersonal precision and deliberation, had been utterly
unforgettable. For a time I did not pause to question whether the intelligence
behind the scraping was the identical one which had formerly talked to me;
but shortly afterward I reflected that any brain would emit vocal sounds of the
same quality if linked to the same mechanical speech-producer; the only
possible differences being in language, rhythm, speed, and pronunciation. To
complete the eldritch colloquy there were two actually human voices—one
the crude speech of an unknown and evidently rustic man, and the other the
suave Bostonian tones of my erstwhile guide Noyes.

As I tried to catch the words which the stoutly fashioned floor so bafflingly
intercepted, I was also conscious of a great deal of stirring and scratching and
shuffling in the room below; so that I could not escape the impression that it
was full of living beings—many more than the few whose speech I could single
out. The exact nature of this stirring is extremely hard to describe, for very few
good bases of comparison exist. Objects seemed now and then to move across
the room like conscious entities; the sound of their footfalls having something
about it like a loose, hard-surfaced clattering—as of the contact of ill-
coördinated 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. On 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 Outsiders’ friendliness.

With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices, even

though I could not grasp much of what any of the voices said. I seemed to catch
certain typical emotions behind some of the speakers. One of the buzzing
voices, for example, held an unmistakable note of authority; whilst the
mechanical voice, notwithstanding its artificial loudness and regularity,
seemed to be in a position of subordination and pleading. Noyes’s tones
exuded a kind of conciliatory atmosphere. The others I could make no attempt
to interpret. I did not hear the familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that
such a sound could never penetrate the solid flooring of my room.
I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other sounds I
caught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know how. It was from the
speech-machine that I first picked up a few recognisable phrases.

(THE SPEECH-MACHINE)

“. . . brought it on myself . . . sent back the letters and the record . . . end on it
. . . taken in . . . seeing and hearing . . . damn you . . . impersonal force, after all
. . . fresh, shiny cylinder . . . great God. . . .”

(FIRST BUZZING VOICE)

“. . . time we stopped . . . small and human . . . Akeley . . . brain . . . saying . . .”

(SECOND BUZZING VOICE)

“. . . Nyarlathotep . . . Wilmarth . . . records and letters . . . cheap imposture. .

. .”

(NOYES)

“. . . (an unpronounceable word or name, possibly N’gah-Kthun) . . . harmless

. . . peace . . . couple of weeks . . . theatrical . . . told you that before. . . .”

(FIRST BUZZING VOICE)

“. . . no reason . . . original plan . . . effects . . . Noyes can watch . . . Round Hill
. . . fresh cylinder . . . Noyes’s car. . . .”

(NOYES)

“. . . well . . . all yours . . . down here . . . rest . . . place. . . .”

(SEVERAL VOICES AT ONCE IN INDISTINGUISHABLE SPEECH)

(MANY FOOTSTEPS, INCLUDING THE PECULIAR LOOSE STIRRING OR

CLATTERING)

(A CURIOUS SORT OF FLAPPING SOUND)

(THE SOUND OF AN AUTOMOBILE STARTING AND RECEDING)

(SILENCE)

That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon that
strange upstairs bed in the haunted farmhouse among the daemoniac hills—
lay there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right hand and a pocket
flashlight gripped in my left. I became, as I have said, broad awake; but a kind
of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert till long after the last echoes
of the sounds had died away. I heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the
ancient Connecticut clock somewhere far below, and at last made out the
irregular snoring of a sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange
session, and I could well believe that he needed to do so.
Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide. After all, what
had I heard beyond things which previous information might have led me to
expect? Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were now freely
admitted to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been surprised by an
unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that fragmentary discourse had
chilled me immeasurably, raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and
made me wish fervently that I might wake up and prove everything a dream. I
think my subconscious mind must have caught something which my
consciousness has not yet recognised. But what of Akeley? Was he not my
friend, and would he not have protested if any harm were meant me? The
peaceful snoring below seemed to cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified
fears.

Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to draw
me into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph record? Did
those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction because we had
come to know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness and unnaturalness
of that change in the situation which must have occurred between Akeley’s
penultimate and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly
wrong. All was not as it seemed. That acrid coffee which I refused—had there
not been an attempt by some hidden, unknown entity to drug it? I must talk
to Akeley at once, and restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised
him with their promises of cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to
reason. We must get out of this before it would be too late. If he lacked the
will power to make the break for liberty, I would supply it. Or if I could not
persuade him to go, I could at least go myself. Surely he would let me take his
Ford and leave it in a garage at 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 cat-like retreat to the hall, my
caution this time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper
on the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.

Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense told me
that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible before arousing
anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door
after me; thereby lessening the chances of awaking 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 favourite 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 a haunted mountain—that focus of trans-cosmic
horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral
rustic land.

It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wild
scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually managed to get
out of that room and that house without making any further noise, to drag
myself and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the shed, and to set that
archaic vehicle in motion toward some unknown point of safety in the black,
moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or
Rimbaud or the drawings of Doré, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all.
If my sanity is still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will
bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.

As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its
circuit of the room; then noticing for the first time the presence of certain
objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the
empty dressing-gown. These are the objects, three in number, which the
investigators did not find when they came later on. As I said at the outset, there
was nothing of actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they
led one to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt—moments in
which I half accept the scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience
to dream and nerves and delusion.

The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were
furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic
developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hope—devoutly
hope—that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my
inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid
odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider . . . that hideous
repressed buzzing . . . and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf
. . . poor devil . . . “prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical
skill”. . .

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic
resemblance—or identity—were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth
Akeley.
 THE MOUND
By H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop (1930)

I.

It is only within the last few years that most people have stopped thinking of
the West as a new land. I suppose the idea gained ground because our own
especial civilisation happens to be new there; but nowadays explorers are
digging beneath the surface and bringing up whole chapters of life that rose
and fell among these plains and mountains before recorded history began. We
think nothing of a Pueblo village 2500 years old, and it hardly jolts us when
archaeologists put the sub-pedregal culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or
18,000 B. C. We hear rumours of still older things, too—of primitive man
contemporaneous with extinct animals and known today only through a few
fragmentary bones and artifacts—so that the idea of newness is fading out
pretty rapidly. Europeans usually catch the sense of immemorial ancientness
and deep deposits from successive life-streams better than we do. Only a
couple of years ago a British author spoke of Arizona as a “moon-dim region,
very lovely in its way, and stark and old—an ancient, lonely land”.

Yet I believe I have a deeper sense of the stupefying—almost horrible—

ancientness of the West than any European. It all comes from an incident that
happened in 1928; an incident which I’d greatly like to dismiss as three-
quarters hallucination, but which has left such a frightfully firm impression on
my memory that I can’t put it off very easily. It was in Oklahoma, where my
work as an American Indian ethnologist constantly takes me and where I had
come upon some devilishly strange and disconcerting matters before. Make
no mistake—Oklahoma is a lot more than a mere pioneers’ and promoters’
frontier. There are old, old tribes with old, old memories there; and when the
tom-toms beat ceaselessly over brooding plains in the autumn the spirits of
men are brought dangerously close to primal, whispered things. I am white
and Eastern enough myself, but anybody is welcome to know that the rites of
Yig, Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder out of me any day. I have heard
and seen too much to be “sophisticated” in such matters. And so it is with this
incident of 1928. I’d like to laugh it off—but I can’t.

I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many ghost
tales which were current among the white settlers, but which had strong
Indian corroboration, and—I felt sure—an ultimate Indian source. They were
very curious, these open-air ghost tales; and though they sounded flat and
prosaic in the mouths of the white people, they had earmarks of linkage with
some of the richest and obscurest phases of native mythology. All of them
were woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking mounds in the western
part of the state, and all of them involved apparitions of exceedingly strange
aspect and equipment.

The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when
a government marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after
horse-thieves and came out with a wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the
air between great armies of invisible spectres—battles that involved the rush
of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of metal on metal, the muffled
cries of warriors, and the fall of human and equine bodies. These things
happened by moonlight, and frightened his horse as well as himself. The
sounds persisted an hour at a time; vivid, but subdued as if brought from a
distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any glimpse of the armies
themselves. Later on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds was a
notoriously haunted spot, shunned by settlers and Indians alike. Many had
seen, or half seen, the warring horsemen in the sky, and had furnished dim,
ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described the ghostly fighters as Indians,
though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumes and
weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure the
horses were really horses.
The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as kinsfolk.
They referred to them as “those people”, “the old people”, or “they who dwell
below”, and appeared to hold them in too great a frightened veneration to talk
much about them. No ethnologist had been able to pin any tale-teller down to
a specific description of the beings, and apparently nobody had ever had a very
clear look at them. The Indians had one or two old proverbs about these
phenomena, saying that “men very old, make very big spirit; not so old, not so
big; older than all time, then spirit he so big he near flesh; those old people
and spirits they mix up—get all the same”.

Now all of this, of course, is “old stuff” to an ethnologist—of a piece with the
persistent legends of rich hidden cities and buried races which abound among
the Pueblo and plains Indians, and which lured Coronado centuries ago on his
vain search for the fabled Quivira. What took me into western Oklahoma was
something far more definite and tangible—a local and distinctive tale which,
though really old, was wholly new to the outside world of research, and which
involved the first clear descriptions of the ghosts which it treated of. There was
an added thrill in the fact that it came from the remote town of Binger, in
Caddo County, a place I had long known as the scene of a very terrible and
partly inexplicable occurrence connected with the snake-god myth.

The tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive and simple one, and centred in a
huge, lone mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a third of a mile
west of the village—a mound which some thought a product of Nature, but
which others believed to be a burial-place or ceremonial dais constructed by
prehistoric tribes. This mound, the villagers said, was constantly haunted by
two Indian figures which appeared in alternation; an old man who paced back
and forth along the top from dawn till dusk, regardless of the weather and with
only brief intervals of disappearance, and a squaw who took his place at night
with a blue-flamed torch that glimmered quite continuously till morning.
When the moon was bright the squaw’s peculiar figure could be seen fairly
plainly, and over half the villagers agreed that the apparition was headless.
Local opinion was divided as to the motives and relative ghostliness of the two
visions. Some held that the man was not a ghost at all, but a living Indian who
had killed and beheaded a squaw for gold and buried her somewhere on the
mound. According to these theorists he was pacing the eminence through
sheer remorse, bound by the spirit of his victim which took visible shape after
dark. But other theorists, more uniform in their spectral beliefs, held that both
man and woman were ghosts; the man having killed the squaw and himself as
well at some very distant period. These and minor variant versions seemed to
have been current ever since the settlement of the Wichita country in 1889,
and were, I was told, sustained to an astonishing degree by still-existing
phenomena which anyone might observe for himself. Not many ghost tales
offer such free and open proof, and I was very eager to see what bizarre
wonders might be lurking in this small, obscure village so far from the beaten
path of crowds and from the ruthless searchlight of scientific knowledge. So,
in the late summer of 1928 I took a train for Binger and brooded on strange
mysteries as the cars rattled timidly along their single track through a lonelier
and lonelier landscape.

Binger is a modest cluster of frame houses and stores in the midst of a flat
windy region full of clouds of red dust. There are about 500 inhabitants besides
the Indians on a neighbouring reservation; the principal occupation seeming
to be agriculture. The soil is decently fertile, and the oil boom has not reached
this part of the state. My train drew in at twilight, and I felt rather lost and
uneasy—cut off from wholesome and every-day things—as it puffed away to
the southward without me. The station platform was filled with curious
loafers, all of whom seemed eager to direct me when I asked for the man to
whom I had letters of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace main
street whose rutted surface was red with the sandstone soil of the country,
and finally delivered at the door of my prospective host. Those who had
arranged things for me had done well; for Mr. Compton was a man of high
intelligence and local responsibility, while his mother—who lived with him and
was familiarly known as “Grandma Compton”—was one of the first pioneer
generation, and a veritable mine of anecdote and folklore.
That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among
the villagers, proving that the phenomenon I had come to study was indeed a
baffling and important one. The ghosts, it seems, were accepted almost as a
matter of course by everyone in Binger. Two generations had been born and
grown up within sight of that queer, lone tumulus and its restless figures. The
neighbourhood of the mound was naturally feared and shunned, so that the
village and the farms had not spread toward it in all four decades of
settlement; yet venturesome individuals had several times visited it. Some had
come back to report that they saw no ghosts at all when they neared the
dreaded hill; that somehow the lone sentinel had stepped out of sight before
they reached the spot, leaving them free to climb the steep slope and explore
the flat summit. There was nothing up there, they said—merely a rough
expanse of underbrush. Where the Indian watcher could have vanished to,
they had no idea. He must, they reflected, have descended the slope and
somehow managed to escape unseen along the plain; although there was no
convenient cover within sight. At any rate, there did not appear to be any
opening into the mound; a conclusion which was reached after considerable
exploration of the shrubbery and tall grass on all sides. In a few cases some of
the more sensitive searchers declared that they felt a sort of invisible
restraining presence; but they could describe nothing more definite than that.
It was simply as if the air thickened against them in the direction they wished
to move. It is needless to mention that all these daring surveys were conducted
by day. Nothing in the universe could have induced any human being, white or
red, to approach that sinister elevation after dark; and indeed, no Indian would
have thought of going near it even in the brightest sunlight.

But it was not from the tales of these sane, observant seekers that the chief
terror of the ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their experience been typical,
the phenomenon would have bulked far less prominently in the local legendry.
The most evil thing was the fact that many other seekers had come back
strangely impaired in mind and body, or had not come back at all. The first of
these cases had occurred in 1891, when a young man named Heaton had gone
with a shovel to see what hidden secrets he could unearth. He had heard
curious tales from the Indians, and had laughed at the barren report of another
youth who had been out to the mound and had found nothing. Heaton had
watched the mound with a spy glass from the village while the other youth
made his trip; and as the explorer neared the spot, he saw the sentinel Indian
walk deliberately down into the tumulus as if a trap-door and staircase existed
on the top. The other youth had not noticed how the Indian disappeared, but
had merely found him gone upon arriving at the mound.

When Heaton made his own trip he resolved to get to the bottom of the
mystery, and watchers from the village saw him hacking diligently at the
shrubbery atop the mound. Then they saw his figure melt slowly into
invisibility; not to reappear for long hours, till after the dusk drew on, and the
torch of the headless squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the distant elevation.
About two hours after nightfall he staggered into the village minus his spade
and other belongings, and burst into a shrieking monologue of disconnected
ravings. He howled of shocking abysses and monsters, of terrible carvings and
statues, of inhuman captors and grotesque tortures, and of other fantastic
abnormalities too complex and chimerical even to remember. “Old! Old! Old!”
he would moan over and over again, “great God, they are older than the earth,
and came here from somewhere else—they know what you think, and make
you know what they think—they’re half-man, half-ghost—crossed the line—
melt and take shape again—getting more and more so, yet we’re all descended
from them in the beginning—children of Tulu—everything made of gold—
monstrous animals, half-human—dead slaves—madness—Iä! Shub-
Niggurath!—that white man—oh, my God, what they did to him! . . .”

Heaton was the village idiot for about eight years, after which he died in an
epileptic fit. Since his ordeal there had been two more cases of mound-
madness, and eight of total disappearance. Immediately after Heaton’s mad
return, three desperate and determined men had gone out to the lone hill
together; heavily armed, and with spades and pickaxes. Watching villagers saw
the Indian ghost melt away as the explorers drew near, and afterward saw the
men climb the mound and begin scouting around through the underbrush. All
at once they faded into nothingness, and were never seen again. One watcher,
with an especially powerful telescope, thought he saw other forms dimly
materialise beside the hapless men and drag them down into the mound; but
this account remained uncorroborated. It is needless to say that no searching-
party went out after the lost ones, and that for many years the mound was
wholly unvisited. Only when the incidents of 1891 were largely forgotten did
anybody dare to think of further explorations. Then, about 1910, a fellow too
young to recall the old horrors made a trip to the shunned spot and found
nothing at all.

By 1915 the acute dread and wild legendry of ’91 had largely faded into the
commonplace and unimaginative ghost-tales at present surviving—that is, had
so faded among the white people. On the nearby reservation were old Indians
who thought much and kept their own counsel. About this time a second wave
of active curiosity and adventuring developed, and several bold searchers
made the trip to the mound and returned. Then came a trip of two Eastern
visitors with spades and other apparatus—a pair of amateur archaeologists
connected with a small college, who had been making studies among the
Indians. No one watched this trip from the village, but they never came back.
The searching-party that went out after them—among whom was my host
Clyde Compton—found nothing whatsoever amiss at the mound.

The next trip was the solitary venture of old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled pioneer
who had helped to open up the region in 1889, but who had never been there
since. He had recalled the mound and its fascination all through the years; and
being now in comfortable retirement, resolved to have a try at solving the
ancient riddle. Long familiarity with Indian myth had given him ideas rather
stranger than those of the simple villagers, and he had made preparations for
some extensive delving. He ascended the mound on the morning of Thursday,
May 11, 1916, watched through spy glasses by more than twenty people in the
village and on the adjacent plain. His disappearance was very sudden, and
occurred as he was hacking at the shrubbery with a brush-cutter. No one could
say more than that he was there one moment and absent the next. For over a
week no tidings of him reached Binger, and then—in the middle of the night—
there dragged itself into the village the object about which dispute still rages.

It said it was—or had been—Capt. Lawton, but it was definitely younger by as

much as forty years than the old man who had climbed the mound. Its hair was
jet black, and its face—now distorted with nameless fright—free from
wrinkles. But it did remind Grandma Compton most uncannily of the captain
as he had looked back in ’89. Its feet were cut off neatly at the ankles, and the
stumps were smoothly healed to an extent almost incredible if the being really
were the man who had walked upright a week before. It babbled of
incomprehensible things, and kept repeating the name “George Lawton,
George E. Lawton” as if trying to reassure itself of its own identity. The things
it babbled of, Grandma Compton thought, were curiously like the
hallucinations of poor young Heaton in ’91; though there were minor
differences. “The blue light!—the blue light! . . .” muttered the object, “always
down there, before there were any living things—older than the dinosaurs—
always the same, only weaker—never death—brooding and brooding and
brooding—the same people, half-man and half-gas—the dead that walk and
work—oh, those beasts, those half-human unicorns—houses and cities of
gold—old, old, old, older than time—came down from the stars—Great Tulu—
Azathoth—Nyarlathotep—waiting, waiting. . . .” The object died before dawn.

Of course there was an investigation, and the Indians at the reservation were
grilled unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had nothing to say. At least,
none of them had anything to say except old Grey Eagle, a Wichita chieftain
whose more than a century of age put him above common fears. He alone
deigned to grunt some advice.

“You let um ’lone, white man. No good—those people. All under here, all
under there, them old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there. Yig is Yig.
Tiráwa, big father of men, he there. Tiráwa is Tiráwa. No die. No get old. Just
same like air. Just live and wait. One time they come out here, live and fight.
Build um dirt tepee. Bring up gold—they got plenty. Go off and make new
lodges. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All change. Nobody come
out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. You let um ’lone, you have no bad
medicine. Red man know, he no get catch. White man meddle, he no come
back. Keep ’way little hills. No good. Grey Eagle say this.”

If Joe Norton and Rance Wheelock had taken the old chief’s advice, they would
probably be here today; but they didn’t. They were great readers and
materialists, and feared nothing in heaven or earth; and they thought that
some Indian fiends had a secret headquarters inside the mound. They had
been to the mound before, and now they went again to avenge old Capt.
Lawton—boasting that they’d do it if they had to tear the mound down
altogether. Clyde Compton watched them with a pair of prism binoculars and
saw them round the base of the sinister hill. Evidently they meant to survey
their territory very gradually and minutely. Minutes passed, and they did not
reappear. Nor were they ever seen again.

Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only the excitement of
the Great War served to restore it to the farther background of Binger folklore.
It was unvisited from 1916 to 1919, and would have remained so but for the
daredeviltry of some of the youths back from service in France. From 1919 to
1920, however, there was a veritable epidemic of mound-visiting among the
prematurely hardened young veterans—an epidemic that waxed as one youth
after another returned unhurt and contemptuous. By 1920—so short is human
memory—the mound was almost a joke; and the tame story of the murdered
squaw began to displace darker whispers on everybody’s tongues. Then two
reckless young brothers—the especially unimaginative and hard-boiled Clay
boys—decided to go and dig up the buried squaw and the gold for which the
old Indian had murdered her.

They went out on a September afternoon—about the time the Indian tom-
toms begin their incessant annual beating over the flat, red-dusty plains.
Nobody watched them, and their parents did not become worried at their non-
return for several hours. Then came an alarm and a searching-party, and
another resignation to the mystery of silence and doubt.

But one of them came back after all. It was Ed, the elder, and his straw-
coloured hair and beard had turned an albino white for two inches from the
roots. On his forehead was a queer scar like a branded hieroglyph. Three
months after he and his brother Walker had vanished he skulked into his house
at night, wearing nothing but a queerly patterned blanket which he thrust into
the fire as soon as he had got into a suit of his own clothes. He told his parents
that he and Walker had been captured by some strange Indians—not Wichitas
or Caddos—and held prisoners somewhere toward the west. Walker had died
under torture, but he himself had managed to escape at a high cost. The
experience had been particularly terrible, and he could not talk about it just
then. He must rest—and anyway, it would do no good to give an alarm and try
to find and punish the Indians. They were not of a sort that could be caught or
punished, and it was especially important for the good of Binger—for the good
of the world—that they be not pursued into their secret lair. As a matter of
fact, they were not altogether what one could call real Indians—he would
explain about that later. Meanwhile he must rest. Better not to rouse the
village with the news of his return—he would go upstairs and sleep. Before he
climbed the rickety flight to his room he took a pad and pencil from the living-
room table, and an automatic pistol from his father’s desk drawer.

Three hours later the shot rang out. Ed Clay had put a bullet neatly through his
temples with a pistol clutched in his left hand, leaving a sparsely written sheet
of paper on the rickety table near his bed. He had, it later appeared from the
whittled pencil-stub and stove full of charred paper, originally written much
more; but had finally decided not to tell what he knew beyond vague hints.
The surviving fragment was only a mad warning scrawled in a curiously
backhanded script—the ravings of a mind obviously deranged by hardships—
and it read thus; rather surprisingly for the utterance of one who had always
been stolid and matter-of-fact:
For gods sake never go nere that mound it is part of some kind of a world so
devilish and old it cannot be spoke about me and Walker went and was took
into the thing just melted at times and made up agen and the whole world
outside is helpless alongside of what they can do—they what live forever
young as they like and you cant tell if they are really men or just gostes—and
what they do cant be spoke about and this is only 1 entrance—you cant tell
how big the whole thing is—after what we seen I dont want to live aney more
France was nothing besides this—and see that people always keep away o god
they wood if they see poor walker like he was in the end. Yrs truely Ed Clay

At the autopsy it was found that all of young Clay’s organs were transposed
from right to left within his body, as if he had been turned inside out. Whether
they had always been so, no one could say at the time, but it was later learned
from army records that Ed had been perfectly normal when mustered out of
the service in May, 1919. Whether there was a mistake somewhere, or
whether some unprecedented metamorphosis had indeed occurred, is still an
unsettled question, as is also the origin of the hieroglyph-like scar on the
forehead.

That was the end of the explorations of the mound. In the eight intervening
years no one had been near the place, and few indeed had even cared to level
a spy glass at it. From time to time people continued to glance nervously at the
lone hill as it rose starkly from the plain against the western sky, and to
shudder at the small dark speck that paraded by day and the glimmering will-
o’-the-wisp that danced by night. The thing was accepted at face value as a
mystery not to be probed, and by common consent the village shunned the
subject. It was, after all, quite easy to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited in
every direction, and community life always follows beaten trails. The mound
side of the village was simply kept trailless, as if it had been water or
swampland or desert. And it is a curious commentary on the stolidity and
imaginative sterility of the human animal that the whispers with which
children and strangers were warned away from the mound quickly sank once
more into the flat tale of a murderous Indian ghost and his squaw victim. Only
the tribesmen on the reservation, and thoughtful old-timers like Grandma
Compton, remembered the overtones of unholy vistas and deep cosmic
menace which clustered around the ravings of those who had come back
changed and shattered.

It was very late, and Grandma Compton had long since gone upstairs to bed,
when Clyde finished telling me this. I hardly knew what to think of the frightful
puzzle, yet rebelled at any notion to conflict with sane materialism. What
influence had brought madness, or the impulse of flight and wandering, to so
many who had visited the mound? Though vastly impressed, I was spurred on
rather than deterred. Surely I must get to the bottom of this matter, as well I
might if I kept a cool head and an unbroken determination. Compton saw my
mood and shook his head worriedly. Then he motioned me to follow him
outdoors.

We stepped from the frame house to the quiet side street or lane, and walked
a few paces in the light of a waning August moon to where the houses were
thinner. The half-moon was still low, and had not blotted many stars from the
sky; so that I could see not only the westering gleams of Altair and Vega, but
the mystic shimmering of the Milky Way, as I looked out over the vast expanse
of earth and sky in the direction that Compton pointed. Then all at once I saw
a spark that was not a star—a bluish spark that moved and glimmered against
the Milky Way near the horizon, and that seemed in a vague way more evil and
malevolent than anything in the vault above. In another moment it was clear
that this spark came from the top of a long distant rise in the outspread and
faintly litten plain; and I turned to Compton with a question.

“Yes,” he answered, “it’s the blue ghost-light—and that is the mound. There’s
not a night in history that we haven’t seen it—and not a living soul in Binger
that would walk out over that plain toward it. It’s a bad business, young man,
and if you’re wise you’ll let it rest where it is. Better call your search off, son,
and tackle some of the other Injun legends around here. We’ve plenty to keep
you busy, heaven knows!”

II.

But I was in no mood for advice; and though Compton gave me a pleasant
room, I could not sleep a wink through eagerness for the next morning with its
chances to see the daytime ghost and to question the Indians at the
reservation. I meant to go about the whole thing slowly and thoroughly,
equipping myself with all available data both white and red before I
commenced any actual archaeological investigations. I rose and dressed at
dawn, and when I heard others stirring I went downstairs. Compton was
building the kitchen fire while his mother was busy in the pantry. When he saw
me he nodded, and after a moment invited me out into the glamorous young
sunlight. I knew where we were going, and as we walked along the lane I
strained my eyes westward over the plains.

There was the mound—far away and very curious in its aspect of artificial
regularity. It must have been from thirty to forty feet high, and all of a hundred
yards from north to south as I looked at it. It was not as wide as that from east
to west, Compton said, but had the contour of a rather thinnish ellipse. He, I
knew, had been safely out to it and back several times. As I looked at the rim
silhouetted against the deep blue of the west I tried to follow its minor
irregularities, and became impressed with a sense of something moving upon
it. My pulse mounted a bit feverishly, and I seized quickly on the high-powered
binoculars which Compton had quietly offered me. Focussing them hastily, I
saw at first only a tangle of underbrush on the distant mound’s rim—and then
something stalked into the field.

It was unmistakably a human shape, and I knew at once that I was seeing the
daytime “Indian ghost” I did not wonder at the description, for surely the tall,
lean, darkly robed being with the filleted black hair and seamed, coppery,
expressionless, aquiline face looked more like an Indian than anything else in
my previous experience. And yet my trained ethnologist’s eye told me at once
that this was no redskin of any sort hitherto known to history, but a creature
of vast racial variation and of a wholly different culture-stream. Modern
Indians are brachycephalic—round-headed—and you can’t find any
dolichocephalic or long-headed skulls except in ancient Pueblo deposits dating
back 2500 years or more; yet this man’s long-headedness was so pronounced
that I recognised it at once, even at his vast distance and in the uncertain field
of the binoculars. I saw, too, that the pattern of his robe represented a
decorative tradition utterly remote from anything we recognise in
southwestern native art. There were shining metal trappings, likewise, and a
short sword or kindred weapon at his side, all wrought in a fashion wholly alien
to anything I had ever heard of.

As he paced back and forth along the top of the mound I followed him for
several minutes with the glass, noting the kinaesthetic quality of his stride and
the poised way he carried his head; and there was borne in upon me the
strong, persistent conviction that this man, whoever or whatever he might be,
was certainly not a savage. He was the product of a civilisation, I felt
instinctively, though of what civilisation I could not guess. At length he
disappeared beyond the farther edge of the mound, as if descending the
opposite and unseen slope; and I lowered the glass with a curious mixture of
puzzled feelings. Compton was looking quizzically at me, and I nodded non-
committally, “What do you make of that?” he ventured. “This is what we’ve
seen here in Binger every day of our lives.”

That noon found me at the Indian reservation talking with old Grey Eagle—
who, through some miracle, was still alive; though he must have been close to
a hundred and fifty years old. He was a strange, impressive figure—this stern,
fearless leader of his kind who had talked with outlaws and traders in fringed
buckskin and French officials in knee-breeches and three-cornered hats—and
I was glad to see that, because of my air of deference toward him, he appeared
to like me. His liking, however, took an unfortunately obstructive form as soon
as he learned what I wanted; for all he would do was to warn me against the
search I was about to make.

“You good boy—you no bother that hill. Bad medicine. Plenty devil under
there—catchum when you dig. No dig, no hurt. Go and dig, no come back. Just
same when me boy, just same when my father and he father boy. All time buck
he walk in day, squaw with no head she walk in night. All time since white man
with tin coats they come from sunset and below big river—long way back—
three, four times more back than Grey Eagle—two times more back than
Frenchmen—all same after then. More back than that, nobody go near little
hills nor deep valleys with stone caves. Still more back, those old ones no hide,
come out and make villages. Bring plenty gold. Me them. You them. Then big
waters come. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out.
They no die—no get old like Grey Eagle with valleys in face and snow on head.
Just same like air—some man, some spirit. Bad medicine. Sometimes at night
spirit come out on half-man–half-horse-with-horn and fight where men once
fight. Keep ’way them place. No good. You good boy—go ’way and let them
old ones ’lone.”

That was all I could get out of the ancient chief, and the rest of the Indians
would say nothing at all. But if I was troubled, Grey Eagle was clearly more so;
for he obviously felt a real regret at the thought of my invading the region he
feared so abjectly. As I turned to leave the reservation he stopped me for a
final ceremonial farewell, and once more tried to get my promise to abandon
my search. When he saw that he could not, he produced something half-
timidly from a buckskin pouch he wore, and extended it toward me very
solemnly. It was a worn but finely minted metal disc about two inches in
diameter, oddly figured and perforated, and suspended from a leathern cord.

“You no promise, then Grey Eagle no can tell what get you. But if anything help
um, this good medicine. Come from my father—he get from he father—he get
from he father—all way back, close to Tiráwa, all men’s father. My father say,
‘You keep ’way from those old ones, keep ’way from little hills and valleys with
stone caves. But if old ones they come out to get you, then you shew um this
medicine. They know. They make him long way back. They look, then they no
do such bad medicine maybe. But no can tell. You keep ’way, just same. Them
no good. No tell what they do.’”

As he spoke, Grey Eagle was hanging the thing around my neck, and I saw it
was a very curious object indeed. The more I looked at it, the more I marvelled;
for not only was its heavy, darkish, lustrous, and richly mottled substance an
absolutely strange metal to me, but what was left of its design seemed to be
of a marvellously artistic and utterly unknown workmanship. One side, so far
as I could see, had borne an exquisitely modelled serpent design; whilst the
other side had depicted a kind of octopus or other tentacled monster. There
were some half-effaced hieroglyphs, too, of a kind which no archaeologist
could identify or even place conjecturally. With Grey Eagle’s permission I later
had expert historians, anthropologists, geologists, and chemists pass carefully
upon the disc, but from them I obtained only a chorus of bafflement. It defied
either classification or analysis. The chemists called it an amalgam of unknown
metallic elements of heavy atomic weight, and one geologist suggested that
the substance must be of meteoric origin, shot from unknown gulfs of
interstellar space. Whether it really saved my life or sanity or existence as a
human being I cannot attempt to say, but Grey Eagle is sure of it. He has it
again, now, and I wonder if it has any connexion with his inordinate age. All his
fathers who had it lived far beyond the century mark, perishing only in battle.
Is it possible that Grey Eagle, if kept from accidents, will never die? But I am
ahead of my story.

When I returned to the village I tried to secure more mound-lore, but found
only excited gossip and opposition. It was really flattering to see how solicitous
the people were about my safety, but I had to set their almost frantic
remonstrances aside. I shewed them Grey Eagle’s charm, but none of them
had ever heard of it before, or seen anything even remotely like it. They agreed
that it could not be an Indian relic, and imagined that the old chief’s ancestors
must have obtained it from some trader.

When they saw they could not deter me from my trip, the Binger citizens sadly
did what they could to aid my outfitting. Having known before my arrival the
sort of work to be done, I had most of my supplies already with me—machete
and trench-knife for shrub-clearing and excavating, electric torches for any
underground phase which might develop, rope, field-glasses, tape-measure,
microscope, and incidentals for emergencies—as much, in fact, as might be
comfortably stowed in a convenient handbag. To this equipment I added only
the heavy revolver which the sheriff forced upon me, and the pick and shovel
which I thought might expedite my work.

I decided to carry these latter things slung over my shoulder with a stout
cord—for I soon saw that I could not hope for any helpers or fellow-explorers.
The village would watch me, no doubt, with all its available telescopes and
field-glasses; but it would not send any citizen so much as a yard over the flat
plain toward the lone hillock. My start was timed for early the next morning,
and all the rest of that day I was treated with the awed and uneasy respect
which people give to a man about to set out for certain doom.

When morning came—a cloudy though not a threatening morning—the whole

village turned out to see me start across the dustblown plain. Binoculars
shewed the lone man at his usual pacing on the mound, and I resolved to keep
him in sight as steadily as possible during my approach. At the last moment a
vague sense of dread oppressed me, and I was just weak and whimsical enough
to let Grey Eagle’s talisman swing on my chest in full view of any beings or
ghosts who might be inclined to heed it. Bidding au revoir to Compton and his
mother, I started off at a brisk stride despite the bag in my left hand and the
clanking pick and shovel strapped to my back; holding my field-glass in my right
hand and taking a glance at the silent pacer from time to time. As I neared the
mound I saw the man very clearly, and fancied I could trace an expression of
infinite evil and decadence on his seamed, hairless features. I was startled, too,
to see that his goldenly gleaming weapon-case bore hieroglyphs very similar
to those on the unknown talisman I wore. All the creature’s costume and
trappings bespoke exquisite workmanship and cultivation. Then, all too
abruptly, I saw him start down the farther side of the mound and out of sight.
When I reached the place, about ten minutes after I set out, there was no one
there.

There is no need of relating how I spent the early part of my search in surveying
and circumnavigating the mound, taking measurements, and stepping back to
view the thing from different angles. It had impressed me tremendously as I
approached it, and there seemed to be a kind of latent menace in its too
regular outlines. It was the only elevation of any sort on the wide, level plain;
and I could not doubt for a moment that it was an artificial tumulus. The steep
sides seemed wholly unbroken, and without marks of human tenancy or
passage. There were no signs of a path toward the top; and, burdened as I was,
I managed to scramble up only with considerable difficulty. When I reached
the summit I found a roughly level elliptical plateau about 300 by 50 feet in
dimensions; uniformly covered with rank grass and dense underbrush, and
utterly incompatible with the constant presence of a pacing sentinel. This
condition gave me a real shock, for it shewed beyond question that the “Old
Indian”, vivid though he seemed, could not be other than a collective
hallucination.

I looked about with considerable perplexity and alarm, glancing wistfully back
at the village and the mass of black dots which I knew was the watching crowd.
Training my glass upon them, I saw that they were studying me avidly with
their glasses; so to reassure them I waved my cap in the air with a show of
jauntiness which I was far from feeling. Then, settling to my work I flung down
pick, shovel, and bag; taking my machete from the latter and commencing to
clear away underbrush. It was a weary task, and now and then I felt a curious
shiver as some perverse gust of wind arose to hamper my motion with a skill
approaching deliberateness. At times it seemed as if a half-tangible force were
pushing me back as I worked—almost as if the air thickened in front of me, or
as if formless hands tugged at my wrists. My energy seemed used up without
producing adequate results, yet for all that I made some progress.

By afternoon I had clearly perceived that, toward the northern end of the
mound, there was a slight bowl-like depression in the root-tangled earth.
While this might mean nothing, it would be a good place to begin when I
reached the digging stage, and I made a mental note of it. At the same time I
noticed another and very peculiar thing—namely, that the Indian talisman
swinging from my neck seemed to behave oddly at a point about seventeen
feet southeast of the suggested bowl. Its gyrations were altered whenever I
happened to stoop around that point, and it tugged downward as if attracted
by some magnetism in the soil. The more I noticed this, the more it struck me,
till at length I decided to do a little preliminary digging there without further
delay.

As I turned up the soil with my trench-knife I could not help wondering at the
relative thinness of the reddish regional layer. The country as a whole was all
red sandstone earth, but here I found a strange black loam less than a foot
down. It was such soil as one finds in the strange, deep valleys farther west
and south, and must surely have been brought from a considerable distance in
the prehistoric age when the mound was reared. Kneeling and digging, I felt
the leathern cord around my neck tugged harder and harder, as something in
the soil seemed to draw the heavy metal talisman more and more. Then I felt
my implements strike a hard surface, and wondered if a rock layer rested
beneath. Prying about with the trench-knife, I found that such was not the
case. Instead, to my intense surprise and feverish interest, I brought up a
mould-clogged, heavy object of cylindrical shape—about a foot long and four
inches in diameter—to which my hanging talisman clove with glue-like
tenacity. As I cleared off the black loam my wonder and tension increased at
the bas-reliefs revealed by that process. The whole cylinder, ends and all, was
covered with figures and hieroglyphs; and I saw with growing excitement that
these things were in the same unknown tradition as those on Grey Eagle’s
charm and on the yellow metal trappings of the ghost I had seen through my
binoculars.

Sitting down, I further cleaned the magnetic cylinder against the rough
corduroy of my knickerbockers, and observed that it was made of the same
heavy, lustrous unknown metal as the charm—hence, no doubt, the singular
attraction. The carvings and chasings were very strange and very horrible—
nameless monsters and designs fraught with insidious evil—and all were of the
highest finish and craftsmanship. I could not at first make head or tail of the
thing, and handled it aimlessly until I spied a cleavage near one end. Then I
sought eagerly for some mode of opening, discovering at last that the end
simply unscrewed.

The cap yielded with difficulty, but at last it came off, liberating a curious
aromatic odour. The sole contents was a bulky roll of a yellowish, paper-like
substance inscribed in greenish characters, and for a second I had the supreme
thrill of fancying that I held a written key to unknown elder worlds and abysses
beyond time. Almost immediately, however, the unrolling of one end shewed
that the manuscript was in Spanish—albeit the formal, pompous Spanish of a
long-departed day. In the golden sunset light I looked at the heading and the
opening paragraph, trying to decipher the wretched and ill-punctuated script
of the vanished writer. What manner of relic was this? Upon what sort of a
discovery had I stumbled? The first words set me in a new fury of excitement
and curiosity, for instead of diverting me from my original quest they startlingly
confirmed me in that very effort.

The yellow scroll with the green script began with a bold, identifying caption
and a ceremoniously desperate appeal for belief in incredible revelations to
follow:
RELACIÓN DE PÁNFILO DE ZAMACONA Y NUÑEZ, HIDALGO DE LUARCA EN
ASTURIAS, TOCANTE AL MUNDO SOTERRÁNEO DE XINAIÁN, A. D. MDXLV

En el nombre de la santísima Trinidad, Padre, Hijo, y Espíritu-Santo, tres

personas distintas y un solo. Dios verdadero, y de la santísima Virgen muestra
Señora, YO, PÁNFILO DE ZAMACONA, HIJO DE PEDRO GUZMAN Y ZAMACONA,
HIDALGO, Y DE LA DOÑA YNÉS ALVARADO Y NUÑEZ, DE LUARCA EN ASTURIAS,
juro para que todo que deco está verdadero como sacramento. . . .

I paused to reflect on the portentous significance of what I was reading. “The

Narrative of Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman, of Luarca in Asturias,
Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinaián, A. D. 1545” . . . Here, surely,
was too much for any mind to absorb all at once. A subterranean world—again
that persistent idea which filtered through all the Indian tales and through all
the utterances of those who had come back from the mound. And the date—
1545—what could this mean? In 1540 Coronado and his men had gone north
from Mexico into the wilderness, but had they not turned back in 1542! My
eye ran questingly down the opened part of the scroll, and almost at once
seized on the name Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. The writer of this thing,
clearly, was one of Coronado’s men—but what had he been doing in this
remote realm three years after his party had gone back? I must read further,
for another glance told me that what was now unrolled was merely a summary
of Coronado’s northward march, differing in no essential way from the account
known to history.

It was only the waning light which checked me before I could unroll and read
more, and in my impatient bafflement I almost forgot to be frightened at the
onrush of night in this sinister place. Others, however, had not forgotten the
lurking terror, for I heard a loud distant hallooing from a knot of men who had
gathered at the edge of the town. Answering the anxious hail, I restored the
manuscript to its strange cylinder—to which the disc around my neck still clung
until I pried it off and packed it and my smaller implements for departure.
Leaving the pick and shovel for the next day’s work, I took up my handbag,
scrambled down the steep side of the mound, and in another quarter-hour
was back in the village explaining and exhibiting my curious find. As darkness
drew on, I glanced back at the mound I had so lately left, and saw with a
shudder that the faint bluish torch of the nocturnal squaw-ghost had begun to
glimmer.

It was hard work waiting to get at the bygone Spaniard’s narrative; but I knew
I must have quiet and leisure for a good translation, so reluctantly saved the
task for the later hours of night. Promising the townsfolk a clear account of my
findings in the morning, and giving them an ample opportunity to examine the
bizarre and provocative cylinder, I accompanied Clyde Compton home and
ascended to my room for the translating process as soon as I possibly could.
My host and his mother were intensely eager to hear the tale, but I thought
they had better wait till I could thoroughly absorb the text myself and give
them the gist concisely and unerringly.

Opening my handbag in the light of a single electric bulb, I again took out the
cylinder and noted the instant magnetism which pulled the Indian talisman to
its carven surface. The designs glimmered evilly on the richly lustrous and
unknown metal, and I could not help shivering as I studied the abnormal and
blasphemous forms that leered at me with such exquisite workmanship. I wish
now that I had carefully photographed all these designs—though perhaps it is
just as well that I did not. Of one thing I am really glad, and that is that I could
not then identify the squatting octopus-headed thing which dominated most
of the ornate cartouches, and which the manuscript called “Tulu”. Recently I
have associated it, and the legends in the manuscript connected with it, with
some new-found folklore of monstrous and unmentioned Cthulhu, a horror
which seeped down from the stars while the young earth was still half-formed;
and had I known of the connexion then, I could not have stayed in the same
room with the thing. The secondary motif, a semi-anthropomorphic serpent, I
did quite readily place as a prototype of the Yig, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulcan
conceptions. Before opening the cylinder I tested its magnetic powers on
metals other than that of Grey Eagle’s disc, but found that no attraction
existed. It was no common magnetism which pervaded this morbid fragment
of unknown worlds and linked it to its kind.

At last I took out the manuscript and began translating—jotting down a

synoptic outline in English as I went, and now and then regretting the absence
of a Spanish dictionary when I came upon some especially obscure or archaic
word or construction. There was a sense of ineffable strangeness in thus being
thrown back nearly four centuries in the midst of my continuous quest—
thrown back to a year when my own forbears were settled, homekeeping
gentlemen of Somerset and Devon under Henry the Eighth, with never a
thought of the adventure that was to take their blood to Virginia and the New
World; yet when that new world possessed, even as now, the same brooding
mystery of the mound which formed my present sphere and horizon. The
sense of a throwback was all the stronger because I felt instinctively that the
common problem of the Spaniard and myself was one of such abysmal
timelessness—of such unholy and unearthly eternity—that the scant four
hundred years between us bulked as nothing in comparison. It took no more
than a single look at that monstrous and insidious cylinder to make me realise
the dizzying gulfs that yawned between all men of the known earth and the
primal mysteries it represented. Before that gulf Pánfilo de Zamacona and I
stood side by side; just as Aristotle and I, or Cheops and I, might have stood.

III.

Of his youth in Luarca, a small, placid port on the Bay of Biscay, Zamacona told
little. He had been wild, and a younger son, and had come to New Spain in
1532, when only twenty years old. Sensitively imaginative, he had listened
spellbound to the floating rumours of rich cities and unknown worlds to the
north—and especially to the tale of the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, who
came back from a trip in 1539 with glowing accounts of fabulous Cíbola and its
great walled towns with terraced stone houses. Hearing of Coronado’s
contemplated expedition in search of these wonders—and of the greater
wonders whispered to lie beyond them in the land of buffaloes—young
Zamacona managed to join the picked party of 300, and started north with the
rest in 1540.

History knows the story of that expedition—how Cíbola was found to be

merely the squalid Pueblo village of Zuñi, and how de Niza was sent back to
Mexico in disgrace for his florid exaggerations; how Coronado first saw the
Grand Canyon, and how at Cicuyé, on the Pecos, he heard from the Indian
called El Turco of the rich and mysterious land of Quivira, far to the northeast,
where gold, silver, and buffaloes abounded, and where there flowed a river
two leagues wide. Zamacona told briefly of the winter camp at Tiguex on the
Pecos, and of the northward start in April, when the native guide proved false
and led the party astray amidst a land of prairie-dogs, salt pools, and roving,
bison-hunting tribes.

When Coronado dismissed his larger force and made his final forty-two-day
march with a very small and select detachment, Zamacona managed to be
included in the advancing party. He spoke of the fertile country and of the
great ravines with trees visible only from the edge of their steep banks; and of
how all the men lived solely on buffalo-meat. And then came mention of the
expedition’s farthest limit—of the presumable but disappointing land of
Quivira with its villages of grass houses, its brooks and rivers, its good black
soil, its plums, nuts, grapes, and mulberries, and its maize-growing and copper-
using Indians. The execution of El Turco, the false native guide, was casually
touched upon, and there was a mention of the cross which Coronado raised
on the bank of a great river in the autumn of 1541—a cross bearing the
inscription, “Thus far came the great general, Francisco Vásquez de
Coronado”.

This supposed Quivira lay at about the fortieth parallel of north latitude, and I
see that quite lately the New York archaeologist Dr. Hodge has identified it
with the course of the Arkansas River through Barton and Rice Counties,
Kansas. It is the old home of the Wichitas, before the Sioux drove them south
into what is now Oklahoma, and some of the grass-house village sites have
been found and excavated for artifacts. Coronado did considerable exploring
hereabouts, led hither and thither by the persistent rumours of rich cities and
hidden worlds which floated fearfully around on the Indians’ tongues. These
northerly natives seemed more afraid and reluctant to talk about the
rumoured cities and worlds than the Mexican Indians had been; yet at the
same time seemed as if they could reveal a good deal more than the Mexicans
had they been willing or dared to do so. Their vagueness exasperated the
Spanish leader, and after many disappointing searches he began to be very
severe toward those who brought him stories. Zamacona, more patient than
Coronado, found the tales especially interesting; and learned enough of the
local speech to hold long conversations with a young buck named Charging
Buffalo, whose curiosity had led him into much stranger places than any of his
fellow-tribesmen had dared to penetrate.

It was Charging Buffalo who told Zamacona of the queer stone doorways,
gates, or cave-mouths at the bottom of some of those deep, steep, wooded
ravines which the party had noticed on the northward march. These openings,
he said, were mostly concealed by shrubbery; and few had entered them for
untold aeons. Those who went to where they led, never returned—or in a few
cases returned mad or curiously maimed. But all this was legend, for nobody
was known to have gone more than a limited distance inside any of them
within the memory of the grandfathers of the oldest living men. Charging
Buffalo himself had probably been farther than anyone else, and he had seen
enough to curb both his curiosity and his greed for the rumoured gold below.

Beyond the aperture he had entered there was a long passage running crazily
up and down and round about, and covered with frightful carvings of monsters
and horrors that no man had ever seen. At last, after untold miles of windings
and descents, there was a glow of terrible blue light; and the passage opened
upon a shocking nether world. About this the Indian would say no more, for
he had seen something that had sent him back in haste. But the golden cities
must be somewhere down there, he added, and perhaps a white man with the
magic of the thunder-stick might succeed in getting to them. He would not tell
the big chief Coronado what he knew, for Coronado would not listen to Indian
talk any more. Yes—he could shew Zamacona the way if the white man would
leave the party and accept his guidance. But he would not go inside the
opening with the white man. It was bad in there.

The place was about a five days’ march to the south, near the region of great
mounds. These mounds had something to do with the evil world down there—
they were probably ancient closed-up passages to it, for once the Old Ones
below had had colonies on the surface and had traded with men everywhere,
even in the lands that had sunk under the big waters. It was when those lands
had sunk that the Old Ones closed themselves up below and refused to deal
with surface people. The refugees from the sinking places had told them that
the gods of outer earth were against men, and that no men could survive on
the outer earth unless they were daemons in league with the evil gods. That is
why they shut out all surface folk, and did fearful things to any who ventured
down where they dwelt. There had been sentries once at the various openings,
but after ages they were no longer needed. Not many people cared to talk
about the hidden Old Ones, and the legends about them would probably have
died out but for certain ghostly reminders of their presence now and then. It
seemed that the infinite ancientness of these creatures had brought them
strangely near to the borderline of spirit, so that their ghostly emanations were
more commonly frequent and vivid. Accordingly the region of the great
mounds was often convulsed with spectral nocturnal battles reflecting those
which had been fought in the days before the openings were closed.

The Old Ones themselves were half-ghost—indeed, it was said that they no
longer grew old or reproduced their kind, but flickered eternally in a state
between flesh and spirit. The change was not complete, though, for they had
to breathe. It was because the underground world needed air that the
openings in the deep valleys were not blocked up as the mound-openings on
the plains had been. These openings, Charging Buffalo added, were probably
based on natural fissures in the earth. It was whispered that the Old Ones had
come down from the stars to the world when it was very young, and had gone
inside to build their cities of solid gold because the surface was not then fit to
live on. They were the ancestors of all men, yet none could guess from what
star—or what place beyond the stars—they came. Their hidden cities were still
full of gold and silver, but men had better let them alone unless protected by
very strong magic.

They had frightful beasts with a faint strain of human blood, on which they
rode, and which they employed for other purposes. The things, so people
hinted, were carnivorous, and like their masters, preferred human flesh; so
that although the Old Ones themselves did not breed, they had a sort of half-
human slave-class which also served to nourish the human and animal
population. This had been very oddly recruited, and was supplemented by a
second slave-class of reanimated corpses. The Old Ones knew how to make a
corpse into an automaton which would last almost indefinitely and perform
any sort of work when directed by streams of thought. Charging Buffalo said
that the people had all come to talk by means of thought only; speech having
been found crude and needless, except for religious devotions and emotional
expression, as aeons of discovery and study rolled by. They worshipped Yig,
the great father of serpents, and Tulu, the octopus-headed entity that had
brought them down from the stars; appeasing both of these hideous
monstrosities by means of human sacrifices offered up in a very curious
manner which Charging Buffalo did not care to describe.

Zamacona was held spellbound by the Indian’s tale, and at once resolved to
accept his guidance to the cryptic doorway in the ravine. He did not believe
the accounts of strange ways attributed by legend to the hidden people, for
the experiences of the party had been such as to disillusion one regarding
native myths of unknown lands; but he did feel that some sufficiently
marvellous field of riches and adventure must indeed lie beyond the weirdly
carved passages in the earth. At first he thought of persuading Charging
Buffalo to tell his story to Coronado—offering to shield him against any effects
of the leader’s testy scepticism—but later he decided that a lone adventure
would be better. If he had no aid, he would not have to share anything he
found; but might perhaps become a great discoverer and owner of fabulous
riches. Success would make him a greater figure than Coronado himself—
perhaps a greater figure than anyone else in New Spain, including even the
mighty viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza.

On October 7, 1541, at an hour close to midnight, Zamacona stole out of the

Spanish camp near the grass-house village and met Charging Buffalo for the
long southward journey. He travelled as lightly as possible, and did not wear
his heavy helmet and breastplate. Of the details of the trip the manuscript told
very little, but Zamacona records his arrival at the great ravine on October
13th. The descent of the thickly wooded slope took no great time; and though
the Indian had trouble in locating the shrubbery-hidden stone door again
amidst the twilight of that deep gorge, the place was finally found. It was a
very small aperture as doorways go, formed of monolithic sandstone jambs
and lintel, and bearing signs of nearly effaced and now undecipherable
carvings. Its height was perhaps seven feet, and its width not more than four.
There were drilled places in the jambs which argued the bygone presence of a
hinged door or gate, but all other traces of such a thing had long since
vanished.

At sight of this black gulf Charging Buffalo displayed considerable fear, and
threw down his pack of supplies with signs of haste. He had provided
Zamacona with a good stock of resinous torches and provisions, and had
guided him honestly and well; but refused to share in the venture that lay
ahead. Zamacona gave him the trinkets he had kept for such an occasion, and
obtained his promise to return to the region in a month; afterward shewing
the way southward to the Pecos Pueblo villages. A prominent rock on the plain
above them was chosen as a meeting-place; the one arriving first to pitch camp
until the other should arrive.
In the manuscript Zamacona expressed a wistful wonder as to the Indian’s
length of waiting at the rendezvous—for he himself could never keep that
tryst. At the last moment Charging Buffalo tried to dissuade him from his
plunge into the darkness, but soon saw it was futile, and gestured a stoical
farewell. Before lighting his first torch and entering the opening with his
ponderous pack, the Spaniard watched the lean form of the Indian scrambling
hastily and rather relievedly upward among the trees. It was the cutting of his
last link with the world; though he did not know that he was never to see a
human being—in the accepted sense of that term—again.

Zamacona felt no immediate premonition of evil upon entering that ominous

doorway, though from the first he was surrounded by a bizarre and
unwholesome atmosphere. The passage, slightly taller and wider than the
aperture, was for many yards a level tunnel of Cyclopean masonry, with heavily
worn flagstones under foot, and grotesquely carved granite and sandstone
blocks in sides and ceiling. The carvings must have been loathsome and terrible
indeed, to judge from Zamacona’s description; according to which most of
them revolved around the monstrous beings Yig and Tulu. They were unlike
anything the adventurer had ever seen before, though he added that the
native architecture of Mexico came closest to them of all things in the outer
world. After some distance the tunnel began to dip abruptly, and irregular
natural rock appeared on all sides. The passage seemed only partly artificial,
and decorations were limited to occasional cartouches with shocking bas-
reliefs.

Following an enormous descent, whose steepness at times produced an acute

danger of slipping and tobogganing, the passage became exceedingly
uncertain in its direction and variable in its contour. At times it narrowed
almost to a slit or grew so low that stooping and even crawling were necessary,
while at other times it broadened out into sizeable caves or chains of caves.
Very little human construction, it was plain, had gone into this part of the
tunnel; though occasionally a sinister cartouche or hieroglyphic on the wall, or
a blocked-up lateral passageway, would remind Zamacona that this was in
truth the aeon-forgotten high-road to a primal and unbelievable world of living
things.

For three days, as best he could reckon, Pánfilo de Zamacona scrambled down,
up, along, and around, but always predominately downward, through this dark
region of palaeogean night. Once in a while he heard some secret being of
darkness patter or flap out of his way, and on just one occasion he half
glimpsed a great, bleached thing that set him trembling. The quality of the air
was mostly very tolerable; though foetid zones were now and then met with,
while one great cavern of stalactites and stalagmites afforded a depressing
dampness. This latter, when Charging Buffalo had come upon it, had quite
seriously barred the way; since the limestone deposits of ages had built fresh
pillars in the path of the primordial abyss-denizens. The Indian, however, had
broken through these; so that Zamacona did not find his course impeded. It
was an unconscious comfort to him to reflect that someone else from the
outside world had been there before—and the Indian’s careful descriptions
had removed the element of surprise and unexpectedness. More—Charging
Buffalo’s knowledge of the tunnel had led him to provide so good a torch
supply for the journey in and out, that there would be no danger of becoming
stranded in darkness. Zamacona camped twice, building a fire whose smoke
seemed well taken care of by the natural ventilation.

At what he considered the end of the third day—though his cocksure

guesswork chronology is not at any time to be given the easy faith that he gave
it—Zamacona encountered the prodigious descent and subsequent prodigious
climb which Charging Buffalo had described as the tunnel’s last phase. As at
certain earlier points, marks of artificial improvement were here discernible;
and several times the steep gradient was eased by a flight of rough-hewn
steps. The torch shewed more and more of the monstrous carvings on the
walls, and finally the resinous flare seemed mixed with a fainter and more
diffusive light as Zamacona climbed up and up after the last downward
stairway. At length the ascent ceased, and a level passage of artificial masonry
with dark, basaltic blocks led straight ahead. There was no need for a torch
now, for all the air was glowing with a bluish, quasi-electric radiance that
flickered like an aurora. It was the strange light of the inner world that the
Indian had described—and in another moment Zamacona emerged from the
tunnel upon a bleak, rocky hillside which climbed above him to a seething,
impenetrable sky of bluish coruscations, and descended dizzily below him to
an apparently illimitable plain shrouded in bluish mist.

He had come to the unknown world at last, and from his manuscript it is clear
that he viewed the formless landscape as proudly and exaltedly as ever his
fellow-countryman Balboa viewed the new-found Pacific from that
unforgettable peak in Darien. Charging Buffalo had turned back at this point,
driven by fear of something which he would only describe vaguely and
evasively as a herd of bad cattle, neither horse nor buffalo, but like the things
the mound-spirits rode at night—but Zamacona could not be deterred by any
such trifle. Instead of fear, a strange sense of glory filled him; for he had
imagination enough to know what it meant to stand alone in an inexplicable
nether world whose existence no other white man suspected.

The soil of the great hill that surged upward behind him and spread steeply
downward below him was dark grey, rock-strown, without vegetation, and
probably basaltic in origin; with an unearthly cast which made him feel like an
intruder on an alien planet. The vast distant plain, thousands of feet below,
had no features he could distinguish; especially since it appeared to be largely
veiled in a curling, bluish vapour. But more than hill or plain or cloud, the bluely
luminous, coruscating sky impressed the adventurer with a sense of supreme
wonder and mystery. What created this sky within a world he could not tell;
though he knew of the northern lights, and had even seen them once or twice.
He concluded that this subterraneous light was something vaguely akin to the
aurora; a view which moderns may well endorse, though it seems likely that
certain phenomena of radio-activity may also enter in.
At Zamacona’s back the mouth of the tunnel he had traversed yawned darkly;
defined by a stone doorway very like the one he had entered in the world
above, save that it was of greyish-black basalt instead of red sandstone. There
were hideous sculptures, still in good preservation and perhaps corresponding
to those on the outer portal which time had largely weathered away. The
absence of weathering here argued a dry, temperate climate; indeed, the
Spaniard already began to note the delightfully spring-like stability of
temperature which marks the air of the north’s interior. On the stone jambs
were works proclaiming the bygone presence of hinges, but of any actual door
or gate no trace remained. Seating himself for rest and thought, Zamacona
lightened his pack by removing an amount of food and torches sufficient to
take him back through the tunnel. These he proceeded to cache at the
opening, under a cairn hastily formed of the rock fragments which everywhere
lay around. Then, readjusting his lightened pack, he commenced his descent
toward the distant plain; preparing to invade a region which no living thing of
outer earth had penetrated in a century or more, which no white man had ever
penetrated, and from which, if legend were to be believed, no organic creature
had ever returned sane.

Zamacona strode briskly along down the steep, interminable slope; his
progress checked at times by the bad walking that came from loose rock
fragments, or by the excessive precipitousness of the grade. The distance of
the mist-shrouded plain must have been enormous, for many hours’ walking
brought him apparently no closer to it than he had been before. Behind him
was always the great hill stretching upward into a bright aërial sea of bluish
coruscations. Silence was universal; so that his own footsteps, and the fall of
stones that he dislodged, struck on his ears with startling distinctness. It was
at what he regarded as about noon that he first saw the abnormal footprints
which set him to thinking of Charging Buffalo’s terrible hints, precipitate flight,
and strangely abiding terror.

The rock-strown nature of the soil gave few opportunities for tracks of any
kind, but at one point a rather level interval had caused the loose detritus to
accumulate in a ridge, leaving a considerable area of dark-grey loam absolutely
bare. Here, in a rambling confusion indicating a large herd aimlessly
wandering, Zamacona found the abnormal prints. It is to be regretted that he
could not describe them more exactly, but the manuscript displayed far more
vague fear than accurate observation. Just what it was that so frightened the
Spaniard can only be inferred from his later hints regarding the beasts. He
referred to the prints as ‘not hooves, nor hands, nor feet, nor precisely paws—
nor so large as to cause alarm on that account’. Just why or how long ago the
things had been there, was not easy to guess. There was no vegetation visible,
hence grazing was out of the question; but of course if the beasts were
carnivorous they might well have been hunting smaller animals, whose tracks
their own would tend to obliterate.

Glancing backward from this plateau to the heights above, Zamacona thought
he detected traces of a great winding road which had once led from the tunnel
downward to the plain. One could get the impression of this former highway
only from a broad panoramic view, since a trickle of loose rock fragments had
long ago obscured it; but the adventurer felt none the less certain that it had
existed. It had not, probably, been an elaborately paved trunk route; for the
small tunnel it reached seemed scarcely like a main avenue to the outer world.
In choosing a straight path of descent Zamacona had not followed its curving
course, though he must have crossed it once or twice. With his attention now
called to it, he looked ahead to see if he could trace it downward toward the
plain; and this he finally thought he could do. He resolved to investigate its
surface when next he crossed it, and perhaps to pursue its line for the rest of
the way if he could distinguish it.

Having resumed his journey, Zamacona came some time later upon what he
thought was a bend of the ancient road. There were signs of grading and of
some primal attempt at rock-surfacing, but not enough was left to make the
route worth following. While rummaging about in the soil with his sword, the
Spaniard turned up something that glittered in the eternal blue daylight, and
was thrilled at beholding a kind of coin or medal of a dark, unknown, lustrous
metal, with hideous designs on each side. It was utterly and bafflingly alien to
him, and from his description I have no doubt but that it was a duplicate of the
talisman given me by Grey Eagle almost four centuries afterward. Pocketing it
after a long and curious examination, he strode onward; finally pitching camp
at an hour which he guessed to be the evening of the outer world.

The next day Zamacona rose early and resumed his descent through this blue-
litten world of mist and desolation and preternatural silence. As he advanced,
he at last became able to distinguish a few objects on the distant plain below—
trees, bushes, rocks, and a small river that came into view from the right and
curved forward at a point to the left of his contemplated course. This river
seemed to be spanned by a bridge connected with the descending roadway,
and with care the explorer could trace the route of the road beyond it in a
straight line over the plain. Finally he even thought he could detect towns
scattered along the rectilinear ribbon; towns whose left-hand edges reached
the river and sometimes crossed it. Where such crossings occurred, he saw as
he descended, there were always signs of bridges either ruined or surviving.
He was now in the midst of a sparse grassy vegetation, and saw that below him
the growth became thicker and thicker. The road was easier to define now,
since its surface discouraged the grass which the looser soil supported. Rock
fragments were less frequent, and the barren upward vista behind him looked
bleak and forbidding in contrast to his present milieu.

It was on this day that he saw the blurred mass moving over the distant plain.
Since his first sight of the sinister footprints he had met with no more of these,
but something about that slowly and deliberately moving mass peculiarly
sickened him. Nothing but a herd of grazing animals could move just like that,
and after seeing the footprints he did not wish to meet the things which had
made them. Still, the moving mass was not near the road—and his curiosity
and greed for fabled gold were great. Besides, who could really judge things
from vague, jumbled footprints or from the panic-twisted hints of an ignorant
Indian?
In straining his eyes to view the moving mass Zamacona became aware of
several other interesting things. One was that certain parts of the now
unmistakable towns glittered oddly in the misty blue light. Another was that,
besides the towns, several similarly glittering structures of a more isolated sort
were scattered here and there along the road and over the plain. They seemed
to be embowered in clumps of vegetation, and those off the road had small
avenues leading to the highway. No smoke or other signs of life could be
discerned about any of the towns or buildings. Finally Zamacona saw that the
plain was not infinite in extent, though the half-concealing blue mists had
hitherto made it seem so. It was bounded in the remote distance by a range of
low hills, toward a gap in which the river and roadway seemed to lead. All
this—especially the glittering of certain pinnacles in the towns—had become
very vivid when Zamacona pitched his second camp amidst the endless blue
day. He likewise noticed the flocks of high-soaring birds, whose nature he
could not clearly make out.

The next afternoon—to use the language of the outer world as the manuscript
did at all times—Zamacona reached the silent plain and crossed the soundless,
slow-running river on a curiously carved and fairly well-preserved bridge of
black basalt. The water was clear, and contained large fishes of a wholly
strange aspect. The roadway was now paved and somewhat overgrown with
weeds and creeping vines, and its course was occasionally outlined by small
pillars bearing obscure symbols. On every side the grassy level extended, with
here and there a clump of trees or shrubbery, and with unidentifiable bluish
flowers growing irregularly over the whole area. Now and then some
spasmodic motion of the grass indicated the presence of serpents. In the
course of several hours the traveller reached a grove of old and alien-looking
evergreen-trees which he knew, from distant viewing, protected one of the
glittering-roofed isolated structures. Amidst the encroaching vegetation he
saw the hideously sculptured pylons of a stone gateway leading off the road,
and was presently forcing his way through briers above a moss-crusted
tessellated walk lined with huge trees and low monolithic pillars.
At last, in this hushed green twilight, he saw the crumbling and ineffably
ancient facade of the building—a temple, he had no doubt. It was a mass of
nauseous bas-reliefs; depicting scenes and beings, objects and ceremonies,
which could certainly have no place on this or any sane planet. In hinting of
these things Zamacona displays for the first time that shocked and pious
hesitancy which impairs the informative value of the rest of his manuscript.
We cannot help regretting that the Catholic ardour of Renaissance Spain had
so thoroughly permeated his thought and feeling. The door of the place stood
wide open, and absolute darkness filled the windowless interior. Conquering
the repulsion which the mural sculptures had excited, Zamacona took out flint
and steel, lighted a resinous torch, pushed aside curtaining vines, and sallied
boldly across the ominous threshold.

For a moment he was quite stupefied by what he saw. It was not the all-
covering dust and cobwebs of immemorial aeons, the fluttering winged things,
the shriekingly loathsome sculptures on the walls, the bizarre form of the many
basins and braziers, the sinister pyramidal altar with the hollow top, or the
monstrous, octopus-headed abnormality in some strange, dark metal leering
and squatting broodingly on its hieroglyphed pedestal, which robbed him of
even the power to give a startled cry. It was nothing so unearthly as this—but
merely the fact that, with the exception of the dust, the cobwebs, the winged
things, and the gigantic emerald-eyed idol, every particle of substance in sight
was composed of pure and evidently solid gold.

Even the manuscript, written in retrospect after Zamacona knew that gold is
the most common structural metal of a nether world containing limitless lodes
and veins of it, reflects the frenzied excitement which the traveller felt upon
suddenly finding the real source of all the Indian legends of golden cities. For
a time the power of detailed observation left him, but in the end his faculties
were recalled by a peculiar tugging sensation in the pocket of his doublet.
Tracing the feeling, he realised that the disc of strange metal he had found in
the abandoned road was being attracted strongly by the vast octopus-headed,
emerald-eyed idol on the pedestal, which he now saw to be composed of the
same unknown exotic metal. He was later to learn that this strange magnetic
substance—as alien to the inner world as to the outer world of men—is the
one precious metal of the blue-lighted abyss. None knows what it is or where
it occurs in Nature, and the amount of it on this planet came down from the
stars with the people when great Tulu, the octopus-headed god, brought them
for the first time to this earth. Certainly, its only known source was a stock of
pre-existing artifacts, including multitudes of Cyclopean idols. It could never
be placed or analysed, and even its magnetism was exerted only on its own
kind. It was the supreme ceremonial metal of the hidden people, its use being
regulated by custom in such a way that its magnetic properties might cause no
inconvenience. A very weakly magnetic alloy of it with such base metals as
iron, gold, silver, copper, or zinc, had formed the sole monetary standard of
the hidden people at one period of their history.

Zamacona’s reflections on the strange idol and its magnetism were disturbed
by a tremendous wave of fear as, for the first time in this silent world, he heard
a rumble of very definite and obviously approaching sound. There was no
mistaking its nature. It was a thunderously charging herd of large animals; and,
remembering the Indian’s panic, the footprints, and the moving mass distantly
seen, the Spaniard shuddered in terrified anticipation. He did not analyse his
position, or the significance of this onrush of great lumbering beings, but
merely responded to an elemental urge toward self-protection. Charging
herds do not stop to find victims in obscure places, and on the outer earth
Zamacona would have felt little or no alarm in such a massive, grove-girt
edifice. Some instinct, however, now bred a deep and peculiar terror in his
soul; and he looked about frantically for any means of safety.

There being no available refuge in the great, gold-patined interior, he felt that
he must close the long-disused door; which still hung on its ancient hinges,
doubled back against the inner wall. Soil, vines, and moss had entered the
opening from outside, so that he had to dig a path for the great gold portal
with his sword; but he managed to perform this work very swiftly under the
frightful stimulus of the approaching noise. The hoofbeats had grown still
louder and more menacing by the time he began tugging at the heavy door
itself; and for a while his fears reached a frantic height, as hope of starting the
age-clogged metal grew faint. Then, with a creak, the thing responded to his
youthful strength, and a frenzied siege of pulling and pushing ensued. Amidst
the roar of unseen stampeding feet success came at last, and the ponderous
golden door clanged shut, leaving Zamacona in darkness but for the single
lighted torch he had wedged between the pillars of a basin-tripod. There was
a latch, and the frightened man blessed his patron saint that it was still
effective.

Sound alone told the fugitive the sequel. When the roar grew very near it
resolved itself into separate footfalls, as if the evergreen grove had made it
necessary for the herd to slacken speed and disperse. But feet continued to
approach, and it became evident that the beasts were advancing among the
trees and circling the hideously carven temple walls. In the curious
deliberation of their tread Zamacona found something very alarming and
repulsive, nor did he like the scuffling sounds which were audible even through
the thick stone walls and heavy golden door. Once the door rattled ominously
on its archaic hinges, as if under a heavy impact, but fortunately it still held.
Then, after a seemingly endless interval, he heard retreating steps and realised
that his unknown visitors were leaving. Since the herds did not seem to be very
numerous, it would have perhaps been safe to venture out within a half-hour
or less; but Zamacona took no chances. Opening his pack, he prepared his
camp on the golden tiles of the temple’s floor, with the great door still securely
latched against all comers; drifting eventually into a sounder sleep than he
could have known in the blue-litten spaces outside. He did not even mind the
hellish, octopus-headed bulk of great Tulu, fashioned of unknown metal and
leering with fishy, sea-green eyes, which squatted in the blackness above him
on its monstrously hieroglyphed pedestal.

Surrounded by darkness for the first time since leaving the tunnel, Zamacona
slept profoundly and long. He must have more than made up the sleep he had
lost at his two previous camps, when the ceaseless glare of the sky had kept
him awake despite his fatigue, for much distance was covered by other living
feet while he lay in his healthily dreamless rest. It is well that he rested deeply,
for there were many strange things to be encountered in his next period of
consciousness.

IV.

What finally roused Zamacona was a thunderous rapping at the door. It beat
through his dreams and dissolved all the lingering mists of drowsiness as soon
as he knew what it was. There could be no mistake about it—it was a definite,
human, and peremptory rapping; performed apparently with some metallic
object, and with all the measured quality of conscious thought or will behind
it. As the awakening man rose clumsily to his feet, a sharp vocal note was
added to the summons—someone calling out, in a not unmusical voice, a
formula which the manuscript tries to represent as “oxi, oxi, giathcán ycá
relex”. Feeling sure that his visitors were men and not daemons, and arguing
that they could have no reason for considering him an enemy, Zamacona
decided to face them openly and at once; and accordingly fumbled with the
ancient latch till the golden door creaked open from the pressure of those
outside.

As the great portal swung back, Zamacona stood facing a group of about
twenty individuals of an aspect not calculated to give him alarm. They seemed
to be Indians; though their tasteful robes and trappings and swords were not
such as he had seen among any of the tribes of the outer world, while their
faces had many subtle differences from the Indian type. That they did not
mean to be irresponsibly hostile, was very clear; for instead of menacing him
in any way they merely probed him attentively and significantly with their
eyes, as if they expected their gaze to open up some sort of communication.
The longer they gazed, the more he seemed to know about them and their
mission; for although no one had spoken since the vocal summons before the
opening of the door, he found himself slowly realising that they had come from
the great city beyond the low hills, mounted on animals, and that they had
been summoned by animals who had reported his presence; that they were
not sure what kind of person he was or just where he had come from, but that
they knew he must be associated with that dimly remembered outer world
which they sometimes visited in curious dreams. How he read all this in the
gaze of the two or three leaders he could not possibly explain; though he
learned why a moment later.

As it was, he attempted to address his visitors in the Wichita dialect he had

picked up from Charging Buffalo; and after this failed to draw a vocal reply he
successively tried the Aztec, Spanish, French, and Latin tongues—adding as
many scraps of lame Greek, Galician, and Portuguese, and of the Bable peasant
patois of his native Asturias, as his memory could recall. But not even this
polyglot array—his entire linguistic stock—could bring a reply in kind. When,
however, he paused in perplexity, one of the visitors began speaking in an
utterly strange and rather fascinating language whose sounds the Spaniard
later had much difficulty in representing on paper. Upon his failure to
understand this, the speaker pointed first to his own eyes, then to his
forehead, and then to his eyes again, as if commanding the other to gaze at
him in order to absorb what he wanted to transmit.

Zamacona, obeying, found himself rapidly in possession of certain information.

The people, he learned, conversed nowadays by means of unvocal radiations
of thought; although they had formerly used a spoken language which still
survived as the written tongue, and into which they still dropped orally for
tradition’s sake, or when strong feeling demanded a spontaneous outlet. He
could understand them merely by concentrating his attention upon their eyes;
and could reply by summoning up a mental image of what he wished to say,
and throwing the substance of this into his glance. When the thought-speaker
paused, apparently inviting a response, Zamacona tried his best to follow the
prescribed pattern, but did not appear to succeed very well. So he nodded,
and tried to describe himself and his journey by signs. He pointed upward, as
if to the outer world, then closed his eyes and made signs as of a mole
burrowing. Then he opened his eyes again and pointed downward, in order to
indicate his descent of the great slope. Experimentally he blended a spoken
word or two with his gestures—for example, pointing successively to himself
and to all of his visitors and saying “un hombre”, and then pointing to himself
alone and very carefully pronouncing his individual name, Pánfilo de
Zamacona.

Before the strange conversation was over, a good deal of data had passed in
both directions. Zamacona had begun to learn how to throw his thoughts, and
had likewise picked up several words of the region’s archaic spoken language.
His visitors, moreover, had absorbed many beginnings of an elementary
Spanish vocabulary. Their own old language was utterly unlike anything the
Spaniard had ever heard, though there were times later on when he was to
fancy an infinitely remote linkage with the Aztec, as if the latter represented
some far stage of corruption, or some very thin infiltration of loan-words. The
underground world, Zamacona learned, bore an ancient name which the
manuscript records as “Xinaián”, but which, from the writer’s supplementary
explanations and diacritical marks, could probably be best represented to
Anglo-Saxon ears by the phonetic arrangement K’n-yan.

It is not surprising that this preliminary discourse did not go beyond the merest
essentials, but those essentials were highly important. Zamacona learned that
the people of K’n-yan were almost infinitely ancient, and that they had come
from a distant part of space where physical conditions are much like those of
the earth. All this, of course, was legend now; and one could not say how much
truth was in it, or how much worship was really due to the octopus-headed
being Tulu who had traditionally brought them hither and whom they still
reverenced for aesthetic reasons. But they knew of the outer world, and were
indeed the original stock who had peopled it as soon as its crust was fit to live
on. Between glacial ages they had had some remarkable surface civilisations,
especially one at the South Pole near the mountain Kadath.
At some time infinitely in the past most of the outer world had sunk beneath
the ocean, so that only a few refugees remained to bear the news to K’n-yan.
This was undoubtedly due to the wrath of space-devils hostile alike to men and
to men’s gods—for it bore out rumours of a primordially earlier sinking which
had submerged the gods themselves, including great Tulu, who still lay
prisoned and dreaming in the watery vaults of the half-cosmic city Relex. No
man not a slave of the space-devils, it was argued, could live long on the outer
earth; and it was decided that all beings who remained there must be evilly
connected. Accordingly traffic with the lands of sun and starlight abruptly
ceased. The subterraneous approaches to K’n-yan, or such as could be
remembered, were either blocked up or carefully guarded; and all encroachers
were treated as dangerous spies and enemies.

But this was long ago. With the passing of ages fewer and fewer visitors came
to K’n-yan, and eventually sentries ceased to be maintained at the unblocked
approaches. The mass of the people forgot, except through distorted
memories and myths and some very singular dreams, that an outer world
existed; though educated folk never ceased to recall the essential facts. The
last visitors ever recorded—centuries in the past—had not even been treated
as devil-spies; faith in the old legendry having long before died out. They had
been questioned eagerly about the fabulous outer regions; for scientific
curiosity in K’n-yan was keen, and the myths, memories, dreams, and historical
fragments relating to the earth’s surface had often tempted scholars to the
brink of an external expedition which they had not quite dared to attempt. The
only thing demanded of such visitors was that they refrain from going back and
informing the outer world of K’n-yan’s positive existence; for after all, one
could not be sure about these outer lands. They coveted gold and silver, and
might prove highly troublesome intruders. Those who had obeyed the
injunction had lived happily, though regrettably briefly, and had told all they
could about their world—little enough, however, since their accounts were all
so fragmentary and conflicting that one could hardly tell what to believe and
what to doubt. One wished that more of them would come. As for those who
disobeyed and tried to escape—it was very unfortunate about them.
Zamacona himself was very welcome, for he appeared to be a higher-grade
man, and to know much more about the outer world, than anyone else who
had come down within memory. He could tell them much—and they hoped he
would be reconciled to his life-long stay.

Many things which Zamacona learned about K’n-yan in that first colloquy left
him quite breathless. He learned, for instance, that during the past few
thousand years the phenomena of old age and death had been conquered; so
that men no longer grew feeble or died except through violence or will. By
regulating the system, one might be as physiologically young and immortal as
he wished; and the only reason why any allowed themselves to age, was that
they enjoyed the sensation in a world where stagnation and
commonplaceness reigned. They could easily become young again when they
felt like it. Births had ceased, except for experimental purposes, since a large
population had been found needless by a master-race which controlled Nature
and organic rivals alike. Many, however, chose to die after a while; since
despite the cleverest efforts to invent new pleasures, the ordeal of
consciousness became too dull for sensitive souls—especially those in whom
time and satiation had blinded the primal instincts and emotions of self-
preservation. All the members of the group before Zamacona were from 500
to 1500 years old; and several had seen surface visitors before, though time
had blurred the recollection. These visitors, by the way, had often tried to
duplicate the longevity of the underground race; but had been able to do so
only fractionally, owing to evolutionary differences developing during the
million or two years of cleavage.

These evolutionary differences were even more strikingly shewn in another

particular—one far stranger than the wonder of immortality itself. This was
the ability of the people of K’n-yan to regulate the balance between matter
and abstract energy, even where the bodies of living organic beings were
concerned, by the sheer force of the technically trained will. In other words,
with suitable effort a learned man of K’n-yan could dematerialise and
rematerialise himself—or, with somewhat greater effort and subtler
technique, any other object he chose; reducing solid matter to free external
particles and recombining the particles again without damage. Had not
Zamacona answered his visitors’ knock when he did, he would have discovered
this accomplishment in a highly puzzling way; for only the strain and bother of
the process prevented the twenty men from passing bodily through the golden
door without pausing for a summons. This art was much older than the art of
perpetual life; and it could be taught to some extent, though never perfectly,
to any intelligent person. Rumours of it had reached the outer world in past
aeons; surviving in secret traditions and ghostly legendry. The men of K’n-yan
had been amused by the primitive and imperfect spirit tales brought down by
outer-world stragglers. In practical life this principle had certain industrial
applications, but was generally suffered to remain neglected through lack of
any particular incentive to its use. Its chief surviving form was in connexion
with sleep, when for excitement’s sake many dream-connoisseurs resorted to
it to enhance the vividness of their visionary wanderings. By the aid of this
method certain dreamers even paid half-material visits to a strange, nebulous
realm of mounds and valleys and varying light which some believed to be the
forgotten outer world. They would go thither on their beasts, and in an age of
peace live over the old, glorious battles of their forefathers. Some philosophers
thought that in such cases they actually coalesced with immaterial forces left
behind by these warlike ancestors themselves.

The people of K’n-yan all dwelt in the great, tall city of Tsath beyond the
mountains. Formerly several races of them had inhabited the entire
underground world, which stretched down to unfathomable abysses and
which included besides the blue-litten region a red-litten region called Yoth,
where relics of a still older and non-human race were found by archaeologists.
In the course of time, however, the men of Tsath had conquered and enslaved
the rest; interbreeding them with certain horned and four-footed animals of
the red-litten region, whose semi-human leanings were very peculiar, and
which, though containing a certain artificially created element, may have been
in part the degenerate descendants of those peculiar entities who had left the
relics. As aeons passed, and mechanical discoveries made the business of life
extremely easy, a concentration of the people of Tsath took place; so that all
the rest of K’n-yan became relatively deserted.
It was easier to live in one place, and there was no object in maintaining a
population of overflowing proportions. Many of the old mechanical devices
were still in use, though others had been abandoned when it was seen that
they failed to give pleasure, or that they were not necessary for a race of
reduced numbers whose mental force could govern an extensive array of
inferior and semi-human industrial organisms. This extensive slave-class was
highly composite, being bred from ancient conquered enemies, from outer-
world stragglers, from dead bodies curiously galvanised into effectiveness, and
from the naturally inferior members of the ruling race of Tsath. The ruling type
itself had become highly superior through selective breeding and social
evolution—the nation having passed through a period of idealistic industrial
democracy which gave equal opportunities to all, and thus, by raising the
naturally intelligent to power, drained the masses of all their brains and
stamina. Industry, being found fundamentally futile except for the supplying
of basic needs and the gratification of inescapable yearnings, had become very
simple. Physical comfort was ensured by an urban mechanisation of
standardised and easily maintained pattern, and other elemental needs were
supplied by scientific agriculture and stock-raising. Long travel was
abandoned, and people went back to using the horned, half-human beasts
instead of maintaining the profusion of gold, silver, and steel transportation
machines which had once threaded land, water, and air. Zamacona could
scarcely believe that such things had ever existed outside dreams, but was told
he could see specimens of them in museums. He could also see the ruins of
other vast magical devices by travelling a day’s journey to the valley of Do-Hna,
to which the race had spread during its period of greatest numbers. The cities
and temples of this present plain were of a far more archaic period, and had
never been other than religious and antiquarian shrines during the supremacy
of the men of Tsath.

In government, Tsath was a kind of communistic or semi-anarchical state;

habit rather than law determining the daily order of things. This was made
possible by the age-old experience and paralysing ennui of the race, whose
wants and needs were limited to physical fundamentals and to new
sensations. An aeon-long tolerance not yet undermined by growing reaction
had abolished all illusions of values and principles, and nothing but an
approximation to custom was ever sought or expected. To see that the mutual
encroachments of pleasure-seeking never crippled the mass life of the
community—this was all that was desired. Family organisation had long ago
perished, and the civil and social distinction of the sexes had disappeared.
Daily life was organised in ceremonial patterns; with games, intoxication,
torture of slaves, day-dreaming, gastronomic and emotional orgies, religious
exercises, exotic experiments, artistic and philosophical discussions, and the
like, as the principal occupations. Property—chiefly land, slaves, animals,
shares in the common city enterprise of Tsath, and ingots of magnetic Tulu-
metal, the former universal money standard—was allocated on a very complex
basis which included a certain amount equally divided among all the freemen.
Poverty was unknown, and labour consisted only of certain administrative
duties imposed by an intricate system of testing and selection. Zamacona
found difficulty in describing conditions so unlike anything he had previously
known; and the text of his manuscript proved unusually puzzling at this point.

Art and intellect, it appeared, had reached very high levels in Tsath; but had
become listless and decadent. The dominance of machinery had at one time
broken up the growth of normal aesthetics, introducing a lifelessly geometrical
tradition fatal to sound expression. This had soon been outgrown, but had left
its mark upon all pictorial and decorative attempts; so that except for
conventionalised religious designs, there was little depth or feeling in any later
work. Archaistic reproductions of earlier work had been found much
preferable for general enjoyment. Literature was all highly individual and
analytical, so much so as to be wholly incomprehensible to Zamacona. Science
had been profound and accurate, and all-embracing save in the one direction
of astronomy. Of late, however, it was falling into decay, as people found it
increasingly useless to tax their minds by recalling its maddening infinitude of
details and ramifications. It was thought more sensible to abandon the
deepest speculations and to confine philosophy to conventional forms.
Technology, of course, could be carried on by rule of thumb. History was more
and more neglected, but exact and copious chronicles of the past existed in
the libraries. It was still an interesting subject, and there would be a vast
number to rejoice at the fresh outer-world knowledge brought in by
Zamacona. In general, though, the modern tendency was to feel rather than
to think; so that men were now more highly esteemed for inventing new
diversions than for preserving old facts or pushing back the frontier of cosmic
mystery.

Religion was a leading interest in Tsath, though very few actually believed in
the supernatural. What was desired was the aesthetic and emotional
exaltation bred by the mystical moods and sensuous rites which attended the
colourful ancestral faith. Temples to Great Tulu, a spirit of universal harmony
anciently symbolised as the octopus-headed god who had brought all men
down from the stars, were the most richly constructed objects in all K’n-yan;
while the cryptic shrines of Yig, the principle of life symbolised as the Father of
all Serpents, were almost as lavish and remarkable. In time Zamacona learned
much of the orgies and sacrifices connected with this religion, but seemed
piously reluctant to describe them in his manuscript. He himself never
participated in any of the rites save those which he mistook for perversions of
his own faith; nor did he ever lose an opportunity to try to convert the people
to that faith of the Cross which the Spaniards hoped to make universal.

Prominent in the contemporary religion of Tsath was a revived and almost

genuine veneration for the rare, sacred metal of Tulu—that dark, lustrous,
magnetic stuff which was nowhere found in Nature, but which had always
been with men in the form of idols and hieratic implements. From the earliest
times any sight of it in its unalloyed form had impelled respect, while all the
sacred archives and litanies were kept in cylinders wrought of its purest
substance. Now, as the neglect of science and intellect was dulling the critically
analytical spirit, people were beginning to weave around the metal once more
that same fabric of awestruck superstition which had existed in primitive
times.
Another function of religion was the regulation of the calendar, born of a
period when time and speed were regarded as prime fetiches in man’s
emotional life. Periods of alternate waking and sleeping, prolonged, abridged,
and inverted as mood and convenience dictated, and timed by the tail-beats
of Great Yig, the Serpent, corresponded very roughly to terrestrial days and
nights; though Zamacona’s sensations told him they must actually be almost
twice as long. The year-unit, measured by Yig’s annual shedding of his skin,
was equal to about a year and a half of the outer world. Zamacona thought he
had mastered this calendar very well when he wrote his manuscript, whence
the confidently given date of 1545; but the document failed to suggest that his
assurance in this matter was fully justified.

As the spokesman of the Tsath party proceeded with his information,

Zamacona felt a growing repulsion and alarm. It was not only what was told,
but the strange, telepathic manner of telling, and the plain inference that
return to the outer world would be impossible, that made the Spaniard wish
he had never descended to this region of magic, abnormality, and decadence.
But he knew that nothing but friendly acquiescence would do as a policy,
hence decided to coöperate in all his visitors’ plans and furnish all the
information they might desire. They, on their part, were fascinated by the
outer-world data which he managed haltingly to convey.

It was really the first draught of reliable surface information they had had since
the refugees straggled back from Atlantis and Lemuria aeons before, for all
their subsequent emissaries from outside had been members of narrow and
local groups without any knowledge of the world at large—Mayas, Toltecs, and
Aztecs at best, and mostly ignorant tribes of the plains. Zamacona was the first
European they had ever seen, and the fact that he was a youth of education
and brilliancy made him of still more emphatic value as a source of knowledge.
The visiting party shewed their breathless interest in all he contrived to
convey, and it was plain that his coming would do much to relieve the flagging
interest of weary Tsath in matters of geography and history.
The only thing which seemed to displease the men of Tsath was the fact that
curious and adventurous strangers were beginning to pour into those parts of
the upper world where the passages to K’n-yan lay. Zamacona told them of the
founding of Florida and New Spain, and made it clear that a great part of the
world was stirring with the zest of adventure—Spanish, Portuguese, French,
and English. Sooner or later Mexico and Florida must meet in one great
colonial empire—and then it would be hard to keep outsiders from the
rumoured gold and silver of the abyss. Charging Buffalo knew of Zamacona’s
journey into the earth. Would he tell Coronado, or somehow let a report get
to the great viceroy, when he failed to find the traveller at the promised
meeting-place? Alarm for the continued secrecy and safety of K’n-yan shewed
in the faces of the visitors, and Zamacona absorbed from their minds the fact
that from now on sentries would undoubtedly be posted once more at all the
unblocked passages to the outside world which the men of Tsath could
remember.

V.

The long conversation of Zamacona and his visitors took place in the green-
blue twilight of the grove just outside the temple door. Some of the men
reclined on the weeds and moss beside the half-vanished walk, while others,
including the Spaniard and the chief spokesman of the Tsath party, sat on the
occasional low monolithic pillars that lined the temple approach. Almost a
whole terrestrial day must have been consumed in the colloquy, for Zamacona
felt the need of food several times, and ate from his well-stocked pack while
some of the Tsath party went back for provisions to the roadway, where they
had left the animals on which they had ridden. At length the prime leader of
the party brought the discourse to a close, and indicated that the time had
come to proceed to the city.

There were, he affirmed, several extra beasts in the cavalcade, upon one of
which Zamacona could ride. The prospect of mounting one of those ominous
hybrid entities whose fabled nourishment was so alarming, and a single sight
of which had set Charging Buffalo into such a frenzy of flight, was by no means
reassuring to the traveller. There was, moreover, another point about the
things which disturbed him greatly—the apparently preternatural intelligence
with which some members of the previous day’s roving pack had reported his
presence to the men of Tsath and brought out the present expedition. But
Zamacona was not a coward, hence followed the men boldly down the weed-
grown walk toward the road where the things were stationed.

And yet he could not refrain from crying out in terror at what he saw when he
passed through the great vine-draped pylons and emerged upon the ancient
road. He did not wonder that the curious Wichita had fled in panic, and had to
close his eyes a moment to retain his sanity. It is unfortunate that some sense
of pious reticence prevented him from describing fully in his manuscript the
nameless sight he saw. As it is, he merely hinted at the shocking morbidity of
these great floundering white things, with black fur on their backs, a
rudimentary horn in the centre of their foreheads, and an unmistakable trace
of human or anthropoid blood in their flat-nosed, bulging-lipped faces. They
were, he declared later in his manuscript, the most terrible objective entities
he ever saw in his life, either in K’n-yan or in the outer world. And the specific
quality of their supreme terror was something apart from any easily
recognisable or describable feature. The main trouble was that they were not
wholly products of Nature.

The party observed Zamacona’s fright, and hastened to reassure him as much
as possible. The beasts or gyaa-yothn, they explained, surely were curious
things; but were really very harmless. The flesh they ate was not that of
intelligent people of the master-race, but merely that of a special slave-class
which had for the most part ceased to be thoroughly human, and which indeed
was the principal meat stock of K’n-yan. They—or their principal ancestral
element—had first been found in a wild state amidst the Cyclopean ruins of
the deserted red-litten world of Yoth which lay below the blue-litten world of
K’n-yan. That part of them was human, seemed quite clear; but men of science
could never decide whether they were actually the descendants of the bygone
entities who had lived and reigned in the strange ruins. The chief ground for
such a supposition was the well-known fact that the vanished inhabitants of
Yoth had been quadrupedal. This much was known from the very few
manuscripts and carvings found in the vaults of Zin, beneath the largest ruined
city of Yoth. But it was also known from these manuscripts that the beings of
Yoth had possessed the art of synthetically creating life, and had made and
destroyed several efficiently designed races of industrial and transportational
animals in the course of their history—to say nothing of concocting all manner
of fantastic living shapes for the sake of amusement and new sensations during
the long period of decadence. The beings of Yoth had undoubtedly been
reptilian in affiliations, and most physiologists of Tsath agreed that the present
beasts had been very much inclined toward reptilianism before they had been
crossed with the mammal slave-class of K’n-yan.

It argues well for the intrepid fire of those Renaissance Spaniards who
conquered half the unknown world, that Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez actually
mounted one of the morbid beasts of Tsath and fell into place beside the
leader of the cavalcade—the man named Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn, who had been most
active in the previous exchange of information. It was a repulsive business; but
after all, the seat was very easy, and the gait of the clumsy gyaa-yoth
surprisingly even and regular. No saddle was necessary, and the animal
appeared to require no guidance whatever. The procession moved forward at
a brisk gait, stopping only at certain abandoned cities and temples about which
Zamacona was curious, and which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn was obligingly ready to
display and explain. The largest of these towns, B’graa, was a marvel of finely
wrought gold, and Zamacona studied the curiously ornate architecture with
avid interest. Buildings tended toward height and slenderness, with roofs
bursting into a multitude of pinnacles. The streets were narrow, curving, and
occasionally picturesquely hilly, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn said that the later cities of
K’n-yan were far more spacious and regular in design. All these old cities of the
plain shewed traces of levelled walls—reminders of the archaic days when
they had been successively conquered by the now dispersed armies of Tsath.
There was one object along the route which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn exhibited on his
own initiative, even though it involved a detour of about a mile along a vine-
tangled side path. This was a squat, plain temple of black basalt blocks without
a single carving, and containing only a vacant onyx pedestal. The remarkable
thing about it was its story, for it was a link with a fabled elder world compared
to which even cryptic Yoth was a thing of yesterday. It had been built in
imitation of certain temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to house a very
terrible black toad-idol found in the red-litten world and called Tsathoggua in
the Yothic manuscripts. It had been a potent and widely worshipped god, and
after its adoption by the people of K’n-yan had lent its name to the city which
was later to become dominant in that region. Yothic legend said that it had
come from a mysterious inner realm beneath the red-litten world—a black
realm of peculiar-sensed beings which had no light at all, but which had had
great civilisations and mighty gods before ever the reptilian quadrupeds of
Yoth had come into being. Many images of Tsathoggua existed in Yoth, all of
which were alleged to have come from the black inner realm, and which were
supposed by Yothic archaeologists to represent the aeon-extinct race of that
realm. The black realm called N’kai in the Yothic manuscripts had been
explored as thoroughly as possible by these archaeologists, and singular stone
troughs or burrows had excited infinite speculation.

When the men of K’n-yan discovered the red-litten world and deciphered its
strange manuscripts, they took over the Tsathoggua cult and brought all the
frightful toad images up to the land of blue light—housing them in shrines of
Yoth-quarried basalt like the one Zamacona now saw. The cult flourished until
it almost rivalled the ancient cults of Yig and Tulu, and one branch of the race
even took it to the outer world, where the smallest of the images eventually
found a shrine at Olathoë, in the land of Lomar near the earth’s north pole. It
was rumoured that this outer-world cult survived even after the great ice-
sheet and the hairy Gnophkehs destroyed Lomar, but of such matters not
much was definitely known in K’n-yan. In that world of blue light the cult came
to an abrupt end, even though the name of Tsath was suffered to remain.
What ended the cult was the partial exploration of the black realm of N’kai
beneath the red-litten world of Yoth. According to the Yothic manuscripts,
there was no surviving life in N’kai, but something must have happened in the
aeons between the days of Yoth and the coming of men to the earth;
something perhaps not unconnected with the end of Yoth. Probably it had
been an earthquake, opening up lower chambers of the lightless world which
had been closed against the Yothic archaeologists; or perhaps some more
frightful juxtaposition of energy and electrons, wholly inconceivable to any
sort of vertebrate minds, had taken place. At any rate, when the men of K’n-
yan went down into N’kai’s black abyss with their great atom-power
searchlights they found living things—living things that oozed along stone
channels and worshipped onyx and basalt images of Tsathoggua. But they
were not toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they were amorphous
lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for various purposes.
The explorers of K’n-yan did not pause for detailed observations, and those
who escaped alive sealed the passage leading from red-litten Yoth down into
the gulfs of nether horror. Then all the images of Tsathoggua in the land of K’n-
yan were dissolved into the ether by disintegrating rays, and the cult was
abolished forever.

Aeons later, when naive fears were outgrown and supplanted by scientific
curiosity, the old legends of Tsathoggua and N’kai were recalled, and a suitably
armed and equipped exploring party went down to Yoth to find the closed gate
of the black abyss and see what might still lie beneath. But they could not find
the gate, nor could any man ever do so in all the ages that followed. Nowadays
there were those who doubted that any abyss had ever existed, but the few
scholars who could still decipher the Yothic manuscripts believed that the
evidence for such a thing was adequate, even though the middle records of
K’n-yan, with accounts of the one frightful expedition into N’kai, were more
open to question. Some of the later religious cults tried to suppress
remembrance of N’kai’s existence, and attached severe penalties to its
mention; but these had not begun to be taken seriously at the time of
Zamacona’s advent to K’n-yan.
As the cavalcade returned to the old highway and approached the low range
of mountains, Zamacona saw that the river was very close on the left.
Somewhat later, as the terrain rose, the stream entered a gorge and passed
through the hills, while the road traversed the gap at a rather higher level close
to the brink. It was about this time that light rainfall came. Zamacona noticed
the occasional drops and drizzle, and looked up at the coruscating blue air, but
there was no diminution of the strange radiance. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn then told him
that such condensations and precipitations of water-vapour were not
uncommon, and that they never dimmed the glare of the vault above. A kind
of mist, indeed, always hung about the lowlands of K’n-yan, and compensated
for the complete absence of true clouds.

The slight rise of the mountain pass enabled Zamacona, by looking behind, to
see the ancient and deserted plain in panorama as he had seen it from the
other side. He seems to have appreciated its strange beauty, and to have
vaguely regretted leaving it; for he speaks of being urged by Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn to
drive his beast more rapidly. When he faced frontward again he saw that the
crest of the road was very near; the weed-grown way leading starkly up and
ending against a blank void of blue light. The scene was undoubtedly highly
impressive—a steep green mountain wall on the right, a deep river-chasm on
the left with another green mountain wall beyond it, and ahead, the churning
sea of bluish coruscations into which the upward path dissolved. Then came
the crest itself, and with it the world of Tsath outspread in a stupendous
forward vista.

Zamacona caught his breath at the great sweep of peopled landscape, for it
was a hive of settlement and activity beyond anything he had ever seen or
dreamed of. The downward slope of the hill itself was relatively thinly strown
with small farms and occasional temples; but beyond it lay an enormous plain
covered like a chess board with planted trees, irrigated by narrow canals cut
from the river, and threaded by wide, geometrically precise roads of gold or
basalt blocks. Great silver cables borne aloft on golden pillars linked the low,
spreading buildings and clusters of buildings which rose here and there, and in
some places one could see lines of partly ruinous pillars without cables.
Moving objects shewed the fields to be under tillage, and in some cases
Zamacona saw that men were ploughing with the aid of the repulsive, half-
human quadrupeds.

But most impressive of all was the bewildering vision of clustered spires and
pinnacles which rose afar off across the plain and shimmered flower-like and
spectral in the coruscating blue light. At first Zamacona thought it was a
mountain covered with houses and temples, like some of the picturesque hill
cities of his own Spain, but a second glance shewed him that it was not indeed
such. It was a city of the plain, but fashioned of such heaven-reaching towers
that its outline was truly that of a mountain. Above it hung a curious greyish
haze, through which the blue light glistened and took added overtones of
radiance from the million golden minarets. Glancing at Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn,
Zamacona knew that this was the monstrous, gigantic, and omnipotent city of
Tsath.

As the road turned downward toward the plain, Zamacona felt a kind of
uneasiness and sense of evil. He did not like the beast he rode, or the world
that could provide such a beast, and he did not like the atmosphere that
brooded over the distant city of Tsath. When the cavalcade began to pass
occasional farms, the Spaniard noticed the forms that worked in the fields; and
did not like their motions and proportions, or the mutilations he saw on most
of them. Moreover, he did not like the way that some of these forms were
herded in corrals, or the way they grazed on the heavy verdure. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn
indicated that these beings were members of the slave-class, and that their
acts were controlled by the master of the farm, who gave them hypnotic
impressions in the morning of all they were to do during the day. As semi-
conscious machines, their industrial efficiency was nearly perfect. Those in the
corrals were inferior specimens, classified merely as livestock.
Upon reaching the plain, Zamacona saw the larger farms and noted the almost
human work performed by the repulsive horned gyaa-yothn. He likewise
observed the more manlike shapes that toiled along the furrows, and felt a
curious fright and disgust toward certain of them whose motions were more
mechanical than those of the rest. These, Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn explained, were what
men called the y’m-bhi—organisms which had died, but which had been
mechanically reanimated for industrial purposes by means of atomic energy
and thought-power. The slave-class did not share the immortality of the
freemen of Tsath, so that with time the number of y’m-bhi had become very
large. They were dog-like and faithful, but not so readily amenable to thought-
commands as were living slaves. Those which most repelled Zamacona were
those whose mutilations were greatest; for some were wholly headless, while
others had suffered singular and seemingly capricious subtractions,
distortions, transpositions, and graftings in various places. The Spaniard could
not account for this condition, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn made it clear that these were
slaves who had been used for the amusement of the people in some of the
vast arenas; for the men of Tsath were connoisseurs of delicate sensation, and
required a constant supply of fresh and novel stimuli for their jaded impulses.
Zamacona, though by no means squeamish, was not favourably impressed by
what he saw and heard.

Approached more closely, the vast metropolis became dimly horrible in its
monstrous extent and inhuman height. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn explained that the
upper parts of the great towers were no longer used, and that many had been
taken down to avoid the bother of maintenance. The plain around the original
urban area was covered with newer and smaller dwellings, which in many
cases were preferred to the ancient towers. From the whole mass of gold and
stone a monotonous roar of activity droned outward over the plain, while
cavalcades and streams of wagons were constantly entering and leaving over
the great gold- or stone-paved roads.

Several times Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn paused to shew Zamacona some particular object

of interest, especially the temples of Yig, Tulu, Nug, Yeb, and the Not-to-Be-
Named One which lined the road at infrequent intervals, each in its
embowering grove according to the custom of K’n-yan. These temples, unlike
those of the deserted plain beyond the mountains, were still in active use;
large parties of mounted worshippers coming and going in constant streams.
Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn took Zamacona into each of them, and the Spaniard watched
the subtle orgiastic rites with fascination and repulsion. The ceremonies of Nug
and Yeb sickened him especially—so much, indeed, that he refrained from
describing them in his manuscript. One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was
encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-
Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind of
sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely
obnoxious. What he liked least of all were the emotional sounds emitted by
the celebrants—jarring sounds in a race that had ceased to use vocal speech
for ordinary purposes.

Close to the compact outskirts of Tsath, and well within the shadow of its
terrifying towers, Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn pointed out a monstrous circular building
before which enormous crowds were lined up. This, he indicated, was one of
the many amphitheatres where curious sports and sensations were provided
for the weary people of K’n-yan. He was about to pause and usher Zamacona
inside the vast curved facade, when the Spaniard, recalling the mutilated
forms he had seen in the fields, violently demurred. This was the first of those
friendly clashes of taste which were to convince the people of Tsath that their
guest followed strange and narrow standards.

Tsath itself was a network of strange and ancient streets; and despite a
growing sense of horror and alienage, Zamacona was enthralled by its
intimations of mystery and cosmic wonder. The dizzy giganticism of its
overawing towers, the monstrous surge of teeming life through its ornate
avenues, the curious carvings on its doorways and windows, the odd vistas
glimpsed from balustraded plazas and tiers of titan terraces, and the
enveloping grey haze which seemed to press down on the gorge-like streets in
low ceiling-fashion, all combined to produce such a sense of adventurous
expectancy as he had never known before. He was taken at once to a council
of executives which held forth in a gold-and-copper palace behind a gardened
and fountained park, and was for some time subjected to close, friendly
questioning in a vaulted hall frescoed with vertiginous arabesques. Much was
expected of him, he could see, in the way of historical information about the
outside earth; but in return all the mysteries of K’n-yan would be unveiled to
him. The one great drawback was the inexorable ruling that he might never
return to the world of sun and stars and Spain which was his.

A daily programme was laid down for the visitor, with time apportioned
judiciously among several kinds of activities. There were to be conversations
with persons of learning in various places, and lessons in many branches of
Tsathic lore. Liberal periods of research were allowed for, and all the libraries
of K’n-yan both secular and sacred were to be thrown open to him as soon as
he might master the written languages. Rites and spectacles were to be
attended—except when he might especially object—and much time would be
left for the enlightened pleasure-seeking and emotional titillation which
formed the goal and nucleus of daily life. A house in the suburbs or an
apartment in the city would be assigned him, and he would be initiated into
one of the large affection-groups, including many noblewomen of the most
extreme and art-enhanced beauty, which in latter-day K’n-yan took the place
of family units. Several horned gyaa-yothn would be provided for his
transportation and errand-running, and ten living slaves of intact body would
serve to conduct his establishment and protect him from thieves and sadists
and religious orgiasts on the public highways. There were many mechanical
devices which he must learn to use, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn would instruct him
immediately regarding the principal ones.

Upon his choosing an apartment in preference to a suburban villa, Zamacona

was dismissed by the executives with great courtesy and ceremony, and was
led through several gorgeous streets to a cliff-like carven structure of some
seventy or eighty floors. Preparations for his arrival had already been
instituted, and in a spacious ground-floor suite of vaulted rooms slaves were
busy adjusting hangings and furniture. There were lacquered and inlaid
tabourets, velvet and silk reclining-corners and squatting-cushions, and infinite
rows of teakwood and ebony pigeon-holes with metal cylinders containing
some of the manuscripts he was soon to read—standard classics which all
urban apartments possessed. Desks with great stacks of membrane-paper and
pots of the prevailing green pigment were in every room—each with graded
sets of pigment brushes and other odd bits of stationery. Mechanical writing
devices stood on ornate golden tripods, while over all was shed a brilliant blue
light from energy-globes set in the ceiling. There were windows, but at this
shadowy ground-level they were of scant illuminating value. In some of the
rooms were elaborate baths, while the kitchen was a maze of technical
contrivances. Supplies were brought, Zamacona was told, through the network
of underground passages which lay beneath Tsath, and which had once
accommodated curious mechanical transports. There was a stable on that
underground level for the beasts, and Zamacona would presently be shewn
how to find the nearest runway to the street. Before his inspection was
finished, the permanent staff of slaves arrived and were introduced; and
shortly afterward there came some half-dozen freemen and noblewomen of
his future affection-group, who were to be his companions for several days,
contributing what they could to his instruction and amusement. Upon their
departure, another party would take their place, and so onward in rotation
through a group of about fifty members.

VI.

Thus was Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez absorbed for four years into the life of
the sinister city of Tsath in the blue-litten nether world of K’n-yan. All that he
learned and saw and did is clearly not told in his manuscript; for a pious
reticence overcame him when he began to write in his native Spanish tongue,
and he dared not set down everything. Much he consistently viewed with
repulsion, and many things he steadfastly refrained from seeing or doing or
eating. For other things he atoned by frequent countings of the beads of his
rosary. He explored the entire world of K’n-yan, including the deserted
machine-cities of the middle period on the gorse-grown plain of Nith, and
made one descent into the red-litten world of Yoth to see the Cyclopean ruins.
He witnessed prodigies of craft and machinery which left him breathless, and
beheld human metamorphoses, dematerialisations, rematerialisations, and
reanimations which made him cross himself again and again. His very capacity
for astonishment was blunted by the plethora of new marvels which every day
brought him.

But the longer he stayed, the more he wished to leave, for the inner life of K’n-
yan was based on impulses very plainly outside his radius. As he progressed in
historical knowledge, he understood more; but understanding only
heightened his distaste. He felt that the people of Tsath were a lost and
dangerous race—more dangerous to themselves than they knew—and that
their growing frenzy of monotony-warfare and novelty-quest was leading
them rapidly toward a precipice of disintegration and utter horror. His own
visit, he could see, had accelerated their unrest; not only by introducing fears
of outside invasion, but by exciting in many a wish to sally forth and taste the
diverse external world he described. As time progressed, he noticed an
increasing tendency of the people to resort to dematerialisation as an
amusement; so that the apartments and amphitheatres of Tsath became a
veritable Witches’ Sabbath of transmutations, age-adjustments, death-
experiments, and projections. With the growth of boredom and restlessness,
he saw, cruelty and subtlety and revolt were growing apace. There was more
and more cosmic abnormality, more and more curious sadism, more and more
ignorance and superstition, and more and more desire to escape out of
physical life into a half-spectral state of electronic dispersal.

All his efforts to leave, however, came to nothing. Persuasion was useless, as
repeated trials proved; though the mature disillusion of the upper classes at
first prevented them from resenting their guest’s open wish for departure. In
a year which he reckoned as 1543 Zamacona made an actual attempt to escape
through the tunnel by which he had entered K’n-yan, but after a weary journey
across the deserted plain he encountered forces in the dark passage which
discouraged him from future attempts in that direction. As a means of
sustaining hope and keeping the image of home in mind, he began about this
time to make rough draughts of the manuscript relating his adventures;
delighting in the loved, old Spanish words and the familiar letters of the Roman
alphabet. Somehow he fancied he might get the manuscript to the outer
world; and to make it convincing to his fellows he resolved to enclose it in one
of the Tulu-metal cylinders used for sacred archives. That alien, magnetic
substance could not but support the incredible story he had to tell.

But even as he planned, he had little real hope of ever establishing contact
with the earth’s surface. Every known gate, he knew, was guarded by persons
or forces that it were better not to oppose. His attempt at escape had not
helped matters, for he could now see a growing hostility to the outer world he
represented. He hoped that no other European would find his way in; for it
was possible that later comers might not fare as well as he. He himself had
been a cherished fountain of data, and as such had enjoyed a privileged status.
Others, deemed less necessary, might receive rather different treatment. He
even wondered what would happen to him when the sages of Tsath
considered him drained dry of fresh facts; and in self-defence began to be
more gradual in his talks on earth-lore, conveying whenever he could the
impression of vast knowledge held in reserve.

One other thing which endangered Zamacona’s status in Tsath was his
persistent curiosity regarding the ultimate abyss of N’kai, beneath red-litten
Yoth, whose existence the dominant religious cults of K’n-yan were more and
more inclined to deny. When exploring Yoth he had vainly tried to find the
blocked-up entrance; and later on he experimented in the arts of
dematerialisation and projection, hoping that he might thereby be able to
throw his consciousness downward into the gulfs which his physical eyes could
not discover. Though never becoming truly proficient in these processes, he
did manage to achieve a series of monstrous and portentous dreams which he
believed included some elements of actual projection into N’kai; dreams which
greatly shocked and perturbed the leaders of Yig and Tulu-worship when he
related them, and which he was advised by friends to conceal rather than
exploit. In time those dreams became very frequent and maddening;
containing things which he dared not record in his main manuscript, but of
which he prepared a special record for the benefit of certain learned men in
Tsath.

It may have been unfortunate—or it may have been mercifully fortunate—that

Zamacona practiced so many reticences and reserved so many themes and
descriptions for subsidiary manuscripts. The main document leaves one to
guess much about the detailed manners, customs, thoughts, language, and
history of K’n-yan, as well as to form any adequate picture of the visual aspect
and daily life of Tsath. One is left puzzled, too, about the real motivations of
the people; their strange passivity and craven unwarlikeness, and their almost
cringing fear of the outer world despite their possession of atomic and
dematerialising powers which would have made them unconquerable had
they taken the trouble to organise armies as in the old days. It is evident that
K’n-yan was far along in its decadence—reacting with mixed apathy and
hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of stultifying regularity
which machinery had brought it during its middle period. Even the grotesque
and repulsive customs and modes of thought and feeling can be traced to this
source; for in his historical research Zamacona found evidence of bygone eras
in which K’n-yan had held ideas much like those of the classic and renaissance
outer world, and had possessed a national character and art full of what
Europeans regard as dignity, kindness, and nobility.

The more Zamacona studied these things, the more apprehensive about the
future he became; because he saw that the omnipresent moral and intellectual
disintegration was a tremendously deep-seated and ominously accelerating
movement. Even during his stay the signs of decay multiplied. Rationalism
degenerated more and more into fanatical and orgiastic superstition, centring
in a lavish adoration of the magnetic Tulu-metal, and tolerance steadily
dissolved into a series of frenzied hatreds, especially toward the outer world
of which the scholars were learning so much from him. At times he almost
feared that the people might some day lose their age-long apathy and
brokenness and turn like desperate rats against the unknown lands above
them, sweeping all before them by virtue of their singular and still-
remembered scientific powers. But for the present they fought their boredom
and sense of emptiness in other ways; multiplying their hideous emotional
outlets and increasing the mad grotesqueness and abnormality of their
diversions. The arenas of Tsath must have been accursed and unthinkable
places—Zamacona never went near them. And what they would be in another
century, or even in another decade, he did not dare to think. The pious
Spaniard crossed himself and counted his beads more often than usual in those
days.

In the year 1545, as he reckoned it, Zamacona began what may well be
accepted as his final series of attempts to leave K’n-yan. His fresh opportunity
came from an unexpected source—a female of his affection-group who
conceived for him a curious individual infatuation based on some hereditary
memory of the days of monogamous wedlock in Tsath. Over this female—a
noblewoman of moderate beauty and of at least average intelligence named
T’la-yub—Zamacona acquired the most extraordinary influence; finally
inducing her to help him in an escape, under the promise that he would let her
accompany him. Chance proved a great factor in the course of events, for T’la-
yub came of a primordial family of gate-lords who had retained oral traditions
of at least one passage to the outer world which the mass of people had
forgotten even at the time of the great closing; a passage to a mound on the
level plains of earth which had, in consequence, never been sealed up or
guarded. She explained that the primordial gate-lords were not guards or
sentries, but merely ceremonial and economic proprietors, half-feudal and
baronial in status, of an era preceding the severance of surface-relations. Her
own family had been so reduced at the time of the closing that their gate had
been wholly overlooked; and they had ever afterward preserved the secret of
its existence as a sort of hereditary secret—a source of pride, and of a sense
of reserve power, to offset the feeling of vanished wealth and influence which
so constantly irritated them.
Zamacona, now working feverishly to get his manuscript into final form in case
anything should happen to him, decided to take with him on his outward
journey only five beast-loads of unalloyed gold in the form of the small ingots
used for minor decorations—enough, he calculated, to make him a personage
of unlimited power in his own world. He had become somewhat hardened to
the sight of the monstrous gyaa-yothn during his four years of residence in
Tsath, hence did not shrink from using the creatures; yet he resolved to kill and
bury them, and cache the gold, as soon as he reached the outer world, since
he knew that even a glimpse of one of the things would drive any ordinary
Indian mad. Later he could arrange for a suitable expedition to transport the
treasure to Mexico. T’la-yub he would perhaps allow to share his fortunes, for
she was by no means unattractive; though possibly he would arrange for her
sojourn amongst the plains Indians, since he was not overanxious to preserve
links with the manner of life in Tsath. For a wife, of course, he would choose a
lady of Spain—or at worst, an Indian princess of normal outer-world descent
and a regular and approved past. But for the present T’la-yub must be used as
a guide. The manuscript he would carry on his own person, encased in a book-
cylinder of the sacred and magnetic Tulu-metal.

The expedition itself is described in the addendum to Zamacona’s manuscript,

written later, and in a hand shewing signs of nervous strain. It set out amidst
the most careful precautions, choosing a rest-period and proceeding as far as
possible along the faintly lighted passages beneath the city. Zamacona and
T’la-yub, disguised in slaves’ garments, bearing provision-knapsacks, and
leading the five laden beasts on foot, were readily taken for commonplace
workers; and they clung as long as possible to the subterranean way—using a
long and little-frequented branch which had formerly conducted the
mechanical transports to the now ruined suburb of L’thaa. Amidst the ruins of
L’thaa they came to the surface, thereafter passing as rapidly as possible over
the deserted, blue-litten plain of Nith toward the Grh-yan range of low hills.
There, amidst the tangled underbrush, T’la-yub found the long disused and
half-fabulous entrance to the forgotten tunnel; a thing she had seen but once
before—aeons in the past, when her father had taken her thither to shew her
this monument to their family pride. It was hard work getting the laden gyaa-
yothn to scrape through the obstructing vines and briers, and one of them
displayed a rebelliousness destined to bear dire consequences—bolting away
from the party and loping back toward Tsath on its detestable pads, golden
burden and all.

It was nightmare work burrowing by the light of blue-ray torches upward,

downward, forward, and upward again through a dank, choked tunnel that no
foot had trodden since ages before the sinking of Atlantis; and at one point
T’la-yub had to practice the fearsome art of dematerialisation on herself,
Zamacona, and the laden beasts in order to pass a point wholly clogged by
shifting earth-strata. It was a terrible experience for Zamacona; for although
he had often witnessed dematerialisation in others, and even practiced it
himself to the extent of dream-projection, he had never been fully subjected
to it before. But T’la-yub was skilled in the arts of K’n-yan, and accomplished
the double metamorphosis in perfect safety.

Thereafter they resumed the hideous burrowing through stalactited crypts of

horror where monstrous carvings leered at every turn; alternately camping
and advancing for a period which Zamacona reckoned as about three days, but
which was probably less. At last they came to a very narrow place where the
natural or only slightly hewn cave-walls gave place to walls of wholly artificial
masonry, carved into terrible bas-reliefs. These walls, after about a mile of
steep ascent, ended with a pair of vast niches, one on each side, in which
monstrous, nitre-encrusted images of Yig and Tulu squatted, glaring at each
other across the passage as they had glared since the earliest youth of the
human world. At this point the passage opened into a prodigious vaulted and
circular chamber of human construction; wholly covered with horrible
carvings, and revealing at the farther end an arched passageway with the foot
of a flight of steps. T’la-yub knew from family tales that this must be very near
the earth’s surface, but she could not tell just how near. Here the party camped
for what they meant to be their last rest-period in the subterraneous world.
It must have been hours later that the clank of metal and the padding of
beasts’ feet awakened Zamacona and T’la-yub. A bluish glare was spreading
from the narrow passage between the images of Yig and Tulu, and in an instant
the truth was obvious. An alarm had been given at Tsath—as was later
revealed, by the returning gyaa-yoth which had rebelled at the brier-choked
tunnel-entrance—and a swift party of pursuers had come to arrest the
fugitives. Resistance was clearly useless, and none was offered. The party of
twelve beast-riders proved studiously polite, and the return commenced
almost without a word or thought-message on either side.

It was an ominous and depressing journey, and the ordeal of dematerialisation

and rematerialisation at the choked place was all the more terrible because of
the lack of that hope and expectancy which had palliated the process on the
outward trip. Zamacona heard his captors discussing the imminent clearing of
this choked place by intensive radiations, since henceforward sentries must be
maintained at the hitherto unknown outer portal. It would not do to let
outsiders get within the passage, for then any who might escape without due
treatment would have a hint of the vastness of the inner world and would
perhaps be curious enough to return in greater strength. As with the other
passages since Zamacona’s coming, sentries must be stationed all along, as far
as the very outermost gate; sentries drawn from amongst all the slaves, the
dead-alive y’m-bhi, or the class of discredited freemen. With the overrunning
of the American plains by thousands of Europeans, as the Spaniard had
predicted, every passage was a potential source of danger; and must be
rigorously guarded until the technologists of Tsath could spare the energy to
prepare an ultimate and entrance-hiding obliteration as they had done for
many passages in earlier and more vigorous times.

Zamacona and T’la-yub were tried before three gn’agn of the supreme tribunal
in the gold-and-copper palace behind the gardened and fountained park, and
the Spaniard was given his liberty because of the vital outer-world information
he still had to impart. He was told to return to his apartment and to his
affection-group; taking up his life as before, and continuing to meet
deputations of scholars according to the latest schedule he had been
following. No restrictions would be imposed upon him so long as he might
remain peacefully in K’n-yan—but it was intimated that such leniency would
not be repeated after another attempt at escape. Zamacona had felt that there
was an element of irony in the parting words of the chief gn’ag—an assurance
that all of his gyaa-yothn, including the one which had rebelled, would be
returned to him.

The fate of T’la-yub was less happy. There being no object in retaining her, and
her ancient Tsathic lineage giving her act a greater aspect of treason than
Zamacona’s had possessed, she was ordered to be delivered to the curious
diversions of the amphitheatre; and afterward, in a somewhat mutilated and
half-dematerialised form, to be given the functions of a y’m-bhi or animated
corpse-slave and stationed among the sentries guarding the passage whose
existence she had betrayed. Zamacona soon heard, not without many pangs
of regret he could scarcely have anticipated, that poor T’la-yub had emerged
from the arena in a headless and otherwise incomplete state, and had been
set as an outermost guard upon the mound in which the passage had been
found to terminate. She was, he was told, a night-sentinel, whose automatic
duty was to warn off all comers with a torch; sending down reports to a small
garrison of twelve dead slave y’m-bhi and six living but partly dematerialised
freemen in the vaulted, circular chamber if the approachers did not heed her
warning. She worked, he was told, in conjunction with a day-sentinel—a living
freeman who chose this post in preference to other forms of discipline for
other offences against the state. Zamacona, of course, had long known that
most of the chief gate-sentries were such discredited freemen.

It was now made plain to him, though indirectly, that his own penalty for
another escape-attempt would be service as a gate-sentry—but in the form of
a dead-alive y’m-bhi slave, and after amphitheatre-treatment even more
picturesque than that which T’la-yub was reported to have undergone. It was
intimated that he—or parts of him—would be reanimated to guard some inner
section of the passage; within sight of others, where his abridged person might
serve as a permanent symbol of the rewards of treason. But, his informants
always added, it was of course inconceivable that he would ever court such a
fate. So long as he remained peaceably in K’n-yan, he would continue to be a
free, privileged, and respected personage.

Yet in the end Pánfilo de Zamacona did court the fate so direfully hinted to
him. True, he did not really expect to encounter it; but the nervous latter part
of his manuscript makes it clear that he was prepared to face its possibility.
What gave him a final hope of scatheless escape from K’n-yan was his growing
mastery of the art of dematerialisation. Having studied it for years, and having
learned still more from the two instances in which he had been subjected to
it, he now felt increasingly able to use it independently and effectively. The
manuscript records several notable experiments in this art—minor successes
accomplished in his apartment—and reflects Zamacona’s hope that he might
soon be able to assume the spectral form in full, attaining complete invisibility
and preserving that condition as long as he wished.

Once he reached this stage, he argued, the outward way lay open to him. Of
course he could not bear away any gold, but mere escape was enough. He
would, though, dematerialise and carry away with him his manuscript in the
Tulu-metal cylinder, even though it cost additional effort; for this record and
proof must reach the outer world at all hazards. He now knew the passage to
follow; and if he could thread it in an atom-scattered state, he did not see how
any person or force could detect or stop him. The only trouble would be if he
failed to maintain his spectral condition at all times. That was the one ever-
present peril, as he had learned from his experiments. But must one not always
risk death and worse in a life of adventure? Zamacona was a gentleman of Old
Spain; of the blood that faced the unknown and carved out half the civilisation
of the New World.

For many nights after his ultimate resolution Zamacona prayed to St.
Pamphilus and other guardian saints, and counted the beads of his rosary. The
last entry in the manuscript, which toward the end took the form of a diary
more and more, was merely a single sentence—“Es más tarde de lo que
pensaba—tengo que marcharme”. . . . “It is later than I thought; I must go.”
After that, only silence and conjecture—and such evidence as the presence of
the manuscript itself, and what that manuscript could lead to, might provide.

VII.

When I looked up from my half-stupefied reading and note-taking the morning

sun was high in the heavens. The electric bulb was still burning, but such things
of the real world—the modern outer world—were far from my whirling brain.
I knew I was in my room at Clyde Compton’s at Binger—but upon what
monstrous vista had I stumbled? Was this thing a hoax or a chronicle of
madness? If a hoax, was it a jest of the sixteenth century or of today? The
manuscript’s age looked appallingly genuine to my not wholly unpracticed
eyes, and the problem presented by the strange metal cylinder I dared not
even think about.

Moreover, what a monstrously exact explanation it gave of all the baffling

phenomena of the mound—of the seemingly meaningless and paradoxical
actions of diurnal and nocturnal ghosts, and of the queer cases of madness and
disappearance! It was even an accursedly plausible explanation—evilly
consistent—if one could adopt the incredible. It must be a shocking hoax
devised by someone who knew all the lore of the mound. There was even a
hint of social satire in the account of that unbelievable nether world of horror
and decay. Surely this was the clever forgery of some learned cynic—
something like the leaden crosses in New Mexico, which a jester once planted
and pretended to discover as a relique of some forgotten Dark Age colony from
Europe.
Upon going down to breakfast I hardly knew what to tell Compton and his
mother, as well as the curious callers who had already begun to arrive. Still in
a daze, I cut the Gordian Knot by giving a few points from the notes I had made,
and mumbling my belief that the thing was a subtle and ingenious fraud left
there by some previous explorer of the mound—a belief in which everybody
seemed to concur when told of the substance of the manuscript. It is curious
how all that breakfast group—and all the others in Binger to whom the
discussion was repeated—seemed to find a great clearing of the atmosphere
in the notion that somebody was playing a joke on somebody. For the time we
all forgot that the known, recent history of the mound presented mysteries as
strange as any in the manuscript, and as far from acceptable solution as ever.

The fears and doubts began to return when I asked for volunteers to visit the
mound with me. I wanted a larger excavating party—but the idea of going to
that uncomfortable place seemed no more attractive to the people of Binger
than it had seemed on the previous day. I myself felt a mounting horror upon
looking toward the mound and glimpsing the moving speck which I knew was
the daylight sentinel; for in spite of all my scepticism the morbidities of that
manuscript stuck by me and gave everything connected with the place a new
and monstrous significance. I absolutely lacked the resolution to look at the
moving speck with my binoculars. Instead, I set out with the kind of bravado
we display in nightmares—when, knowing we are dreaming, we plunge
desperately into still thicker horrors, for the sake of having the whole thing
over the sooner. My pick and shovel were already out there, so I had only my
handbag of smaller paraphernalia to take. Into this I put the strange cylinder
and its contents, feeling vaguely that I might possibly find something worth
checking up with some part of the green-lettered Spanish text. Even a clever
hoax might be founded on some actual attribute of the mound which a former
explorer had discovered—and that magnetic metal was damnably odd! Grey
Eagle’s cryptic talisman still hung from its leathern cord around my neck.

I did not look very sharply at the mound as I walked toward it, but when I
reached it there was nobody in sight. Repeating my upward scramble of the
previous day, I was troubled by thoughts of what might lie close at hand if, by
any miracle, any part of the manuscript were actually half-true. In such a case,
I could not help reflecting, the hypothetical Spaniard Zamacona must have
barely reached the outer world when overtaken by some disaster—perhaps an
involuntary rematerialisation. He would naturally, in that event, have been
seized by whichever sentry happened to be on duty at the time—either the
discredited freeman, or, as a matter of supreme irony, the very T’la-yub who
had planned and aided his first attempt at escape—and in the ensuing struggle
the cylinder with the manuscript might well have been dropped on the
mound’s summit, to be neglected and gradually buried for nearly four
centuries. But, I added, as I climbed over the crest, one must not think of
extravagant things like that. Still, if there were anything in the tale, it must
have been a monstrous fate to which Zamacona had been dragged back . . .
the amphitheatre . . . mutilation . . . duty somewhere in the dank, nitrous
tunnel as a dead-alive slave . . . a maimed corpse-fragment as an automatic
interior sentry. . . .

It was a very real shock which chased this morbid speculation from my head,
for upon glancing around the elliptical summit I saw at once that my pick and
shovel had been stolen. This was a highly provoking and disconcerting
development; baffling, too, in view of the seeming reluctance of all the Binger
folk to visit the mound. Was this reluctance a pretended thing, and had the
jokers of the village been chuckling over my coming discomfiture as they
solemnly saw me off ten minutes before? I took out my binoculars and scanned
the gaping crowd at the edge of the village. No—they did not seem to be
looking for any comic climax; yet was not the whole affair at bottom a colossal
joke in which all the villagers and reservation people were concerned—
legends, manuscript, cylinder, and all? I thought of how I had seen the sentry
from a distance, and then found him unaccountably vanished; thought also of
the conduct of old Grey Eagle, of the speech and expressions of Compton and
his mother, and of the unmistakable fright of most of the Binger people. On
the whole, it could not very well be a village-wide joke. The fear and the
problem were surely real, though obviously there were one or two jesting
daredevils in Binger who had stolen out to the mound and made off with the
tools I had left.

Everything else on the mound was as I had left it—brush cut by my machete,
slight, bowl-like depression toward the north end, and the hole I had made
with my trench-knife in digging up the magnetism-revealed cylinder. Deeming
it too great a concession to the unknown jokers to return to Binger for another
pick and shovel, I resolved to carry out my programme as best I could with the
machete and trench-knife in my handbag; so extracting these, I set to work
excavating the bowl-like depression which my eye had picked as the possible
site of a former entrance to the mound. As I proceeded, I felt again the
suggestion of a sudden wind blowing against me which I had noticed the day
before—a suggestion which seemed stronger, and still more reminiscent of
unseen, formless, opposing hands laid on my wrists, as I cut deeper and deeper
through the root-tangled red soil and reached the exotic black loam beneath.
The talisman around my neck appeared to twitch oddly in the breeze—not in
any one direction, as when attracted by the buried cylinder, but vaguely and
diffusely, in a manner wholly unaccountable.

Then, quite without warning, the black, root-woven earth beneath my feet
began to sink cracklingly, while I heard a faint sound of sifting, falling matter
far below me. The obstructing wind, or forces, or hands now seemed to be
operating from the very seat of the sinking, and I felt that they aided me by
pushing as I leaped back out of the hole to avoid being involved in any cave-in.
Bending down over the brink and hacking at the mould-caked root-tangle with
my machete, I felt that they were against me again—but at no time were they
strong enough to stop my work. The more roots I severed, the more falling
matter I heard below. Finally the hole began to deepen of itself toward the
centre, and I saw that the earth was sifting down into some large cavity
beneath, so as to leave a good-sized aperture when the roots that had bound
it were gone. A few more hacks of the machete did the trick, and with a parting
cave-in and uprush of curiously chill and alien air the last barrier gave way.
Under the morning sun yawned a huge opening at least three feet square, and
shewing the top of a flight of stone steps down which the loose earth of the
collapse was still sliding. My quest had come to something at last! With an
elation of accomplishment almost overbalancing fear for the nonce, I replaced
the trench-knife and machete in my handbag, took out my powerful electric
torch, and prepared for a triumphant, lone, and utterly rash invasion of the
fabulous nether world I had uncovered.

It was rather hard getting down the first few steps, both because of the fallen
earth which had choked them and because of a sinister up-pushing of a cold
wind from below. The talisman around my neck swayed curiously, and I began
to regret the disappearing square of daylight above me. The electric torch
shewed dank, water-stained, and salt-encrusted walls fashioned of huge basalt
blocks, and now and then I thought I descried some trace of carving beneath
the nitrous deposits. I gripped my handbag more tightly, and was glad of the
comforting weight of the sheriff’s heavy revolver in my right-hand coat pocket.
After a time the passage began to wind this way and that, and the staircase
became free from obstructions. Carvings on the walls were now definitely
traceable, and I shuddered when I saw how clearly the grotesque figures
resembled the monstrous bas-reliefs on the cylinder I had found. Winds and
forces continued to blow malevolently against me, and at one or two bends I
half fancied the torch gave glimpses of thin, transparent shapes not unlike the
sentinel on the mound as my binoculars had shewed him. When I reached this
stage of visual chaos I stopped for a moment to get a grip on myself. It would
not do to let my nerves get the better of me at the very outset of what would
surely be a trying experience, and the most important archaeological feat of
my career.

But I wished I had not stopped at just that place, for the act fixed my attention
on something profoundly disturbing. It was only a small object lying close to
the wall on one of the steps below me, but that object was such as to put my
reason to a severe test, and bring up a line of the most alarming speculations.
That the opening above me had been closed against all material forms for
generations was utterly obvious from the growth of shrub-roots and
accumulation of drifting soil; yet the object before me was most distinctly not
many generations old. For it was an electric torch much like the one I now
carried—warped and encrusted in the tomb-like dampness, but none the less
perfectly unmistakable. I descended a few steps and picked it up, wiping off
the evil deposits on my rough coat. One of the nickel bands bore an engraved
name and address, and I recognised it with a start the moment I made it out.
It read “Jas. C. Williams, 17 Trowbridge St., Cambridge, Mass.”—and I knew
that it had belonged to one of the two daring college instructors who had
disappeared on June 28, 1915. Only thirteen years ago, and yet I had just
broken through the sod of centuries! How had the thing got there? Another
entrance—or was there something after all in this mad idea of
dematerialisation and rematerialisation?

Doubt and horror grew upon me as I wound still farther down the seemingly
endless staircase. Would the thing never stop? The carvings grew more and
more distinct, and assumed a narrative pictorial quality which brought me
close to panic as I recognised many unmistakable correspondences with the
history of K’n-yan as sketched in the manuscript now resting in my handbag.
For the first time I began seriously to question the wisdom of my descent, and
to wonder whether I had not better return to the upper air before I came upon
something which would never let me return as a sane man. But I did not
hesitate long, for as a Virginian I felt the blood of ancestral fighters and
gentlemen-adventurers pounding a protest against retreat from any peril
known or unknown.

My descent became swifter rather than slower, and I avoided studying the
terrible bas-reliefs and intaglios that had unnerved me. All at once I saw an
arched opening ahead, and realised that the prodigious staircase had ended at
last. But with that realisation came horror in mounting magnitude, for before
me there yawned a vast vaulted crypt of all-too-familiar outline—a great
circular space answering in every least particular to the carving-lined chamber
described in the Zamacona manuscript.
It was indeed the place. There could be no mistake. And if any room for doubt
yet remained, that room was abolished by what I saw directly across the great
vault. It was a second arched opening, commencing a long, narrow passage
and having at its mouth two huge opposite niches bearing loathsome and
titanic images of shockingly familiar pattern. There in the dark unclean Yig and
hideous Tulu squatted eternally, glaring at each other across the passage as
they had glared since the earliest youth of the human world.

From this point onward I ask no credence for what I tell—for what I think I saw.
It is too utterly unnatural, too utterly monstrous and incredible, to be any part
of sane human experience or objective reality. My torch, though casting a
powerful beam ahead, naturally could not furnish any general illumination of
the Cyclopean crypt; so I now began moving it about to explore the giant walls
little by little. As I did so, I saw to my horror that the space was by no means
vacant, but was instead littered with odd furniture and utensils and heaps of
packages which bespoke a populous recent occupancy—no nitrous reliques of
the past, but queerly shaped objects and supplies in modern, every-day use.
As my torch rested on each article or group of articles, however, the
distinctness of the outlines soon began to grow blurred; until in the end I could
scarcely tell whether the things belonged to the realm of matter or to the
realm of spirit.

All this while the adverse winds blew against me with increasing fury, and the
unseen hands plucked malevolently at me and snatched at the strange
magnetic talisman I wore. Wild conceits surged through my mind. I thought of
the manuscript and what it said about the garrison stationed in this place—
twelve dead slave y’m-bhi and six living but partly dematerialised freemen—
that was in 1545—three hundred and eighty-three years ago. . . . What since
then? Zamacona had predicted change . . . subtle disintegration . . . more
dematerialisation . . . weaker and weaker . . . was it Grey Eagle’s talisman that
held them at bay—their sacred Tulu-metal—and were they feebly trying to
pluck it off so that they might do to me what they had done to those who had
come before? . . . It occurred to me with shuddering force that I was building
my speculations out of a full belief in the Zamacona manuscript—this must not
be—I must get a grip on myself—

But, curse it, every time I tried to get a grip I saw some fresh sight to shatter
my poise still further. This time, just as my will power was driving the half-seen
paraphernalia into obscurity, my glance and torch-beam had to light on two
things of very different nature; two things of the eminently real and sane
world; yet they did more to unseat my shaky reason than anything I had seen
before—because I knew what they were, and knew how profoundly, in the
course of Nature, they ought not to be there. They were my own missing pick
and shovel, side by side, and leaning neatly against the blasphemously carved
wall of that hellish crypt. God in heaven—and I had babbled to myself about
daring jokers from Binger!

That was the last straw. After that the cursed hypnotism of the manuscript got
at me, and I actually saw the half-transparent shapes of the things that were
pushing and plucking; pushing and plucking—those leprous palaeogean things
with something of humanity still clinging to them—the complete forms, and
the forms that were morbidly and perversely incomplete . . . all these, and
hideous other entities—the four-footed blasphemies with ape-like face and
projecting horn . . . and not a sound so far in all that nitrous hell of inner earth.
...

Then there was a sound—a flopping; a padding; a dull, advancing sound which
heralded beyond question a being as structurally material as the pickaxe and
the shovel—something wholly unlike the shadow-shapes that ringed me in, yet
equally remote from any sort of life as life is understood on the earth’s
wholesome surface. My shattered brain tried to prepare me for what was
coming, but could not frame any adequate image. I could only say over and
over again to myself, “It is of the abyss, but it is not dematerialised.” The
padding grew more distinct, and from the mechanical cast of the tread I knew
it was a dead thing that stalked in the darkness. Then—oh, God, I saw it in the
full beam of my torch; saw it framed like a sentinel in the narrow passage
between the nightmare idols of the serpent Yig and the octopus Tulu. . . .

Let me collect myself enough to hint at what I saw; to explain why I dropped
torch and handbag and fled empty-handed in the utter blackness, wrapped in
a merciful unconsciousness which did not wear off until the sun and the distant
yelling and the shouting from the village roused me as I lay gasping on the top
of the accursed mound. I do not yet know what guided me again to the earth’s
surface. I only know that the watchers in Binger saw me stagger up into sight
three hours after I had vanished; saw me lurch up and fall flat on the ground
as if struck by a bullet. None of them dared to come out and help me; but they
knew I must be in a bad state, so tried to rouse me as best they could by yelling
in chorus and firing off revolvers.

It worked in the end, and when I came to I almost rolled down the side of the
mound in my eagerness to get away from that black aperture which still
yawned open. My torch and tools, and the handbag with the manuscript, were
all down there; but it is easy to see why neither I nor anyone else ever went
after them. When I staggered across the plain and into the village I dared not
tell what I had seen. I only muttered vague things about carvings and statues
and snakes and shaken nerves. And I did not faint again until somebody
mentioned that the ghost-sentinel had reappeared about the time I had
staggered half way back to town. I left Binger that evening, and have never
been there since, though they tell me the ghosts still appear on the mound as
usual.

But I have resolved to hint here at last what I dared not hint to the people of
Binger on that terrible August afternoon. I don’t know yet just how I can go
about it—and if in the end you think my reticence strange, just remember that
to imagine such a horror is one thing, but to see it is another thing. I saw it. I
think you’ll recall my citing early in this tale the case of a bright young man
named Heaton who went out to that mound one day in 1891 and came back
at night as the village idiot, babbling for eight years about horrors and then
dying in an epileptic fit. What he used to keep moaning was “That white man—
oh, my God, what they did to him. . . .”

Well, I saw the same thing that poor Heaton saw—and I saw it after reading
the manuscript, so I know more of its history than he did. That makes it
worse—for I know all that it implies; all that must be still brooding and
festering and waiting down there. I told you it had padded mechanically
toward me out of the narrow passage and had stood sentry-like at the
entrance between the frightful eidola of Yig and Tulu. That was very natural
and inevitable—because the thing was a sentry. It had been made a sentry for
punishment, and it was quite dead—besides lacking head, arms, lower legs,
and other customary parts of a human being. Yes—it had been a very human
being once; and what is more, it had been white. Very obviously, if that
manuscript was as true as I think it was, this being had been used for the
diversions of the amphitheatre before its life had become wholly extinct and
supplanted by automatic impulses controlled from outside.

On its white and only slightly hairy chest some letters had been gashed or
branded—I had not stopped to investigate, but had merely noted that they
were in an awkward and fumbling Spanish; an awkward Spanish implying a
kind of ironic use of the language by an alien inscriber familiar neither with the
idiom nor the Roman letters used to record it. The inscription had read
“Secuestrado a la voluntad de Xinaián en el cuerpo decapitado de Tlayúb”—
“Seized by the will of K’n-yan in the headless body of T’la-yub.”
 AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
By H. P. Lovecraft (1931)

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-cap—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 aërial, will count in my favour; 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
overambitious programme 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 Prof. 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 1000 feet deep all formed, with needed accessories, no greater load
than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this being made possible by the
clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned. Four
large Dornier aëroplanes, 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 aëroplane 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 depth on 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 I representing geology and having nominal
command—besides sixteen assistants; seven graduate students from
Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified
aëroplane 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 marvellously
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 Harbour on September 2, 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 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were
considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me
considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up
for the worse rigours 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 26 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 looming 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 raging
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 seventh 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 200 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 scoriac peak towered up some 12,700 feet against
the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it
rose the white, ghost-like height of Mt. Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now
extinct as a volcano. 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 of

“—the lavas that restlessly roll

Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole—
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
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 aërial, aëroplane 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, Mass. We hoped to complete our
work during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible we would
winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the
ice for another summer’s supplies.

I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early
work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several
points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie’s apparatus
accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the
small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with
sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge aëroplanes at the
camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party—twenty men and 55
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 rigours 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 600 to 700 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 breath-taking four-hour non-stop flight of

our squadron on November 21 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 coastline. At last we were truly
entering the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south, and even as we
realised it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up
to its height of almost 15,000 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 aëroplane 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 8500
feet above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground
only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made
considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and
performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever
thought of securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon
sandstones thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was
homogeneous with the great bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat
different from the parts lying eastward below South America—which we then
thought to form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one
by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved
the hypothesis.

In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiselled after boring revealed

their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and
fragments—notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such molluscs as
lingulae and gasteropods—all of which seemed of real significance in
connexion 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 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, all six of the students, four
mechanics, and I 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 500 miles eastward
with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which
would probably be on the smaller continental division, as we mistakenly
conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable for
purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent; lime-juice
well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures
generally above zero enabling us to do without our thickest furs. It was now
midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to conclude work by
March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night. Several
savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped
damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aëroplane
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 programme, 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 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 500 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 revolutionising the entire sciences of biology and geology. His preliminary
sledging and boring journey of January 11–18 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 programme—an interlude requiring the use of all four planes,
many men, and the whole of the expedition’s mechanical apparatus. I did not,
in the end, veto the plan; though I decided not to accompany the
northwestward party despite Lake’s plea for my geological advice. While they
were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work
out final plans for the eastward shift. In preparation for this transfer one of the
planes had begun to move up a good gasoline 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 short-wave 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 metres. The start was made January 22 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 300 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 despatched 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 1500 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 700 miles away inflamed our deepest
sense of adventure; and we rejoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves
personally, had been its discoverers. In half an hour Lake called us again.

“Moulton’s plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody hurt and
perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three for return or further
moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel needed just now.
Mountains surpass anything in imagination. Am going up scouting in Carroll’s
plane, with all weight out. You can’t imagine anything like this. Highest peaks
must go over 35,000 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 marvellous 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 Capt. 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 aëroplane; 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 21,000 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-coloured rock than any visible strata on
slopes proper, hence an evidently crystalline origin. Close flying shews 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 30,000 to 35,000 feet. Am up 21,500 myself, in devilish
gnawing cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves,
but no flying danger so far.”
From then on for another half-hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment,
and expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied
that I would join him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and I
would work out the best gasoline plan—just where and how to concentrate
our supply in view of the expedition’s altered character. Obviously, Lake’s
boring operations, as well as his aëroplane activities, would need a great deal
delivered for the new base which he was 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 connexion with this business I called Capt. 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 30,000 to 34,000 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 abruptly rose. I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his
words—flashed across a glacial void of 700 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 Capt.
Douglas at their widely separated bases; and it was agreed that one of Lake’s
planes would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well
as for all the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending on our
decision about an easterly trip, could wait for a few days; since Lake had
enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually the old southern
base ought to be restocked; but if we postponed the easterly trip we would
not use it till the next summer, and meanwhile Lake must send a plane to
explore a direct route between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.

Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case
might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from
Lake’s base to the Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our conical
tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided
to complete the job of making a permanent Esquimau 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 labours, 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 aëroplane survey of the
nearly exposed rock surfaces shewed 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 tantalising 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 500 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 programme; hence set up the drill and put five men to
work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the
damaged aëroplane. 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 teliosts, sharks, and ganoids. This in
itself was important enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils the
expedition had yet secured; but when shortly afterward the drill-head dropped
through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intense
wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast had laid
open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps five
feet across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a
section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago
by the trickling ground waters of a bygone tropic world.

The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep, but extended
off indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which
suggested its membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and
floor were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some
of which met in columnar form; but important above all else was the vast
deposit of shells and bones which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed
down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree-ferns and fungi, and forests of
Tertiary cycads, fan-palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley
contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal
species than the greatest palaeontologist could have counted or classified in a
year. Molluscs, crustacean armour, 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
despatch 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 mososaur skull fragments, dinosaur
vertebrae and armour-plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing-bones,
archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks’ teeth, primitive bird-skulls, and skulls,
vertebrae, and other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres,
xiphodons, dinocerases, 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, molluscs, and corals as
remote as the Silurian 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 300 million years ago and that of only thirty million
years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene age
when the cavern was closed, was of course past all speculation. In any event,
the coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some 500,000 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 despatched 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 organisation 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 his 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 600 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. Emphasise 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
specialised not later than 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 bone. Not many specimens
affected. Am sending to camp for electric torches. Will extend search area
underground by hacking away stalactites.”

————————

“Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across
and an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation. Greenish,
but no evidences to place its period. Has curious smoothness and regularity.
Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage
at inward angles and in centre of surface. Small, smooth depression in centre
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 odour. 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, 3.5 feet central diameter, tapering to 1
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. These wings seem to be
membraneous, stretched on framework of glandular tubing. Apparent minute
orifices in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends of body shrivelled, giving no clue to
interior or to what has been broken off there. Must dissect when we get back
to camp. Can’t decide whether vegetable or animal. Many features obviously
of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set all hands cutting stalactites and
looking for further specimens. Additional scarred bones found, but these must
wait. Having trouble with dogs. They can’t endure the new specimen, and
would probably tear it to pieces if we didn’t keep it at a distance from them.”

————————

“11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest—I might say
transcendent—importance. Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station at
once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints in rocks. Mills,
Boudreau, and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at underground point
forty feet from aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and configured
soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found—star-shaped but no
marks of breakage except at some of the points. Of organic specimens, eight
apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have brought all to surface, leading
off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the things. Give close attention to
description and repeat back for accuracy. Papers must get this right.

“Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot five-ridged barrel torso 3.5 feet
central diameter, 1 foot end diameters. Dark grey, flexible, and infinitely
tough. Seven-foot membraneous wings of same colour, found folded, spread
out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter
grey, 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 grey flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso
but expansible to maximum length of over 3 feet. Like arms of primitive
crinoid. Single stalks 3 inches diameter branch after 6 inches into five sub-
stalks, each of which branches after 8 inches into five small, tapering tentacles
or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of 25 tentacles.

“At top of torso blunt bulbous neck of lighter grey with gill-like suggestions
holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with
three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colours. Head thick and puffy, about
2 feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from
each point. Slit in exact centre 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 sac-
like swellings of same colour which upon pressure open to bell-shaped orifices
2 inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp white tooth-like projections.
Probable 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-grey pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions,
holds greenish five-pointed starfish-arrangement. Tough, muscular arms 4 feet
long and tapering from 7 inches diameter at base to about 2.5 at point. To each
point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membraneous triangle 8
inches long and 6 wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudo-foot
which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million
years old. From inner angles of starfish-arrangement project two-foot reddish
tubes tapering from 3 inches diameter at base to 1 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 pseudo-neck and end of torso,
corresponding to projections at other end.

“Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now
favour 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 vegetable-like, suggesting vegetable’s essentially up-
and-down structure rather than animal’s fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously
early date of evolution, preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto
known, baffles all conjecture as to origin.

“Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of

primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes
inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton
Smith’s nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak
of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake.
Students have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative
treatment of very ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric folklore things
Wilmarth has spoken of—Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.

“Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early

Eocene period, judging from associated specimens. Massive stalagmites
deposited above them. Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented
damage. State of preservation miraculous, evidently owing to limestone
action. No more found so far, but will resume search later. Job now to get
fourteen huge specimens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can’t
be trusted near them. With nine men—three left to guard the dogs—we ought
to manage the three sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must establish
plane communication with McMurdo Sound and begin shipping material. But
I’ve got to dissect one of these things before we take any rest. Wish I had a
real laboratory here. Dyer better kick himself for having tried to stop my
westward trip. First the world’s greatest mountains, and then this. If this last
isn’t the high spot of the expedition, I don’t know what is. We’re made
scientifically. Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will
Arkham please repeat description?”

The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost
beyond description, nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm.
McTighe, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the
droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand
version as soon as Lake’s operator signed off. All appreciated the epoch-
making significance of the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon
as the Arkham’s operator had repeated back the descriptive parts as
requested; and my example was followed by Sherman from his station at the
McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as by Capt. 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 aërial travel impossible.

But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment.
Lake was sending more messages, and told of the completely successful
transportation of the fourteen great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard
pull, for the things were surprisingly heavy; but nine men had accomplished it
very neatly. Now some of the party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a
safe distance from the camp, to which the dogs could be brought for greater
convenience in feeding. The specimens were laid out on the hard snow near
the camp, save for one on which Lake was making crude attempts at
dissection.
This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected; for
despite the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the
deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen specimen—a powerful and intact
one—lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness. Lake was puzzled as
to how he might make the requisite incisions without violence destructive
enough to upset all the structural niceties he was looking for. He had, it is true,
seven more perfect specimens; but these were too few to use up recklessly
unless the cave might later yield an unlimited supply. Accordingly he removed
the specimen and dragged in one which, though having remnants of the
starfish-arrangements at both ends, was badly crushed and partly disrupted
along one of the great torso furrows.

Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative
indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly
able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left us all
awed and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for
this thing was no product of any cell-growth science knows about. There had
been scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhaps forty
million years the internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery,
undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of
the thing’s form of organisation; and pertained to some palaeogean 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 odour 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 37 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 respiratory 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 connexion 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 preternaturally 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 centres and connectives arguing the very extremes of
specialised 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 had 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 pteridophytes; having spore-cases at the tips of the wings and
evidently developing from a thallus or prothallus.

But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate, but
was clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of
the essentials of animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical
contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated; yet one could not be
exact as to the limit of its later adaptations. The wings, after all, held a
persistent suggestion of the aërial. 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 shewed decadence
rather than higher evolution. The size of the pseudo-feet 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 shewed signs of unfolding; but Lake did
not believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost
sub-zero air. He did, however, move all the undissected specimens closer
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 aëroplane shelters
with snow on the mountainward side. These latter shelters, begun with hard
snow blocks during odd moments, were by no means as high as they should
have been; and Lake finally detached all hands from other tasks to work on
them.

It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all to
share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a little
higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether, and repeated
his praise of the really marvellous drills that had helped him make his
discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of
congratulation, 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
despatched 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.

III.

None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning; for 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 most 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 aëroplane, 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 favourable. We then talked over the
personnel of the coming investigation party; and decided that we would
include all hands, together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me.
Even so great a load would not be too much for one of the huge planes built
to our especial 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 aëroplane 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 despatched 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 non-stop 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 later point when we had to adopt an
actual rule of strict censorship.

The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witch-like 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 phantasy which they inspired as seen in the
reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-
dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of
stupendous secrecy and potential revelation; 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 dream-like suggestions of primordial temple-ruins on
cloudy Asian mountain-tops 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 sample; 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-vapours above our heads.

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to

human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying
monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque
extremes of sinister bizarrerie. 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 discs; 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 giganticism. 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 dizzyingly up like a
fearsome rampart of giants, their curious regularities shewing 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 realisation of the shock the sad event must have
caused us, and believed us when we explained that the mangling action of the
wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside.
Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter
bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth
in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not
tell—what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from
nameless terrors.
It is a fact that the wind had wrought 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 aëroplane shelter—all,
it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate state—was nearly
pulverised; 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 blast 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 enclosure 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 non-committal as we
succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs,
whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected
from poor Lake’s accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the
same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and
certain other objects in the disordered region; objects including scientific
instruments, aëroplanes, 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 harboured 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 like
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 1 A.M. Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an
admirably stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to make him promise not to
shew 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 calcareous
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 super-plateau as ancient
and unchanging as the mountains themselves—20,000 feet in elevation, with
grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer and with low
gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices
of the highest peaks.

This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely
satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours—a longer
time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitring, and rock-collecting
programme 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 straight-line 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; and 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 non-stop flight; and on the 28th we made
McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned
by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice-shelf after we had cleared
the great plateau. In five days more the Arkham and Miskatonic, with all hands
and equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and
working up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming
westward against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind’s wails into a
wide-ranged musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick. Less than a
fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us, and thanked heaven
that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space
and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs
since matter first writhed and swam on the planet’s scarce-cooled crust.

Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic

exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with
splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous
breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his doctors—indeed, as I have said,
there is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even me, though
I think it would help his psychological state if he would consent to do so. It
might explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more than
the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather after
those rare irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me—
things which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself
again.

It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some of
our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We might
have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results
we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long
pursuit of the unknown. Lake’s reports of those biological monstrosities had
aroused naturalists and palaeontologists to the highest pitch; though we were
sensible enough not to shew 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 shewing 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 super-plateau 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 organising, 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 may end the world we know. 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 frightful mountain wall. 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 uneasinesses of our dogs, the
missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of
Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in
texture for all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I
do not recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we
found one dog missing. We did not think much about that till later—indeed,
only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.

The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to
certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind
of rationale to the apparent chaos. At the time I tried to keep the men’s minds
off those points; for it was so much simpler—so much more normal—to lay
everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake’s party.
From the look of things, that daemon mountain wind must have been enough
to drive any man mad in the midst of this centre 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 odour emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.
Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low
antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that
solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of the things
relax and expand. Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them,
and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory
qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity.
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
aëroplane 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 enclosure—
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 realised that one of the six imperfect
and insanely buried things we had found—the one with the trace of a
peculiarly hateful odour—must represent the collected sections of the entity
which Lake had tried to analyse. On and around that laboratory table were
strown 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 35 dogs.
Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table, and on the jumble of
roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it, we were much too
bewildered to speculate.

This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally
perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured
biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated
technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and batteries,
food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly
beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink-blots on
certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling and
experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices both at
the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly disordered
machinery. Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance
of certain staples, and the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open in the
most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places. The profusion of scattered
matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed another minor enigma; as did the
two or three tent-cloths and fur suits which we found lying about with peculiar
and unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable
adaptations. The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy
burial of the damaged Archaean specimens, were all of a piece with this
apparent disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality as the
present one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane
disorder at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the
departure of the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition.

Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open
the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not
help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters
of grouped dots, to poor Lake’s descriptions of the strange greenish
soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the
great mineral pile we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole general
formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably suggestive of the
starfish-head of the Archaean entities; and we agreed that the suggestion
must have worked potently upon the sensitised minds of Lake’s overwrought
party. Our own first sight of the actual buried entities formed a horrible
moment, and sent the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back to some of the
shocking primal myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere
sight and continued presence of the things must have coöperated with the
oppressive polar solitude and daemon mountain wind in driving Lake’s party
mad.

For madness—centring 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 harboured wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate
completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive aëroplane
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 aërial 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 trip;
though heavy winds—mentioned in our brief bulletin to the outside world—
delayed our start till nearly nine o’clock.

I have already repeated the non-committal 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 trans-montane 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 unhuman, aeon-cursed
desolation—the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immensurable evils
will not be mine.

Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and
checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the
range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about 23,000
or 24,000 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 12,000 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 hoary
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 unfavourable 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 aërial photographs whilst Danforth drove; and at times 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 Machu Picchu in the Andes, or the
primal foundation-walls of Kish as dug up by the Oxford–Field Museum
Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that occasional
impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to his
flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this place was
frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous
formations often have strange regularities—like the famous Giants’ Causeway
in Ireland—but this stupendous range, despite Lake’s original suspicion of
smoking cones, was above all else non-volcanic in evident structure.

The curious cave-mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most
abundant, presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity
of outline. They were, as Lake’s bulletin had said, often approximately square
or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry
by some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution were
remarkable, and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with
tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata. Such glimpses as we secured did not
extend far within the caverns, but we saw that they were apparently clear of
stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes
adjoining the apertures seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth
thought that the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward
unusual patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses
discovered at the camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those
baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so
hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six
buried monstrosities.

We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the
relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked
down at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have
attempted the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days. Somewhat to
our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficult as such things go;
and that despite the crevasses and other bad spots it would not have been
likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of
the glaciers appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual continuity,
and upon reaching our chosen pass we found that its case formed no
exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and
peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even
though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially
different from those already seen and traversed. The touch of evil mystery in
these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed
betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be
explained in literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological
symbolism and aesthetic association—a thing mixed up with exotic poetry and
paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes.
Even the wind’s burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a
second it seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre musical
whistling or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the
omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths. There was a cloudy note of
reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the
other dark impressions.

We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of 23,570 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 dream-like. 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 vapours 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 eurhythmic 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 20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to
habitation since a pre-human age not less than 500,000 years ago, there
stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the
desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a
conscious and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed, so far as serious
thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the
mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise,
when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes
at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of
glacial death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean
maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all
comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in
stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a
material basis after all—there had been some horizontal stratum of ice-dust in
the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across
the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection. Of course the
phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which
the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we
thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.

Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and
ramparts had saved the frightful thing 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 daemoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men of
the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their pre-human 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 semi-entity.

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 10 to
150 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 × 6 × 8 feet—though in several
places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed-rock of pre-Cambrian
slate. The buildings were far from equal in size; there being innumerable
honeycomb-arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate
structures. The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal,
or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters
of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled
edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern
fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle
of the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city’s heyday.

The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from
which the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial
debris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of
the gigantic piles, and 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; and 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 pre-human, I can only wonder
that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium which we did. Of course we
knew that something—chronology, scientific theory, or our own
consciousness—was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the
plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a careful series of
photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my
case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my
bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity to
fathom more of this age-old secret—to know what sort of beings had built and
lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general world
of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could have had.

For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary
nucleus and centre 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 palaeogean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis
and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the land of Lomar
are recent things of today—not even of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with
such whispered pre-human blasphemies as Valusia, R’lyeh, Ib 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 shewed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry that
clawed up corpse-like through the eternal ice. There were, though, some
highly absorbing diversifications; such as the carvings on the canyon where
that broad river had once pierced the foothills and approached its sinking-
place in the great range. The headlands at the stream’s entrance had been
boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and something about the ridgy, barrel-
shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-
remembrances in both Danforth and me.

We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares;
and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was
generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice; but there
were at least two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly weathered to
disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other still bore a
fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly
resembling such things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of
Petra.
Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of
infinite width, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After
about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and in ten
more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually without signs of sentient
artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a broad
depressed line; while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness,
seeming to slope slightly upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west.

So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at
entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable.
Accordingly we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our
navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some
exploration on foot. Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a
scattering of ruins, low flying soon disclosed an ample number of possible
landing-places. Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our next flight would
be across the great range and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M.
in coming down on a smooth, hard snowfield wholly devoid of obstacles and
well adapted to a swift and favourable takeoff later on.

It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so brief
a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level; hence we
merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the vital parts of
the mechanism were guarded against the cold. For our foot journey we
discarded the heaviest of our flying furs, and took with us a small outfit
consisting of pocket compass, hand camera, light provisions, voluminous
notebooks and paper, geologist’s hammer and chisel, specimen-bags, coil of
climbing rope, and powerful electric torches with extra batteries; this
equipment having been carried in the plane on the chance that we might be
able to effect a landing, take ground pictures, make drawings and
topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope,
outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper to
tear up, place in a spare specimen-bag, and use on the ancient principle of
hare-and-hounds for marking our course in any interior mazes we might be
able to penetrate. This had been brought in case we found some cave system
with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the
usual rock-chipping method of trail-blazing.

Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous
stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as
keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the
unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously. True, we had become
visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet
the prospect of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings
perhaps millions of years ago—before any known race of men could have
existed—was none the less awesome and potentially terrible in its implications
of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious
altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual; both Danforth and
I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which
might fall to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin
worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge
roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to
an irregular height of ten or eleven feet. For this latter we headed; and when
at last we were able actually 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 300 feet from point to point, was
built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6 × 8 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 mortarless 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 whose 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 vapours of the
west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers; its outré and incredible
forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid
stone, and were it not for the photographs I would still doubt that such a thing
could be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart
we had examined; but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its
urban manifestations were past all description.

Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its infinite bizarrerie,
endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There
were geometrical forms for which an Euclid could 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 shewed 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-phantasy 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 labyrinthine town itself, clambering over
fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing
height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again
became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth
was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations
about the horror at the camp—which I resented all the more because I could
not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this
morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his
imagination, too; for in one place—where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp
corner—he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did
not like; whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle imaginary sound
from some undefined point—a muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that
of the wind in the mountain caves yet somehow disturbingly different. The
ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few
distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could
not escape; and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning
the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.

Nevertheless our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead; and
we mechanically carried out our programme 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 500,000 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 shewed 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-
ridged 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 of 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 shewed
bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls in
broad, horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional
arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a
more easily gained interior were encountered.

Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an archway

about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an aërial
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 realising 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 connexion 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 crystallise the lower part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one
gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately 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
connexion 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 differences in floor levels, characterised 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 100 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 × 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 giganticism of everything about us became curiously
oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the
contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances
of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realised 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 cartouches 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 civilised 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 skilful 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 formalised 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 counter-sunk low relief, their background being
depressed about two inches from the original wall surface. In some specimens
marks of a former colouration 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 marvellous technique the more one
admired the things. Beneath their strict conventionalisation one could grasp
the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists; and
indeed, the very conventions themselves served to symbolise and accentuate
the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated. We felt, too,
that besides these recognisable 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 favour—
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 on an enlarged scale—
these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered
from the pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I
can only hope that my account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane
caution on the part of those who believe me at all. It would be tragic if any
were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by the very warning
meant to discourage them.

Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-
foot doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks—
elaborately carved and polished—of the actual shutters and doors. All metal
fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place and
had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room. Window-frames
with odd transparent panes—mostly elliptical—survived here and there,
though in no considerable quantity. There were also frequent niches of great
magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while containing some bizarre
object carved from green soapstone which was either broken or perhaps held
too inferior to warrant removal. Other apertures were undoubtedly connected
with bygone mechanical facilities—heating, lighting, and the like—of a sort
suggested in many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had
sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now.
Floors were also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated.

As I have said, all furniture and other moveables were absent; but the
sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these
tomb-like, 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 motif 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 realisation which the reader of
these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it
down in black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of
dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new
and almost brainless objects—but the builders of the city were wise and old,
and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well-nigh a thousand
million years . . . rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced
beyond plastic groups of cells . . . rocks laid down before the true life of earth
had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above
all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic
Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the
Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young—
the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers
were such as this planet had never bred. And to think that only the day before
Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragments of their millennially
fossilised 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 pre-human 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
pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, and 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 200 feet square
and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an educational centre
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 favourites
with different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of
the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points and filling in 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 shortly appear in an official bulletin of
Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient high lights 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 membraneous 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 mechanised life on other
planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying.
Their preternatural toughness of organisation and simplicity of natural wants
made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without the more specialised
fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without garments except for
occasional protection against the elements.

It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they
first created earth-life—using available substances according to long-known
methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of
various cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets;
having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular
protoplasmic masses capable of moulding 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 synthesised
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 shewed vast clusters of needle-like spires,
delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin,
horizontal scalloped discs 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 bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The
beings moved in the sea partly by swimming—using the lateral crinoid arms—
and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudo-
feet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two
or more sets of their fan-like folding wings. On land they locally used the
pseudo-feet, 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 coördination; ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and
other manual operations.

The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressures
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 prothalli except when they had new regions to colonise.
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 marvellously; 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 had 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 non-pairing and semi-vegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no

biological basis for the family phase of mammal life; but seemed to organise
large households on the principles of comfortable space-utility and—as we
deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellers—
congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything
in the centre 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 the 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 colonising 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 aërial—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 palaeontology.

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 civilisation 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 neighbouring South Pacific. According to one of the
sculptured maps, the whole globe was then under water, with stone cities
scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map
shews 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 centres
were transferred to the nearest sea-bottom. Later maps, which display this
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 the fabulous pre-human 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 centre of the Old Ones’ civilisation, and all the
discoverable 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 moulding 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 suggestion of the Old
Ones, and had modelled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary
limbs and organs; but now their self-modelling powers were sometimes
exercised independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past
suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semi-stable 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 150 million years ago, when a veritable war of re-
subjugation 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 marvellously fearsome quality despite the
intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of
molecular disturbance against the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved
a complete victory. Thereafter the sculptures shewed 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 shewn 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 from a planet identifiable as the remote and recently discovered
Pluto; 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 cosmic space. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and
peculiar vital properties, were strictly material, and must have had their
absolute origin within the known space-time continuum; whereas the first
sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this,
of course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies
ascribed to the invading foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old
Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional
defeats; since historical interest and pride obviously formed their chief
psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed to mention many
advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering
cities figure persistently in certain obscure legends.

The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with
startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain cases
existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold deductions
are magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener,
and Joly that all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass
which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically
viscous lower surface—an hypothesis suggested by such things as the
complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the great
mountain chains are rolled and shoved up—receives striking support from this
uncanny source.

Maps evidently shewing 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 hellish primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent. Other
charts—and most significantly one in connexion with the founding fifty million
years ago of the vast dead city around us—shewed 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 shewed 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 fan-like membraneous wings, had evidently declined to zero
among the Old Ones.

Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal

rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea-bottom, and
other natural causes was a matter of common record; and it was curious to
observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on.
The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last
general centre 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 recognise in the sculptures, but which
stretched fully an hundred miles along the mountain-range in each direction
beyond the farthest limits of our aërial survey—there were reputed to be
preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city,
which were thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of the general
crumpling 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 neighbouring 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 pre-human 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; and 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 coast of
Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the entire continent. The 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 honour is
beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to
record at all, whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and
trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land—the first part
that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the
Old Ones had seeped down from the stars—which had come to be shunned as
vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their time,
and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth-
buckling had convulsed the region in the Comanchian age, a frightful line of
peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos—and
earth had received her loftiest and most terrible mountains.

If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have been
much over 40,000 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 300 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 pre-human 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 shewed what
grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only
the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had
appeared, and had been shaped into adjuncts of the temples. With the
advance of still later epochs all the limestone veins of the region were
hollowed out by ground waters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the
plains below them were a veritable network of connected caverns and
galleries. Many graphic sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and
of the final discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth’s bowels.

This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which
flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and which
had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones’ range and flowed beside that
chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on Wilkes’s coast-
line. Little by little it had eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning, till
at last its sapping currents reached the caverns of the ground waters and
joined with them in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into
the hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later
city as we now found it had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones,
understanding what had happened, and exercising their always keen artistic
sense, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where
the great stream began its descent into eternal darkness.
This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the one
whose extinct course we had seen in our aëroplane 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 marvellous 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 sombre and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn in
the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object—never allowed to appear in
the design—found in the great river and indicated as having been washed
down through waving, vine-draped cycad-forests from those horrible
westward mountains.

It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we
obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city’s
desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of the same
age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations of a
stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence of the existence
of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the first and only set we
directly encountered. We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said,
immediate conditions dictated another present objective. There would,
though, have been a limit—for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the
place had perished among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a
complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the
coming of the great cold which once held most of the earth in thrall, and which
has never departed from the ill-fated poles—the great cold that, at the world’s
other extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.

Just when this tendency began in the antarctic it would be hard to say in terms
of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods
at a distance of about 500,000 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—500,000 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 shewn in the houses, and winter travellers 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
neighbouring black abyss of subterrene waters.

In the end it seems to have been the neighbouring abyss which received the
greatest colonisation. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional
sacredness of this especial 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 chiselling 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-mile toward the
ancient river-course, and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite
direction.

The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places; but the
Old Ones built their new city under water—no doubt because of its greater
certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have
been very great, so that the earth’s internal heat could ensure its habitability
for an indefinite period. The beings seem 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 shewed 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 mould 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 marvellous 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 realise 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 splendours 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 recognise the superior
merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had
certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation; though all the best
separate statues, like other moveables, 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
recognised, for the sculptures shewed 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 saurian 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 shews 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 no existence. They would have
remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a
younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweeping
northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a far-away tropic
ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens—especially about
the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake’s hideously ravaged camp.
There was something abnormal about that whole business—the strange things
we had tried so hard to lay to somebody’s madness—those frightful graves—
the amount and nature of the missing material—Gedney—the unearthly
toughness of those archaic monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the
sculptures now shewed 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 chiselled 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 neighbouring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy
sunless cliffs above the great abyss; down whose side adequate 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 realised we must
begin the quest at once if we expected to include it on our present flight.

It was now 8 P.M., and we had not enough battery replacements to let our
torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our 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 worst came to worst, we could resort to
rock-chipping—and of course it would be possible, even in case of really lost
direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or another if granted
sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So at last we set off eagerly in the
indicated direction of the nearest tunnel.

According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired
tunnel-mouth could not be much more than a quarter-mile from where we
stood; the intervening space shewing 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 aërial 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 southerly
tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighbouring 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 tantalised 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, about 8:30
P.M., Danforth’s keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of something
unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned
before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly
crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too
definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching. There was an odour—
and that odour 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

odour ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a more frightful
odour—less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place under the
known circumstances . . . unless, of course, Gedney. . . . For the odour 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 auto-
hypnotism—or vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney—or what
not—drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had
seen at the alley-turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping—
potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake’s dissection report
despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks—
which he thought he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths
below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left—of what had
disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived
the inconceivable—a wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent
into the unknown primal masonry—

But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite.
We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace
of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having
automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes
from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake
off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes
and hampered our feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was
about to cease. We had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that
rift glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not
even going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward
aperture opened.

The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven walls of the blocked corridor
in which we stood, shewed several doorways in various states of obstruction;
and from one of them the gasoline odour—quite submerging that other hint
of odour—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 levelling 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
odour even at this extreme super-plateau altitude. In other words, it could not
be other than a sort of camp—a camp made by questing beings who like us
had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.

Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was

concerned, all from Lake’s camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened
as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three
illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its
pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped
fragments of fur and tent-cloth, a used electric battery with circular of
directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of
crumpled papers. It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers
and looked at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had
found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have
prepared us, yet the effect of the sight down there in the pre-human 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 neighbouring 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 aërial
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 this 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-paralysed 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 neighbouring entrance to the abyss, and have passed
within to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the
ultimate gulf—the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too,
was blocked, they would have gone on to the north seeking another. They
were, we remembered, partly independent of light.

Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our
new emotions took—just what change of immediate objective it was that so
sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what
we feared—yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious
wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage-point. Probably we had
not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed
a new goal in the form of that great circular place shewn on the crumpled
sketches we had found. We had at once recognised 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 sub-glacial
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 neighbouring 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 under
foot; 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 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 200 feet in diameter—strown with debris and
containing many choked archways corresponding to the one we were about to
cross. The walls were—in available spaces—boldly sculptured into a spiral
band of heroic proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering
caused by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendour 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 sub-glacial 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
aërial 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 centre of
an immense circular plaza; and had been perhaps 500 or 600 feet high, with
tiers of horizontal discs near the top, and a row of needle-like 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 shewed sad
battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways at the bottom
seemed to have been recently half-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 sub-glacial
exploration we might make on this trip would lie 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. After 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 patent
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 sombre 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 since coming on the camp horror—it would have had a kind of
hellish 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 as utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige
of normal life as the sterile disc of the moon. 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 familiarised 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 sub-glacial 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 aërial survey
as remarkably well preserved. Along our path the single torch shewed 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 realise at once that it
was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and according to the
sculptures their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite
the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white
thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched
for an instant by a 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 tried to increase their meat
supply? We doubted whether that pungent odour 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 flareup 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 an 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 with a black arched aperture which broke the symmetry
of the vault 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 chiselled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth
we fancied a current of slightly warmer air and perhaps even a suspicion of
vapour 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
mountain-top 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-channelled rising of some such vapour 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 marvellously well preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for
a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of those
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. After 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 shewn us that matters of scale were not wholly to be depended on.

After 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 vapour 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 odour—of what nature we could not guess, though
we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterrene 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 75 feet long and 50 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 honeycombings. 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 foetor
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 trail-blazing 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 realised, of
course, the great decadence of the Old Ones’ sculpture at the time of the
tunnelling; and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the
arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this deeper section beyond
the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation—
a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so
profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto
observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.

This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy
of detail. It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the
same general line as the sparse cartouches 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 seeming 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 manifestly laborious substitution. It was like, yet
disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise 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 torch battery on the
floor in front of one of the most characteristic designs.

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 odour was abominably strong, and we could detect scarcely a sign
of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapour 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 of the strange prevailing foetor, now quite plainly mixed with
the nameless stench of those others which had gone before us. 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 penguin 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 daemoniac fray between namelessly
monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of
frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead.

I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly

and reluctantly. Would to heaven we had never approached them at all, but
had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily
smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they
had superseded—run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before
our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily
again!

Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon
realised 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 that 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 foetor
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 150
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 re-subjugation. 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 ever 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 to 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 odour whose cause only a diseased fancy
could envisage—clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a
smooth part of the accursedly re-sculptured 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! After 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 drag up in that hideously dead or
sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming.

They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That awful
awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry,
frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence 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 recognising 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 just
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 impression chimed with mine. Of course common reading is what
prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at
queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may
have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be
remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible
and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and screamed
eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that malign region’s core.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard
conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white mist—that
insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.

We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though
we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused
and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really
wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that non-aggressive conduct
and a display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of
capture; if only from scientific curiosity. After 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 foetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race
had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to re-carve 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 daemon message
was—but those burials at Lake’s camp had shewn how much importance the
beings attached to their dead. Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead
of us the large open cavern where various ways converged, and we were glad
to be leaving those morbid palimpsest sculptures—almost felt even when
scarcely seen—behind.
Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of
losing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were
several of the blind albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that
their fear of the oncoming entity was extreme to the point of unaccountability.
If at that point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of travelling 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, spiralling 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 vapours 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
re-sculptured 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
semi-vision 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 centred on the problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe
and analyse details; yet even so our latent brain-cells must have wondered at
the message brought them by our nostrils. Afterward we realised what it
was—that our retreat from the foetid 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
neighbourhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable
foetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely
given place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had
not done—for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually
undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second.

So we glanced back—simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the

incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we
flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from
sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally
unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and
dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth-centre 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 light-headedly 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 incredibly 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 subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured 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 foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward
through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a
spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. 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 unforming 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 daemoniac 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 grey
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 the 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 shewing beyond the more
crumbled structures toward the east. The low antarctic sun of midnight peered
redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the
terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by
contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of
the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of
tenuous ice-vapours, 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 aëroplane waited. Of what had set us fleeing from the 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. Half way uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary
breathing-spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic palaeogean 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-vapours 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
dream-like against the beckoning rose-colour 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; harbourers of nameless horrors and Archaean
secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning;
untrodden by any living thing of 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 unholy primal legends hint evasively. We were the
first human beings ever to see them—and I hope to God we may be the last.

If the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had told truly, these
cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300 miles away; yet none
the less sharply did their dim elfin essence jut above that remote and snowy
rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into
unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous
beyond all known comparison—carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric
strata peopled 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 re-crossing 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
damnable honeycombs inside them, and of the frightful amorphous entities
that might have pushed their foetidly 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 vapours 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
takeoff over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry
spread out as it had done when first we saw it—so short, yet infinitely long, a
time ago—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 24,000 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 though 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 vapour, and
wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses’ men off the Sirens’ coast to
keep that disturbing wind-piping 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-strown 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 echoing,
vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed;
but a single fantastic, daemoniac 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
unrecognised 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 proto-shoggoths”, “the windowless
solids with five dimensions”, “the nameless cylinder”, “the elder pharos”,
“Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”, “the colour out of space”, “the wings”,
“the eyes in darkness”, “the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the
undying”, and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he
repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of
earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever
dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon
kept under lock and key in the college library.

The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed
enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls
of ice-dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly
distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such
layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest—and of course
Danforth did not hint any of those 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!”
 THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH
By H. P. Lovecraft (1931)

I.

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 is even now only beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly
revived existence.

Complaints from many liberal organisations 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 coöperate
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 lies 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 years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there
was now no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew very
little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours 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 raiders 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-rumoured 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 simply 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 more’n two or three people in it—nobody but those Innsmouth folks.
Leaves the Square—front of Hammond’s Drug Store—at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.
unless they’ve changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap—I’ve never ben
on it.”

That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a
town not shewn on common maps or listed in recent guide-books 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 its neighbours, 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. & 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 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 be 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 ben 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 so 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 around here say. They’re hard to
get started, but once they do get started they never let up. They’ve ben telling
things about Innsmouth—whispering ’em, mostly—for the last hundred years,
I guess, and I gather they’re more scared than anything else. Some of the
stories would make you laugh—about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with
the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind
of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that
people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts—but I come from Panton,
Vermont, and that kind of story don’t go down with me.

“You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black
reef off the coast—Devil Reef, they call it. It’s well above water a good part of
the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island.
The story is that there’s a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef—
sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It’s
a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of
shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.

“That is, sailors that didn’t hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had
against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes
at night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock
formation was interesting, and it’s just barely possible he was looking for
pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with daemons
there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad
reputation to the reef.

“That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in
Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble
was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or
somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough—there was riots over it,
and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don’t believe ever got outside of town—
and it left the place in awful shape. Never came back—there can’t be more’n
300 or 400 people living there now.

“But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice—and I
don’t say I’m blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself,
and I wouldn’t care to go to their town. I s’pose you know—though I can see
you’re a Westerner by your talk—what a lot our New England ships used to
have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere
else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with ’em.
You’ve probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese
wife, and maybe you know there’s still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere
around Cape Cod.

“Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The
place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and
creeks, and we can’t be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it’s
pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd
specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the
twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the
Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes
you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have
queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to
shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their
necks are all shrivelled 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 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
folks 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 ben 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 jewellery that the sailors and
refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on
some of the Marsh womenfolks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed
traded for it in some heathen port, especially since he was always ordering
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 ben dead these sixty years,
and there ain’t ben a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but
just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade
things—mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth
folks like ’em to look at themselves—Gawd knows they’ve gotten to be about
as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.

“That plague of ’46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway,
they’re a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and the 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 doings. 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 ben 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 lunch room, the garages, and the fire station, I had found them even
harder to get started than the ticket-agent had predicted; and realised that I
could not spare the time to overcome their first instinctive reticences. 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 nineteenth century,
and later a minor factory centre using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic
and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to
the county.

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was
unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh
Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only
remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing
paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale
corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around
Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some
discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had
tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewellery

vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole
countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the
museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the
Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things
were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent
strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I
could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the
hour I resolved to see the local sample—said to be a large, queerly
proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara—if it could possibly be
arranged.

The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a

Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient
gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me into the closed building, since the
hour was not outrageously late. The collection was a notable one indeed, but
in my present mood I had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which
glistened in a corner cupboard under the electric lights.

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the

strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there
on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though
it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in
front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for
a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be
predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some
strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its
condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the
striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs—some simply geometrical, and
some plainly marine—chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a
craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination
there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted
for. At first I decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art
which made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever seen either belonged
to some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic
defiances of every recognised 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 suggestions 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 pseudo-memory, 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 overflowing 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 labelled as of probable East-Indian or Indo-Chinese
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 had never seen—was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the
cultural scale, and she assured me that the rumours of devil-worship were
partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and
engulfed all the orthodox churches.
It was called, she said, “The Esoteric Order of Dagon”, and was undoubtedly a
debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time
when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence
among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent
return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence
on 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
“Y” 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-Newb’port”—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 grey golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but
the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one
did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging,
watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead
and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored,
greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs
that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface
seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His
hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue
tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the
structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm.
As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw
that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I
wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.

A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently

given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much
of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not
even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine,
or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have
thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw that 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 started 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, sedge-grass, and
stunted shrubbery became more and more 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 small,
weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we
crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and
promoted the general isolation of the region.

Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above

the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories
I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly settled countryside. The
change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of
1846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connexion with hidden
forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near
the shore, which robbed the soil of its 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
roadway 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 realised, come face
to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.

It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous
dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke
came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the
seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and
another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have
been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed
with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along
the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in.
There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs,
cupolas, and railed “widow’s walks”. These were mostly well back from the
water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching
inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned
railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-
obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.

The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could
spy the white belfry of a fairly well-preserved brick structure which looked like
a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an
ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms
of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the
foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this
barrier, and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered
lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out
past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the
breakwater’s end.

Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in
indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed.
And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely
rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This,
I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning
seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this
overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.

We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in
varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed
in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards.
Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or
digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-
visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these
people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every
one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked
without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this
typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under
circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection
passed very quickly.

As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall
through the unnatural stillness. The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker,
lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did
those we were leaving behind. The panorama ahead had contracted to a street
scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches
of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently
deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and
cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the
most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.

Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to
shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right
shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town,
but there now came signs of a sparse habitation—curtained windows here and
there, and an occasional battered motor-car 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 nineteenth 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 grey 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-towered 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 telling 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 shewn me the previous evening. This, acting on my
imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate
face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any
reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory.
Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals
an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange
way—perhaps as treasure-trove?

A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible

on the sidewalks—lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower
floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy
signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of
waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep
river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond
which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out
on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy
bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could
see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one
downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then
we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on
the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola-crowned building with remnants
of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman
House.

I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in
the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight—an elderly man
without what I had come to call the “Innsmouth look”—and I decided not to
ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things
had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which
the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.

One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the
other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period,
from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and
southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small—all low-powered
incandescents—and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark,
even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair
condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which
one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a
drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer’s office, and still another, at the eastern
extremity of the square near the river, an office of the town’s only industry—
the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four
or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to
be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue
glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three
once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank
of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh
refinery.

For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain
grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a
solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the
brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed
exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place,
its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to
him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich,
and went back home 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
marvellous transformations leading to bodily immortality—of a sort—on this
earth. The youth’s own pastor—Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in
Arkham—had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.

As for the Innsmouth people—the youth hardly knew what to make of them.
They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one
could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory
fishing. Perhaps—judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they
consumed—they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They
seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and
understanding—despising the world as if they had access to other and
preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance—especially those staring,
unwinking eyes which one never saw shut—was certainly shocking enough;
and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their
churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which
fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.

They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and
harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone
in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to
think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in
public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When
exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy,
like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the
older folk, and whether the “Innsmouth look” were not a strange and insidious
disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical
anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity—changes involving
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 agents 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 ninety-six 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 favourite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most
astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.

After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories
were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which
could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed
him, but the natives did not like 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 denizens 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 rumours 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 sons 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 daemons. The clergymen—or priests, or whatever they were called
nowadays—also wore this kind of ornament as a head-dress; but one seldom
caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though
many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.

The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town—
the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots—were all very retiring. They lived in
immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to
harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade
public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.

Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my
benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town’s salient
features. After a moment’s study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and
pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant
I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve
as a lunch later on. My programme, 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
oddly free from the noise of industry. This building stood on the steep river
bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the
earliest civic centre, 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 cobwebs 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
breakwater, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides
and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more
on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over
the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the
sketch, was in ruins.

North of the river there were traces of squalid life—active fish-packing houses
in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there,
occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling
forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes—but I seemed to find this even
more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were
more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I
was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could
not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was
stronger here than farther inland—unless, indeed, the “Innsmouth look” were
a disease rather than a blood strain, 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 diademed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had
told me that the 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—I 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
absense of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and
disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly
shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and
secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and
I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand
by sly, staring eyes that never shut.

I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too
well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following
Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry
and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with
the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the
gorge on my right.

The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took
the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared.
Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more
normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming
intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of
getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-
time of that sinister bus.

It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the
red-faced, bushy-bearded, watery-eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat
on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal-
looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish
nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous
and incredible.
III.

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 to him; yet the thought of this aged witness
to the town’s decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and
factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all,
the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories
based upon truth—and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on
around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense
and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a
nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would
probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.

I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely
notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg
liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I
would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old
Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth 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.

Reëntering 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 along to Water Street and turned
southward amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but
found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At
length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick
walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting
beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats,
and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on
the north. Here, I thought, was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I
guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the
mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of
fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o’clock
coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler;
meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to
overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok’s vinous garrulousness to pass
into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing,
but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about
Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics,
revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to
philosophise in a sententious village fashion.

Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be
enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old
Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening
which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient’s
rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back
was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it, and something or other
had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef,
then shewing 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. Ol’ 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 a-privateerin’ in the War
of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an’ the Ranger snow—both of ’em Gilman
venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat—brigantine Columby, brig
Hetty, 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 Pride
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 fer goin’ to
Christian meetin’ an’ bearin’ their burdens 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 agin’ folks’s doin’ any
heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Otaheité whar they was a lot o’
stone ruins older’n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o’ like them on
Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carvin’s of faces that looked like the big
statues on Easter Island. They was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar
they was other ruins with diff’rent carvin’s—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 araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch,
an’ sported bracelets an’ armlets an’ head rigs made aout of 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 frog-like fishes that was
drawed in all kinds o’ positions like they was human bein’s. Nobody cud git
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 islands had
lean pickin’s. Matt he got to wonderin’ too, an’ so did Cap’n Obed. Obed he
notices, besides, that lots of the han’some young folks ud drop aout o’ sight
fer good from year to year, an’ that they wa’n’t many old folks araound. Also,
he thinks some of the folks looks durned queer even fer Kanakys.
“It took Obed to git the truth aout o’ them heathen. I dun’t know haow he
done it, but he 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 larnt that they’s things on this arth as most folks never
heerd abaout—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 o’ cities on the sea-bottom, an’ this island was
heaved up from thar. Seems they was some of the things alive in the stone
buildin’s when the island come up sudden to the surface. That’s haow the
Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got
over bein’ skeert, an’ pieced up a bargain afore long.

“Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had ’em ages afore, but lost track o’
the upper world arter a time. What they done to the victims it ain’t fer me to
say, an’ I guess Obed wa’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
twict every year—May-Eve an’ Hallowe’en—reg’lar as cud be. Also give some
o’ the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return
was plenty o’ 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 an’ aout o’ water—what they
call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told ’em as haow folks from the other
islands might wanta wipe ’em aout ef 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 hev 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 o’ 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
thar. 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 mostly they turned aout jest the way them things
said. Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was
nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy,
though they’d usually go daown under fer 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 snake-bite 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
arter 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
of ’em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o’ prayers an’ sech.
Walakea allaowed 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 git them gold-
like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of ’em. Things went on
that way fer years, an’ Obed got enough o’ that gold-like stuff to make him
start the refinery in Waite’s old run-daown fullin’ mill. He didn’t dass sell the
pieces like they was, fer folks ud be all the time askin’ questions. All the same
his crews ud git 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.

“Wal, 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, an’ had took matters into their
own hands. S’pose they musta had, arter all, them old magic signs as the sea-
things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin’ what any o’ them
Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some
island with ruins older’n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was—they didn’t leave
nothin’ standin’ on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep’ what
parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little
stones strewed abaout—like charms—with somethin’ on ’em like what ye call
a swastika naowadays. Prob’ly them was the Old Ones’ signs. Folks all wiped
aout, no trace o’ no gold-like things, an’ none o’ 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 seafarin’ days what
profited the master of a ship gen’lly profited the crew proportionate. Most o’
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 wa’n’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
of 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 git a holt o’ sarten paowers as
ud bring plenty o’ fish an’ quite a bit o’ gold. O’ course them as sarved on the
Sumatry Queen an’ seed the island knowed what he meant, an’ wa’n’t none
too anxious to git clost to sea-things like they’d heerd tell on, but them as
didn’t know what ’twas all abaout got kind o’ swayed by what Obed had to say,
an’ begun to ast him what he cud do to set ’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 strangenesses of Innsmouth
and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic
legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial
foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror, if only
because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign
tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come
from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone
Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.

I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious
how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had
come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped
it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent
close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic
smile behind the stained, bushy whiskers. Yes—he was really forming words,
and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.

“Poor Matt—Matt he allus 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 o’ Jehovy—I was a mighty little
critter, but I heerd what I heerd an’ seen what I seen—Dagon an’ Ashtoreth—
Belial an’ Beëlzebub—Golden Caff an’ the idols o’ Canaan an’ the Philistines—
Babylonish abominations—Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin—”

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? Heh, 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 allus 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 be sailors—wear them queer robes
an’ cover theirselves 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 had begun to cackle evilly.

“Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin’ 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 cupalo a-watchin’ shapes as wa’n’t human shapes? . . .
Hey? . . . Heh, heh, heh, heh. . . .”

The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless
alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its
shaking was not altogether that of mirth.

“S’pose one night ye seed somethin’ heavy heaved offen Obed’s dory beyond
the reef, an’ then larned nex’ 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 started comin’ aout o’ the refin’ry chimbly. Other folks were
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. ’Twas 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 folks organised the
Esoteric Order o’ Dagon, an’ bought Masonic Hall offen 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 follered Obed’s
craowd aout to the reef, an’ I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex’ day Obed
an’ thutty-two others was in gaol, with everbody a-wonderin’ jest what was
afoot an’ jest what charge agin’ ’em cud be got to holt. God, ef anybody’d
look’d ahead . . . a couple o’ weeks later, when nothin’ had ben throwed into
the sea fer that long. . . .”

Zadok was shewing signs of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence
for a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned
and was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I
was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad.
Again I strained to catch his whispers.

“That awful night . . . I seed ’em . . . I was up in the cupalo . . . hordes of ’em . .
. swarms of ’em . . . all over the reef an’ swimmin’ up the harbour into the
Manuxet. . . . God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night . . .
they rattled our door, but pa wouldn’t open . . . then he clumb aout the kitchen
winder with his musket to find Selectman Mowry an’ see what he cud do. . . .
Maounds o’ the dead an’ the dyin’ . . . shots an’ 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’ faound
haff our people missin’ . . . nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an’
them things or else keep quiet . . . never heerd 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 entertain guests . . . they
wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an’ he fer 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 arter. . . .

“Nothin’ was to be diff’runt on the aoutside, 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 on 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 humankind, 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 wudn’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 pryin’. All
in the band of the faithful—Order o’ Dagon—an’ the children shud never die,
but go back to the Mother Hydra an’ Father Dagon what we all come from
onct—Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl
fhtagn—”

Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old
soul—to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of
the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative
brain! He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled
cheeks 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’, an’ them as kilt theirselves—them as told
things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you’re a-
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’ Dagon 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 of ’em, that is. I was afeard—never did no pryin’ arter that
awful night, an’ never see one of—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 distempered or somethin’. Besides, 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—hosses
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
hev nothin’ to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the
refin’ry naow 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 seed
aoutdoors.

“Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can’t shet his eyes no more, an’ is
all aout o’ shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he’ll take to the water
soon. Mebbe he’s tried it already—they do sometimes go daown fer little
spells afore they go fer 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 Ipswich, 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, an’ 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 vague apprehensiveness. Zadok now
grew shriller, and 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 be livin’ in a taown
like this, with everything a-rottin’ an’ a-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 o’ 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—I 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! You jest set still an’ listen to me, boy—this is what I ain’t never
told nobody. . . . I says I didn’t do no pryin’ arter that night—but I faound things
aout 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—ben doin’ it fer years,
an’ slackenin’ up lately. Them haouses north o’ the river betwixt Water an’
Main Streets is full of ’em—them devils an’ what they brung—an’ when they
git ready. . . . I say, when they git ready . . . ever hear tell of a shoggoth? . . .

“Hey, d’ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be—I seen ’em one night
when . . . EH—AHHHH—AH! E’YAAHHHH. . . .”
The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness 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! Git 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 loosening masonry of the bygone
wharf, and changed the mad ancient’s whisper to another inhuman and blood-
curdling scream.

“E—YAAHHHH! . . . YHAAAAAAA! . . .”

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 had grown perilously late—
my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight—so I tried
to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile
walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning
houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my
bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit
chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over
my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of
malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some
other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I
did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth
viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the
necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth’s map and seeking a route I had not traversed
before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square.
Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive
whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the
loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed
as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my
valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would
be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight,
and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable
words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers,
and entered the hotel; while the passengers—the same men whom I had seen
arriving in Newburyport that morning—shambled to the sidewalk and
exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have
sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the same seat I
had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent reappeared 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 reëntered the hotel lobby; where the sullen, queer-looking
night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor—large, but
without running water—for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register,
paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary
attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed
wholly devoid of life. My room, a dismal rear one with two windows and bare,
cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy courtyard 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 wooden panelling 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 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 an evening paper and a
flyspecked 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 become out of order, like so many other
things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and
discovered a bolt on the clothes-press which seemed to be of the same size,
judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief
from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the
vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screw-
driver 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 flashlight 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
travellers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive
prosperity. Or were the townsfolk really so resentful about curious visitors?
Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused
unfavourable 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 fulfilment of all my apprehensions. Without
the least shadow of a doubt, the lock on my hall door was being tried—
cautiously, furtively, tentatively—with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less
rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been,
albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard—and that was to my
advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be.
Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate
reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine
blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake.
Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the
would-be intruder’s next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north
entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was
softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler
left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew
that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of
a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking
went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had
realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a
greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have
been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues
of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler 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 recognised human
speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had
heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight’s aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed
to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state’s safety
regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that
my windows commanded only a sheer three-story drop to the cobbled
courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks
abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping
distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings
I would have to be in a room two doors from my own—in one case on the
north and in the other case on the south—and my mind instantly set to work
calculating 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 coördinated 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 buildings, 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 fastenings in place—it was not a favourable 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 buildings to Washington or Bates—or
else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any
case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the
Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire
station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs
below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the
right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned
factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the
rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat, marshy terrain
dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-
threaded countryside 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 panelling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock
or pain. The door resisted even more than I had 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 be 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 through, and had
my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening
inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed,
so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door.
As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate,
while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with
the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly
room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-
key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was
at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think
about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut
and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side—
pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and
moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such
makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof
of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was
something apart from the immediate weakness of my defences. I was
shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous pantings,
gruntings, 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 skylight. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I
would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and
out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to
Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that
the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had
brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead,
however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my
escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour
draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large
projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of
avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them
down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch
and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting
roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So,
climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind
me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining
the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I
observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the
north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the
Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly.
There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there
would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm.
Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down.
The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped;
striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and
made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight—after a hasty glance
at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but
seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barn-like second story to the
ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my
footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall, at one 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 realised to my relief that they did not know where I
had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their
features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was
abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was
strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design
altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt
my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the
street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it
without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall
and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows.
Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in
another moment had climbed outside and was carefully 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 unprosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I
retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be
plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group
who looked like pursuers.
I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and
dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and
stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual
wayfarer. At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling
figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching
the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the
intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked
dangerous to me on the grocery youth’s map; since the moonlight would have
free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course
would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The
only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble
of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one—or at least no
pursuer of mine—would be there.

Just how fully the pursuit was organised—and indeed, just what its purpose
might be—I could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity in the
town, but I judged that the news of my escape from the Gilman had not yet
spread. I would, of course, soon have to shift from Washington to some other
southward street; for that party from the hotel would doubtless be after me. I
must have left dust prints in that last old building, revealing how I had gained
the street.

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains
of a park-like, iron-railed green in its centre. 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 at 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 thirty-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 set me
running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily
staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw
that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty.
They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the
town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I
could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in
a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began
to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were
footsteps and guttural 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 denizens 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 of the river-gorge. There was just a chance that
the townsfolk would not think of that; since its brier-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, Adams, 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 re-cross 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 Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in
Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near
the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street,
I broke into a quiet dog-trot, 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 the vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from
cover beheld a motor-car darting across the open space, bound outward along
Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.
As I watched—choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short
abatement—I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling
in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the
Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the
figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem
which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd
that it sent a chill through me—for it seemed to me the creature was almost
hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting
around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest
stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear
some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but
accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-
crossing broad and moonlit South Street—with its seaward view—and I had to
nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible
Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points.
At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the
crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out—this time on my right—I was
half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not, however, resist; but cast a
sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting
shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half expected there would
be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in
toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered
object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially
repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far
black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible
before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the
slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman
House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by
some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing
along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space
where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see
them plainly only a block away—and was horrified by the bestial abnormality
of their faces and the dog-like 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 turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a
shock 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 footsteps. 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 dizzy height. The condition of this bridge would
determine my next step. If humanly possible, I would use it; if not, I would have
to risk more street wandering and take the nearest intact highway bridge.

The vast, barn-like 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 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 shortly, with the single track on a low, grassy
embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a
sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open
cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter,
since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my
window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to
a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this
time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The
ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal
in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in
the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the
town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a
second.

What I saw—or fancied I saw—was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion

far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde
must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was
great, and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look
of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in
the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too,
though the wind was blowing the other way—a suggestion of bestial scraping
and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately
overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very

extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens
near the waterfront. I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen.
Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering
other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as
depopulated as Innsmouth.

Whence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now beheld?
Did those ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued,
and unsuspected life? Or had some unseen ship indeed landed a legion of
unknown outsiders on that hellish reef? Who were they? Why were they
there? And if such a column of them was scouring the Ipswich road, would the
patrols on the other roads be likewise augmented?

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace
when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind
suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town?
It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural
murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too—
a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up
images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that
unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering
and grateful for the cut’s protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley
road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging.
Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and
vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs
for tracking—though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the
omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt
reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the
track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be
able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close
moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the
irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all
Innsmouth types—something one would not care to remember.
The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of
croaking, baying, and barking without the least suggestion of human speech.
Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So
far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or
pattering was monstrous—I could not look upon the degenerate creatures
responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sounds receded toward
the west. The horde was very close now—the 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 horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth,
of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of Nature and
of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined—nothing, even, that I
could have gathered had I credited old Zadok’s crazy tale in the most literal
way—would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality
that I saw—or believe I saw. I have tried 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—surging 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 used for 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 that 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 so 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 from my stupor in the brush-
grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no
trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone.
Innsmouth’s ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the
southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes
around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.

The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I
felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-
shadowed Innsmouth—and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied
powers of locomotion. Despite weakness, hunger, horror, and bewilderment I
found myself after a long time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy
road to Rowley. Before evening I was in the village, getting a meal and
providing myself with presentable clothes. 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 jewellery
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 on
when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical
society there—Mr. E. 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 maternal 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 his role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman—now
long dead—was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have
told more than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded
parents of the young woman—Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh—among the
known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the
natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence—she certainly had the true
Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took
place at the birth of my grandmother—her only child. Having formed some
disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not
welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I
pleased by Mr. Peabody’s suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself.
However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took
copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented
Orne family.

I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at
Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my
final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other
wholesome activities—reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional
official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my
pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July—just a year after
the Innsmouth experience—I spent a week with my late mother’s family in
Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes,
traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what
kind of connected chart I could construct.

I did not exactly relish the 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 an almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his
condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had
not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both
mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major
cause of his mother’s death two years before.

My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland
household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked
the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible.
Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my
grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter,
who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters,
cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.

It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to
acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother
and uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I
gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion
and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a
horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind
despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least
suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now
suggested something it had not suggested before—something which would
bring stark panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a
downtown safe-deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring
enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my
mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to
produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design,
and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother
used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around
them, and my great-grandmother’s French governess had said they ought not
to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in
Europe.

As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me

not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs.
Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced the workmanship
superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define
their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were
two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief
certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.

During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face
must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and
paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to
continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect
some demonstration when the first piece—the tiara—became visible, but I
doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either,
for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would
turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that
brier-choked railway cut a year before.

From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension,
nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-
grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in
Arkham—and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a
monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through a trick? What was
it the ancient toper had muttered about the likeness 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-grandmother, 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 I fought off these reflections with partial success. My
father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine
as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930–31, however, the dreams began.
They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and
vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me,
and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of
weedy Cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the
other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I
awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all—I was one with
them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and
praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.

There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember
each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever
I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to
drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of
blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and
appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position
and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction
had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.
It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow
ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was
something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to
notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly.
What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my
grandmother and uncle Douglas?

One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the
sea. She lived 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 splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh!
Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot
myself!

I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we
shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding
reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-
columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst
wonder and glory for ever.
 THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE
By H. P. Lovecraft (1932)

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 days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more
steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for
it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah
Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to
explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small,
white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even
Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone
walls with some red, sticky fluid.

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and
quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them
with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional
reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of
the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental
tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered
college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic
legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked
obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to
slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points.
Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on
forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university
library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some
terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the
fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen 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 235 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 practiced her spells.
It had been vacant from the first—for no one had ever been willing to stay
there long—but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet
nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No
ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry
thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s
incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks
through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch
brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly
through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had
happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that
everything of that monstrous past might not—at least in the darkest,
narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys—have utterly perished. He also
rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of
the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones
whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.

Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall
slanting 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 shewed where a window had been
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 cobwebbed 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 already 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 hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an
insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant,
terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—
trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the
rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching
seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the
slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling—and when it came
from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced
himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before
descending to engulf him utterly.

The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt 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 county 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 Jenkin”—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 Gilman’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.
Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of
inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly 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 organisation and faculties were
somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected—though not
without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and
properties.

The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably

angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic
while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake
vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious
idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he
began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects
appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically
different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories
one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in
their motions than the members of the other categories.

All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyond description

or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses 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, shewing 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 tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed
a fresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a
curious little fragment of bone.

Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass
the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was
needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General
Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end
of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter
preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be
companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a
bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for,
but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice
actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves.
On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the
beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an
overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had
made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous
fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.

That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but
traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever
alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch
abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however,
were of abhorrent 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 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 trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as
fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the
whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’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 specific
points in the cosmic pattern.

Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the
three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-
dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That
this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable.
Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in
the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon
what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry.
Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others—even planets
belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-
time continua—though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually
uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of
space.

It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could
survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or
indefinitely multiplied dimensions—be they within or outside the given space-
time continuum—and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a
matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of
mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next
higher plane 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 the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever
did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said
about his sleep-walking. It seemed 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-scratchings 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 agonisingly realistic.

However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at

night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of
this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose
poverty forced him to room in this squalid 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 Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the

whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer 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 time 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.

Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th 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 imminence come from the
formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary
footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a
growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do
something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism?
Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion
of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening
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 in his own blood the book of Azathoth
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 crystallise 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 stuck
more and more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how
it had pronounced the words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.

In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt
that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension.
Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and
unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet,
including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional
sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving
things—a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles
and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting
surface angles—seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float
ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-
plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and
roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of
utterly unendurable intensity.

During the night of April 19–20 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 night-clothes, 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 fore paw 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

connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to
break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk
away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged
himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached
the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched
at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular
lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.

Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that
desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old
woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams.
The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were
crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him
he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’s
labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a
monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent,
ancient figure in brown.

The southeastward 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 realised 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; afternoon found it
rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling 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—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 Gilman’s window was dark; but then
he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman
about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light
which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had
not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that
Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman.
Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw
that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’s
room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be
better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some
good priest like Father Iwanicki.
As the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He
knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night
before, yet this 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
harbourage. 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 story 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 southwest, 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 discs 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 polychromatic sky. Looking upward
he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a
different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains.
Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The
city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound
would well up from it.

The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished
stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled
shapes which struck him 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 this chaos of mixed effulgences;
and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged,
barrel-shaped object 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 oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked
back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent
furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and
the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him
unconscious—for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped
precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves
by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.

Gilman awakened 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 stumbled 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 centre,
the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-
curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs—all were there. In the
electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with
green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of
the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of
attachment to the dream-railing.

Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming
aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he
clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord
Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer
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 a 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 outré
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 slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching
and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull
from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come
from a lower place in the sky.

In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing
came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This
time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws
clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a
moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of
the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for
presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and
planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor
underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every
degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and
bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and
nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light
Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled
him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black
triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dry rattling, there presently
climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human
face.

The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a
figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration
but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair
or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy
black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench,
but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed
position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small,
regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open
on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right
hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax
was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’s clothing to his
shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just
below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a
faint.

He awaked on the morning of the 22nd 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 crystallise 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 of form 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 milky, barely luminous mist in this farther
void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead—a larger wisp
which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form—and
he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along
the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws
unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos.
Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous,
half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute—
but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from
what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth,
which rules all time and space from a curiously environed 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, sprinkle 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 loomfixer 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 both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when
he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared
to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the
cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and as he began to
describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures
gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman’s late
hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness
of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman 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 stating 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 shewed 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-story 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 loomfixer were an unnerving
influence.

During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from
morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed 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 Gilman’s absence
from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs
at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs.
Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-
Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the
cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser.

For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort
to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every
quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was
a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms
was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked
about in college circles. 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 27 a fresh rat-hole 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 aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually
mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises
the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; 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. Success, Gilman added, might lead to
dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions
pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other
hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in
certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might
preserve one’s life 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 Gilman 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 Gilman 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 Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him
out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight
abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark,
muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, 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 grimacing crone started, dragging
Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. 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 Gilman to wait and
disappearing inside the black aperture.

The youth’s oversensitive 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 29th 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 recognise as his there were some smaller,
almost round markings—such as the legs of a large chair or 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 crucifix Joe
Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn
there had been strange sounds in the house—especially a thin, childish wail
hastily choked off.

Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to
fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy
had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating
blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the
next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item
on the paper’s first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check
and stagger back to Elwood’s room.

There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne’s Gangway, and
the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko
had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the
event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so
grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown
Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from
its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at
the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary
Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not
dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things.
Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember.
And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out
of the way anyhow.

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 crystallising, 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 daemoniac 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 30th, 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 void 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
rhythmical praying of the loomfixer 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 realised 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 recognised them none the
less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he
keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him?
Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown Jenkin . . . and now
he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the
distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another
sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the
electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in
the rat-hole—the accursed little face which he at last realised 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 clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend
the empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, 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 completely, and he dropped the
bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically
to stop the monstrous deed.

In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table
and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over
the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters
were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly
around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury.
He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril
wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her
strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he
reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain
and pulling it free.

At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed
long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-
like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge
of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in
again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out
for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain
of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it
enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at
his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage
kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on
some level far below.

Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest
on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the
table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin,
tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac 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-stopped egress he
doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him
merely into a dream-house—an abnormal projection of the actual place he
sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality
in all his experiences.

The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-
rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto
veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect
a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-
time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the
initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this
faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled
spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct 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 wherein reigns the mindless
daemon-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—Iä! 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 on 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 Dr.
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. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that
both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound
intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could
have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic
Valley was more than the honest physician could say.

Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy
communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole
chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as
possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and
accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a
police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just
before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-
long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering
fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that
no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.

The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was
forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting
nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions 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 red 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 Dr. Malkowski. 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 constant 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 loomfixer
would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about
spectral and terrible things.

It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson
rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet
they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the
carpet’s edge and the base-board. 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 grumblingly 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 an 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 graduated in
the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished,
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 story was choked with debris from above,
but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of
the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December,
and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive
workmen that the gossip began.
Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling
were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police.
Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the
university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly
recognisable 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 mingled 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 150 to 200 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
Miskatonic professors profoundly—is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly
resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save
that it is larger, 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 Mazurewicz as that
which he had given poor Gilman 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 Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others,
including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.

When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed
triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found
to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the
room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed
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.
 THE MAN OF STONE
By H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald (1932)

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 firmly
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 that 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 realised 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 for the village, Mountain Top, you know. Of
course he asked questions—but they did not get him very far. He found he was
on a ticklish subject, for the natives only shook their heads, crossed their
fingers, and muttered something about a ‘Mad Dan’—whoever he was.

“It was too much for Jackson, so he came home weeks ahead of his planned
time. He told me all about it because he knows how fond I am of strange
things—and oddly enough, I was able to fish up a recollection that dovetailed
pretty neatly with his yarn. Do you remember Arthur Wheeler, the sculptor
who was such a realist that people began calling him nothing but a solid
photographer? I think you knew him slightly. Well, as a matter of fact, he
ended up in that part of the Adirondacks himself. Spent a lot of time there, and
then dropped out of sight. Never heard from again. Now if stone statues that
look like 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 than 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 no
more . . . by Dan, that is. Kinder soft-spoken and got around Dan’s wife till the
old devil took notice. Pretty sweet on her, I guess. But he took the trail sudden,
and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since. Dan must a told him sumthin’
pretty plain—bad feller to get agin ye, Dan is! Better keep away from thar,
boys, for they ain’t no good in that part of the hills. Dan’s ben workin’ up a
worse and worse mood, and ain’t seen about no more. Nor his wife, neither.
Guess he’s penned her up so’s nobody else kin make eyes at her!”

As Sam resumed his whittling after a few more observations, Ben and I
exchanged glances. Here, surely, was a new lead which deserved intensive
following up. Deciding to lodge at the hotel, we settled ourselves as quickly as
possible; planning for a plunge into the wild hilly country on the next day.

At sunrise we made our start, each bearing a knapsack laden with provisions
and such tools as we thought we might need. The day before us had an almost
stimulating air of invitation—through which only a faint undercurrent of the
sinister ran. Our rough mountain road quickly became steep and winding, so
that before long our feet ached considerably.

After about two miles we left the road—crossing a stone wall on our right near
a great elm and striking off diagonally toward a steeper slope according to the
chart and directions which Jackson had prepared for us. It was rough and briery
travelling, but we knew that the cave could not be far off. In the end we came
upon the aperture quite suddenly—a black, bush-grown crevice where the
ground shot abruptly upward, and beside it, near a shallow rock pool, a small,
still figure stood rigid—as if rivalling its own uncanny petrification.

It was a grey dog—or a dog’s statue—and as our simultaneous gasp died away
we scarcely knew what to think. Jackson had exaggerated nothing, and we
could not believe that any sculptor’s hand had succeeded in producing such
perfection. Every hair of the animal’s magnificent coat seemed distinct, and
those on the back were bristled up as if some unknown thing had taken him
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 prostrate figure. We had little doubt that the stony
thing was what had once been a man, and something in the thought unnerved
us both.

When Ben at last sent forth the electric beam we saw that the object lay on its
side, back toward us. It was clearly of the same material as the dog outside,
but was dressed in the mouldering and unpetrified remains of rough sport
clothing. Braced as we were for a shock, we approached quite calmly to
examine the thing; Ben going around to the other side to glimpse the averted
face. Neither could possibly have been prepared for what Ben saw when he
flashed the light on those stony features. His cry was wholly excusable, and I
could not help echoing it as I leaped to his side and shared the sight. Yet it was
nothing hideous or intrinsically terrifying. It was merely a matter of
recognition, for beyond the least shadow of a doubt this chilly rock figure with
its half-frightened, half-bitter expression had at one time been our old
acquaintance, Arthur Wheeler.

Some instinct sent us staggering and crawling out of the cave, and down the
tangled slope to a point whence we could not see the ominous stone dog. We
hardly knew what to think, for our brains were churning with conjectures and
apprehensions. Ben, who had known Wheeler well, was especially upset; and
seemed to be piecing together some threads I had overlooked.

Again and again as we paused 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, according to old Sam Poole, Wheeler had run 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 civilisation grew fewer and fewer. At
last the beginning of a narrow, neglected path opened up on our left, while the
peaked roof of a squalid, unpainted building shewed itself beyond a sickly
growth of half-dead trees. This, I knew, must be Mad Dan’s cabin; and I
wondered that Wheeler had ever chosen so unprepossessing a place for his
headquarters. I dreaded to walk up that weedy, uninviting path, but could not
lag behind when Ben strode determinedly along and began a vigorous rapping
at the rickety, musty-smelling door.

There was no response to the knock, and something in its echoes sent a series
of shivers through one. Ben, however, was quite unperturbed; and at once
began to circle the house in quest of unlocked windows. The third that he
tried—in the rear of the dismal cabin—proved capable of opening, and after a
boost and a vigorous spring he was safely inside and helping me after him.

The room in which we landed was full of limestone and granite blocks,
chiselling tools and clay models, and we realised at once that it was Wheeler’s
erstwhile studio. So far we had not met with any sign of life, but over
everything hovered a damnably ominous dusty odour. On our left was an open
door evidently leading to a kitchen on the chimney side of the house, and
through this Ben started, intent on finding anything he could concerning his
friend’s last habitat. He was considerably ahead of me when he crossed the
threshold, so that I could not see at first what brought him up short and wrung
a low cry of horror from his lips.

In another moment, though, I did see—and repeated his cry as instinctively as

I had done in the cave. For here in this cabin—far from any subterranean
depths which could breed strange gases and work strange mutations—were
two stony figures which I knew at once were no products of Arthur Wheeler’s
chisel. In a rude armchair before the fireplace, bound in position by the lash of
a long rawhide whip, was the form of a man—unkempt, elderly, and with a
look of fathomless horror on its evil, petrified face.

On the floor beside it lay a woman’s figure; graceful, and with a face
betokening considerable youth and beauty. Its expression seemed to be one
of sardonic satisfaction, and near its outflung right hand was a large tin pail,
somewhat stained on the inside, as with a darkish sediment.

We made no move to approach those inexplicably petrified bodies, nor did we

exchange any but the simplest conjectures. That this stony couple had been
Mad Dan and his wife we could not well doubt, but how to account for their
present condition was another matter. As we looked horrifiedly around we
saw the suddenness with which the final development must have come—for
everything about us seemed, despite a heavy coating of dust, to have been left
in the midst of commonplace household activities.

The only exception to this rule of casualness was on the kitchen table; in whose
cleared centre, as if to attract attention, lay a thin, battered, blank-book
weighted 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 simple
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
I am a Van Kauran on my mother’s side, and anybody this side of the Hudson
can tell what the Van Kaurans have handed down. We come from Nicholas Van
Kauran, the wizard, who was hanged in Wijtgaart in 1587, and everybody
knows he had made the bargain with the Black Man.

“The soldiers never got his Book of Eibon when they burned his house, and his
grandson, William Van Kauran, brought it over when he came to
Rensselaerwyck and later crossed the river to Esopus. Ask anybody in Kingston
or Hurley about what the William Van Kauran line could do to people that got
in their way. Also, ask them if my Uncle Hendrik didn’t manage to keep hold of
the Book of Eibon when they ran him out of town and he went up the river to
this place with his family.

“I am writing this—and am going to keep writing this—because I want people

to know the truth after I am gone. Also, I am afraid I shall really go mad if I
don’t set things down in plain black and white. Everything is going against me,
and if it keeps up I shall have to use the secrets in the Book and call in certain
Powers. Three months ago that sculptor Arthur Wheeler came to Mountain
Top, and they sent him up to me because I am the only man in the place who
knows anything except farming, hunting, and fleecing summer boarders. The
fellow seemed to be interested in what I had to say, and made a deal to stop
here for $13.00 a week with meals. I gave him the back room beside the
kitchen for his lumps of stone and his chiselling, and arranged with Nate
Williams to tend to his rock blasting and haul his big pieces with a drag and
yoke of oxen.
“That was three months ago. Now I know why that cursed son of hell took so
quick to the place. It wasn’t my talk at all, but the looks of my wife Rose, that
is Osborne Chandler’s oldest girl. She is sixteen years younger than I am, and
is always casting sheep’s eyes at the fellows in town. But we always managed
to get along fine enough till this dirty rat shewed up, even if she did balk at
helping me with the Rites on Roodmas and Hallowmass. I can see now that
Wheeler is working on her feelings and getting her so fond of him that she
hardly looks at me, and I suppose he’ll try to elope with her sooner or later.

“But he works slow like all sly, polished dogs, and I’ve got plenty of time to
think up what to do about it. They don’t either of them know I suspect
anything, but before long they’ll both realise it doesn’t pay to break up a Van
Kauran’s home. I promise them plenty of novelty in what I’ll do.

“Nov. 25—Thanksgiving Day! That’s a pretty good joke! But at that I’ll have
something to be thankful for when I finish what I’ve started. No question but
that Wheeler is trying to steal my wife. For the time being, though, I’ll let him
keep on being a star boarder. Got the Book of Eibon down from Uncle
Hendrik’s old trunk in the attic last week, and am looking up something good
which won’t require sacrifices that I can’t make around here. I want something
that’ll finish these two sneaking traitors, and at the same time get me into no
trouble. If it has a twist of drama in it, so much the better. I’ve thought of
calling in the emanation of Yoth, but that needs a child’s blood and I must be
careful about the neighbours. The Green Decay looks promising, but that
would be a bit unpleasant for me as well as for them. I don’t like certain sights
and smells.

“Dec. 10—*Eureka**!* I’ve got the very thing at last! Revenge is sweet—and
this is the perfect climax! 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. Iä! 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 Hasbrouck—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 moonstruck
nincompoops. The trouble will be to make Rose take wine, for she pretends
not to like it. Any experiments that I make on animals will be down at the cave,
and nobody ever thinks of going there in winter. I’ll do some wood-cutting to
account for my time away. A small load or two brought in will keep him off the
track.

“Jan. 20—It’s harder work than I thought. A lot depends on the exact
proportions. The stuff came from Montreal, but I had to send again for some
better scales and an acetylene lamp. They’re getting curious down at the
village. Wish the express office weren’t in Steenwyck’s store. Am trying various
mixtures on the sparrows that drink and bathe in the pool in front of the cave—
when it’s melted. Sometimes it kills them, but sometimes they fly away.
Clearly, I’ve missed some important reaction. I suppose Rose and that upstart
are making the most of my absence—but I can afford to let them. There can
be no doubt of my success in the end.

“Feb. 11—Have got it at last! Put a fresh lot in the little pool—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—Iä R’lyeh! Praise the Lord Tsathoggua! I’ve got the son of hell at
last! Told him I’d found a new ledge of friable limestone down this way, and
he trotted after me like the yellow cur he is! I had the wine-flavoured stuff in
a bottle on my hip, and he was glad of a swig when we got here. Gulped it
down without a wink—and dropped in his tracks before you could count three.
But he knows I’ve had my vengeance, for I made a face at him that he couldn’t
miss. I saw the look of understanding come into his face as he keeled over. In
two minutes he was solid stone.

“I dragged him into the cave and put Rex’s figure outside again. That bristling
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 it 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 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 in 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 her 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 steps on
the ceiling overhead, and I think they’re getting more and more dragging. The
stuff is certainly working, but it’s too slow. Not strong enough. From now on
I’ll rapidly stiffen up the dose.

“March 11—It is very queer. She is still alive and moving. Tuesday night I heard
her piggling with a window, so went up and gave her a rawhiding. She acts
more sullen than frightened, and her eyes look swollen. But she could never
drop to the ground from that height and there’s nowhere she could climb
down. I have had dreams at night, for her slow, dragging pacing on the floor
above gets on my nerves. Sometimes I think she works at the lock on the door.
“March 15—Still alive, despite all the strengthening of the dose. There’s
something queer about it. She crawls now, and doesn’t pace very often. But
the sound of her crawling is horrible. She rattles the windows, too, and fumbles
with the door. I shall have to finish her off with the rawhide if this keeps up.
I’m getting very sleepy. Wonder if Rose has got on her guard somehow. But
she must be drinking the stuff. This sleepiness is abnormal—I think the strain
is telling on me. I’m sleepy. . . .”

(Here the cramped handwriting trails out in a vague scrawl, giving place to a
note in a firmer, evidently feminine handwriting, indicative of great emotional
tension.)

“March 16—4 a.m.—This is added by Rose C. Morris, about to die. Please

notify my father, Osborne E. Chandler, Route 2, Mountain Top, N.Y. I have just
read what the beast has written. I felt sure he had killed Arthur Wheeler, but
did not know how 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 by setting some old pans and dishes that were up
here under places where the roof leaked.

“There were two great rains. I thought he was trying to poison me, though I
didn’t know what the poison was like. What he has written about himself and
me is a lie. We were never happy together and I think I married him only under
one of those spells that he was able to lay on people. I guess he hypnotised
both my father and me, for he was always hated and feared and suspected of
dark dealings with the devil. My father once called him The Devil’s Kin, and he
was right.
“No one will ever know what I went through as his wife. It was not simply
common cruelty—though God knows he was cruel enough, and beat me often
with a leather whip. It was more—more than anyone in this age can ever
understand. He was a monstrous creature, and practiced all sorts of hellish
ceremonies handed down by his mother’s people. He tried to make me help in
the rites—and I don’t dare even hint what they were. I would not, so he beat
me. It would be blasphemy to tell what he tried to make me do. I can say he
was a murderer even then, for I know what he sacrificed one night on Thunder
Hill. He was surely the Devil’s Kin. I tried four times to run away, but he always
caught and beat me. Also, he had a sort of hold over my mind, and even over
my father’s mind.

“About Arthur Wheeler I have nothing to be ashamed of. We did come to love
each other, but only in an honourable 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 was 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 with 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 times. My mind was not ready for such things. After that I
talked to that fiend for two or three hours steady. I told him everything I had
wanted to tell him through all the years I had been his slave, and a lot of other
things that had to do with what I had 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 not bear to touch him, but the tin funnel clinked horribly when I pulled
it out of his mouth. I wish I could have given that Kin of the Devil a more painful,
lingering death, but surely this was the most appropriate he could have had.

“There is not much more to say. I am half-paralysed, and with Arthur murdered
I have nothing to live for. I shall make things complete by drinking the rest of
the poison after placing this book where it will be found. In a quarter of an
hour I shall be a stone statue. My only wish is to be buried beside the statue
that was Arthur—when it is found in that cave where the fiend left it. Poor
trusting Rex ought to lie at our feet. I do not care what becomes of the stone
devil tied in the chair. . . .”
 THE HORROR IN THE MUSEUM
By H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald (1932)

It was languid curiosity 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 shewn, 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, Dr. 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 alcove for adults
only. It was this alcove which had fascinated Jones so much. There were
lumpish hybrid things which only fantasy could spawn, moulded with devilish
skill, and coloured in a horribly life-like fashion.
Some were the figures of well-known myth—gorgons, chimaeras, 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 rumoured 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 taken from feverish dreams of
other planets and other galaxies. The wilder paintings of Clark Ashton Smith
might suggest a few—but nothing could suggest the effect of poignant,
loathsome terror created by their great size and fiendishly cunning
workmanship, and by the diabolically clever lighting conditions under which
they were exhibited.

Stephen Jones, as a leisurely connoisseur of the bizarre in art, had sought out
Rogers himself in the dingy office and workroom behind the vaulted museum
chamber—an evil-looking crypt lighted dimly by dusty windows set slit-like and
horizontal in the brick wall on a level with the ancient cobblestones of a hidden
courtyard. It was here that the images were repaired—here, too, where some
of them had been made. Waxen arms, legs, heads, and torsos lay in grotesque
array on various benches, while on high tiers of shelves matted wigs, ravenous-
looking teeth, and glassy, staring eyes were indiscriminately scattered.
Costumes of all sorts hung from hooks, and in one alcove were great piles of
flesh-coloured wax-cakes and shelves filled with paint-cans and brushes of
every description. In the centre of the room was a large melting-furnace used
to prepare the wax for moulding, 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 delirium.
At one end was a door of heavy plank, fastened by an unusually large padlock
and with a very peculiar symbol painted over it. Jones, who had once had
access to the dreaded Necronomicon, shivered involuntarily as he recognised
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’s intrusion, but
seemed to welcome the chance of unburdening himself to an interested
person. His voice was of singular depth and resonance, and harboured 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 these hints expanded into tales—despite a few odd
corroborative photographs—whose extravagance was almost comic. It was
some time in June, on a night when Jones had brought a bottle of good whiskey
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 Thibet, the African interior, the Arabian desert, the Amazon
valley, Alaska, and certain little-known islands of the South Pacific, plus claims
of having read such monstrous and half-fabulous books as the prehistoric
Pnakotic fragments and the Dhol chants attributed to malign and non-human
Leng—but nothing in all this had been so unmistakably insane as what had
cropped out that June evening under the spell of the whiskey.

To be plain, Rogers began making vague 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 cases 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 grotesqueries 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 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
daemoniac abnormalities were artificial.

It was Jones’s 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 blasphemies in the screened-off alcove 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 regard. At times he would try to humour 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 horrors 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’s sensibilities. It was the
yelp or scream of a dog, and was such a sound as could be made only under
conditions of the utmost fright and agony combined. Its stark, anguished
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 neighbourhood 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 neighbourhood 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 more 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 street
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 steps led to an opaque and heavily bolted door. Some
impulse urged him to crouch low on the damp, broken cobblestones and peer
in, on the chance that the thick green shades, worked by long cords that hung
down to a reachable level, might not be drawn. The outer surfaces were thick
with dirt, but as he rubbed them with his handkerchief he saw there was no
obscuring curtain in the way of his vision.

So shadowed was the cellar from the inside that not much could be made out,
but the grotesque working paraphernalia now and then loomed up spectrally
as Jones tried each of the windows in turn. It seemed evident at first that no
one was within; yet when he peered through the extreme right-hand
window—the one nearest the entrance alley—he saw a glow of light at the
farther end of the apartment which made him pause in bewilderment. There
was no reason why any light 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 thought 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 speculations 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 afternoon, and about the glow of light in that disturbing and
usually unopened inner doorway with the heavy padlock. The attendants were
leaving as he arrived, and he thought that Orabona—the dark foreign-looking
assistant—eyed him with something like sly, repressed amusement. He did not
relish that look—even though he had seen the fellow turn it on his employer
many times.

The vaulted exhibition room was ghoulish in its desertion, but he strode
quickly through it and rapped at the door of the office and workroom.
Response was slow in coming, though there were footsteps inside. Finally, in
response to a second knock, the lock rattled, and the ancient six-panelled
portal creaked reluctantly open to reveal the slouching, feverish-eyed form of
George Rogers. From the first it was clear that the showman was in an unusual
mood. There was a curious mixture of reluctance and actual gloating in his
welcome, and his talk at once veered to extravagances of the most hideous
and incredible sort.

Surviving elder gods—nameless sacrifices—the other than artificial nature of

some of the alcove horrors—all the usual boasts, but uttered in a tone of
peculiarly increasing confidence. Obviously, Jones reflected, the poor fellow’s
madness was gaining on him. From time to time Rogers would send furtive
glances toward the heavy, padlocked inner door at the end of the room, or
toward a piece of coarse burlap on the floor not far from it, beneath which
some small object appeared to be lying. Jones grew more nervous as the
moments passed, and began to feel as hesitant about mentioning the
afternoon’s oddities as he had formerly been anxious to do so.

Rogers’ sepulchrally resonant bass almost cracked under the excitement of his
fevered rambling.

“Do you remember,” he shouted, “what I told you about that ruined city in
Indo-China where the Tcho-Tchos lived? 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 that 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 have only 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 Noatak 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 Esquimau 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 shewed enough.
We saw the bones of others who had been before us—aeons ago, when the
climate was warm. Some of these 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 that throne didn’t move—and we knew then that It needed the
nourishment of sacrifice. But we didn’t want to wake It then. Better to get It
to London first. Orabona and I went to the surface for the big box, but when
we had packed it we couldn’t get It up the three flights of steps. These steps
weren’t made for human beings, and their size bothered us. Anyway, it was
devilish heavy. We had to have the Americans down to get It out. They weren’t
anxious to go into the place, but of course the worst thing was safely inside
the box. We told them it was a batch of ivory carvings—archaeological 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 shewed an incredible interior chamber
with wild carvings and a curious throne whose proportion could not have been
designed for a human occupant. The carvings on 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 lemurs and elementals that are older than
the earth will come when the blood of men or beasts is offered under the right
conditions.”

The expression on the narrator’s face was growing very alarming and repulsive,
so that Jones fidgeted involuntarily in his chair. Rogers seemed to notice his
guest’s nervousness, and continued with a distinctly evil smile.

“It was last year that I got It, and ever since then I’ve been trying rites and
sacrifices. Orabona hasn’t been much help, for he was always against the idea
of waking It. He hates It—probably because he’s afraid of what It will come to
mean. He carries a pistol all the time to protect himself—fool, as if there were
human protection against It! If I ever see him draw that pistol, I’ll strangle him.
He wanted me to kill It and make an effigy of It. But I’ve stuck by my plans, and
I’m coming out on top in spite of all the cowards like Orabona and damned
sniggering sceptics 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 himself 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 curiosity 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
grotesqueness? After a moment Jones realised what it must be. It was what
was left of a dog—a dog, perhaps of considerable size and whitish colour. 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 up 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? Let us admit that the results are
unbeautiful from our limited human standpoint. 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 Its work, not mine. It needed the nourishment of the
offering, and took it in Its own way. But let me shew you what It looks like.”

As Jones stood hesitating, the speaker returned to his desk and took up the
photograph he had laid face down without shewing. Now he extended it with
a curious look. Jones took it and glanced at it 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 modelling 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 shewn 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 forward 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, and marked with spiral stripes—suggesting the
traditional serpent-locks of Medusa. To say 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 mixed with other
emotions not of the world or this solar system. Into this bestial abnormality,
he reflected, Rogers must have poured at once all his malignant insanity and
all his uncanny sculptural genius. The thing was incredible—and yet the
photograph proved that it existed.

Rogers interrupted his reveries.

“Well—what do you think of It? Now do you wonder what crushed the dog
and sucked it dry with a million mouths? It needed nourishment—and It will
need more. It is a god, and I am the first priest of Its latter-day hierarchy. Iä!
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 all a fraud! You still think I made It, and you
still think my figures are nothing but lifeless wax! Why, damn you, you’re a
worse clod than a wax image yourself! But I’ve got proof this time, and 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 nearby bench.

“Very well, Rogers, let it be later. I must be going now, but I’ll call around
tomorrow afternoon. Think my advice over and see if it doesn’t sound sensible.
Ask Orabona what he thinks, too.”

Rogers actually bared his teeth in wild-beast fashion.

“Must be going now, eh? Afraid, after all! Afraid, for all your bold talk! You say
the effigies are only wax, and yet you run away when I begin to prove that they
aren’t. You’re like the fellows who take my standing bet that they daren’t
spend the night in the museum—they come boldly enough, but after an hour
they shriek and hammer to get out! Want me to ask Orabona, eh? You two—
always against me! You want to break down the coming earthly reign of It!”

Jones preserved his calm.

“No, Rogers—there’s nobody against you. And I’m not afraid of your figures,
either, much as I admire your skill. But we’re both a bit nervous tonight, and I
fancy some rest will do us good.”

Again Rogers checked his guest’s departure.

“Not afraid, eh?—then why are you so anxious to go? Look here—do you or
don’t you dare to stay alone here in the dark? What’s your hurry if you don’t
believe 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 know. 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. But stick you must.
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 scepticism. 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’ll 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 centre 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 quiet
café, 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 stamped up the worn steps to the sidewalk
outside. As his tread receded, Jones realised that the long, tedious vigil had
commenced.

II.

Later, in the utter blackness of the great arched cellar, Jones cursed the
childish naiveté which had brought him there. For the first half-hour he had
kept flashing on his pocket-light at intervals, but now just sitting in the dark on
one of the visitors’ benches had become a more nerve-racking 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 humour 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 surely not far from actual greatness. He had the fancy of a Sime
or a Doré joined to the minute, scientific craftsmanship of a Blatschka. Indeed,
he had done for the world of nightmare what the Blatschkas with their
marvellously accurate plant models of finely wrought and coloured glass had
done for the world of botany.

At midnight the strokes of a distant clock filtered through the darkness, and
Jones felt cheered by the message from a still-surviving outside world. The
vaulted museum chamber was like a tomb—ghastly in its utter solitude. Even
a mouse would be cheering company; yet Rogers had once boasted that—for
“certain reasons”, as he said—no mice or even insects ever came near the
place. That was very curious, yet it seemed to be true. The deadness and
silence were virtually complete. If only something would make a sound! He
shuffled his feet, and the echoes came spectrally out of the absolute stillness.
He coughed, but there was something mocking in the staccato reverberations.
He could not, he vowed, begin talking to himself. That meant nervous
disintegration. 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 draughtlessness 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 tasted salty, as if it were mixed with the
brine of dark subterrene waters, and there was a bare hint of some odour of
ineffable mustiness. In the daytime he had never noticed that the waxen
figures had an odour. 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 the imagination—had not such things driven poor Rogers mad?

But the utter loneliness of this place was frightful. Even the distant chimes
seemed to come from across cosmic gulfs. It made Jones think of that insane
picture which Rogers had shewed 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 delirium.

The proximity of the numberless waxen shapes began to get on Jones’s 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 imaginative 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
hunting him down in a circle. Black Tsathoggua moulded 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 shewed, these were not as bad
as what his fancy called out of the utter blackness.

But there were drawbacks. Even in the light of his torch he could not help
suspecting a slight, furtive trembling on the part of the canvas partition
screening off the terrible “Adults only” alcove. He knew what lay beyond, and
shivered. Imagination called up the shocking form 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 tentacles of great Cthulhu actually
swaying, slowly and insidiously? He knew they were flexible, but he had not
realised that the draught 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 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 could not
be in the workroom—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-panelled portal in its proper position.
Again he tried darkness and closed 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-shapes tried to close in on him? The shuffling
crept nearer, and his resolution failed. He did not scream but merely gulped
out a challenge.
“Who goes there? Who are you? What do you want?”

There was no answer, but the shuffling kept on. Jones did not know which he
feared most to do—turn on his flashlight 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 beams of his torch. Then,
paralysed 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 fore paws 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’s 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.

“Iä! Iä!” 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 had doubted you. You shall crush and drain him, with all his
doubts, and grow strong thereby. And ever after among men he shall be shewn
as a monument to your glory. Rhan-Tegoth, infinite and invincible, I am your
slave and high-priest. You are hungry, and I provide. I read the sign and have
led you forth. I shall feed you with blood, and you shall feed me with power.
Iä! 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 rear courtyard, donned his disguise, and then advanced to seize his
neatly trapped and fear-broken victim. His strength was prodigious, and if he
was to be thwarted, one must act quickly. Counting on the madman’s
confidence in his unconsciousness he determined to take him by surprise,
while his grasp 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’s 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’s overwrought nerves it seemed as if the cries echoed from an
infinite distance of daemoniac snortings and bayings. 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
favour. 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 puzzlingly queer sort of leather. For some
reason it made Jones’s flesh crawl to touch it, and there seemed to be an alien,
rusty odour about it. In the normal clothes beneath it was Rogers’ key-ring,
and this the exhausted victor seized as his final passport to freedom. The
shades at the small, slit-like windows were all securely drawn, and he let them
remain so.

Washing off the blood of battle at a convenient sink, Jones donned the most
ordinary-looking and least ill-fitting clothes he could find on the costume
hooks. Testing the door to the courtyard, he found it fastened with a spring-
lock which did not require a key from the inside. He kept the key-ring,
however, to admit him on his return with aid—for plainly, the thing to do was
to call in an alienist. There was no telephone in the museum, but it would not
take long to find an all-night restaurant or chemist’s shop where one could be
had. He had almost opened the door to go 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 first honour instead. Now you must both beware, for It
is not gentle without Its priest.

“Iä! Iä! 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 all ready! When It had had Its fill, and you
were like that dog I shewed 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—Iä! Iä! 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 think 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! Iä! Iä! 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 honour. I won’t bother you again.
Let me go, and I will share with you the power that It will bring me. Iä! Iä! 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 neighbours in this
deserted warehouse district.

“Wza-y’ei! Wza-y’ei!” howled the madman. “Y’kaa haa bho—ii, Rhan-Tegoth—

Cthulhu fhtagn—Ei! Ei! Ei! Ei!—Rhan-Tegoth, 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 the 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.

And now something happened which sent an additional chill down Jones’s
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 posture, head cocked on one side as if listening intently
for something. All at once a smile of devilish triumph overspread his face, and
he began speaking intelligibly again—this time in a hoarse whisper contrasting
oddly with his former stentorian howling.

“Listen, fool! Listen hard! It has heard me, and is coming. Can’t you hear It
splashing out of Its tank down there at the end of the runway? I dug it deep,
because there was nothing too good for It. It is amphibious, you know—you
saw the gills in the picture. It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where
the cities are under the warm deep sea. It can’t stand up in there—too tall—
has to sit 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 disorganised
Jones so badly. The utter, insane confidence and sincerity in that crazed
whisper were damnably contagious. Imagination, with 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 noticed 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 harboured 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’s 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
phantasmagorically through his helpless imagination. There was a splashing.
There was a 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 zoölogical gardens in Regent’s Park.

He did not know now whether Rogers was talking or not. Everything real had
faded away, and he was a statue obsessed with dreams and hallucinations so
unnatural that they became almost objective and remote from him. He
thought he heard a sniffing or snorting from the unknown gulf beyond the
door, and when a sudden baying, trumpeting noise assailed his ears he could
not feel sure that it came from the tightly bound maniac whose image swam
uncertainly in his shaken vision. The photograph of that accursed, unseen wax
thing persisted in floating through his consciousness. Such a thing had no right
to exist. Had it not driven him mad?

Even as he reflected, a fresh evidence of madness beset him. Something, he

thought, was fumbling with the latch of the heavy padlocked door. It was
patting and pawing and pushing at the planks. There was a thudding on the
stout wood, which grew louder and louder. The stench was horrible. And now
the assault on that door from the inside was a malign, determined pounding
like the strokes of a battering-ram. There was an ominous cracking—a
splintering—a welling foetor—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 dank 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 neighbourhood. He still had on the
queer mélange 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 phantasm of
fever? It would help to put him on his feet if he could settle some of these
maddening points. He must have seen that damnable photograph of the wax
image called “It”, for no brain but Rogers’ could ever have conceived such a
blasphemy.

It was a fortnight before he dared to enter Southwark Street again. He went in

the middle of the morning, when there was the greatest amount of sane,
wholesome activity around the ancient, crumbling shops and warehouses. The
museum’s sign was still there, and as he approached he saw that the place was
open. The gateman nodded in a 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 twenty-eighth 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 has 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 unfortunate. It is a great

masterpiece—designed and made, you understand, by Mr. Rogers. He will see
about it when he gets back.”

Again Orabona smiled.

“The police, you know. We put it on display a week ago, and there were two
or three faintings. One poor fellow had an epileptic fit in front of it. You see, it
is 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 shewn. Said we’d have to remove it. It
was a tremendous shame—such a masterpiece of art—but I didn’t feel
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 has 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 treated 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 clung to the brass railing in front of the
curtained niche. He almost reached out to stop Orabona when he saw the
curtain beginning to swing aside, but some conflicting impulse held him back.
The foreigner smiled triumphantly.

“Behold!”

Jones reeled in spite of his grip on the railing.

“God!—great God!”

Fully ten feet high despite a shambling, crouching attitude expressive of

infinite cosmic malignancy, a monstrosity of unbelievable horror was shewn
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 that 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 localised 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 mould his own features into his masterpiece? Was
there anything more that subconscious vision had seized on and suppressed in
sheer terror?

The wax of the mangled face had been handled with boundless dexterity.
Those punctures—how perfectly they reproduced the myriad wounds
somehow inflicted on that poor dog! But there was something more. On the
left cheek one could trace an irregularity which seemed outside the general
scheme—as if the sculptor had sought to cover up a defect of his first
modelling. The more Jones looked at it, the more mysteriously it horrified
him—and then, suddenly, he remembered a circumstance which brought his
horror to a head. That night of hideousness—the tussle—the bound
madman—and the long, deep scratch down the left cheek of the actual living
Rogers. . . .
Jones, releasing his desperate clutch on the railing, sank in a total faint.

Orabona continued to smile.

 THE THING ON THE DOORSTEP
By H. P. Lovecraft (1933)
I.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and
yet I hope to shew 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 as 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
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 inner life in the boy,
with imagination as his one avenue of freedom.

At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile
writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had
leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger
child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and
marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in
which we lived—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 daemoniac 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 overcareful 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 attempts to raise a moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His
voice was soft and light, and his pampered, 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 sensitivenesses
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 practice my profession—
settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall St. since my father had moved
to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came
to regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing
the doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal,
so that after dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes
followed by two more after a pause. Less frequently I would visit at his house
and note with envy the obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.

Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkham, 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 meaninglessly
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 overbookish. 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 rumours about the wild
Miskatonic set were extremely singular. There was even talk of black magic
and of happenings utterly beyond credibility.
II.

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 and zestful irony from her present situation.

Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over
other persons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing
peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling
of exchanged personality—as if the subject were placed momentarily in the
magician’s body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose
eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild
claims about the nature of consciousness and about its independence of the
physical frame—or at least from the life-processes of the physical frame. Her
crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a
male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man’s
brain, she declared, she could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery
of unknown forces.

Edward met Asenath at a gathering of “intelligentsia” held in one of the

students’ rooms, and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the
next day. He had found her full of the interests and erudition which engrossed
him most, and was in addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had never
seen the young woman, and recalled casual references only faintly, but I knew
who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby should become so
upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since infatuation
thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.
In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby.
Others now remarked Edward’s autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that
he did not look even nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an
escort for his bizarre divinity. He was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence
and self-indulgence, and his face was absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the
other hand, had the premature crow’s feet which come from the exercise 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 peace,

according to the bride’s request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered no
opposition; and he, my wife, my son, and I attended the brief ceremony—the
other guests being wild young people from the college. Asenath had bought
the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of High Street, and they
proposed to settle there after a short trip to Innsmouth, whence three
servants and some books and household goods were to be brought. It was
probably not so much consideration for Edward and his father as a personal
wish to be near the college, its library, and its crowd of “sophisticates”, that
made Asenath settle in Arkham instead of returning permanently home.
When Edward called on me after the honeymoon I thought he looked slightly
changed. Asenath had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache, but
there was more than that. He looked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual
pout of childish rebelliousness being exchanged for a look almost of genuine
sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether I liked or disliked the change.
Certainly, he seemed for the moment more normally adult than ever before.
Perhaps the marriage was a good thing—might not the change of dependence
form a start toward actual neutralisation, 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 disquieting 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.

III.

For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would
sometimes slip by without the familiar three-and-two strokes at the front
door; and when he did call—or when, as happened with increasing
infrequency, I called on him—he was very little disposed to converse on vital
topics. He had become secretive about those occult studies which he used to
describe and discuss so minutely, and preferred not to talk of his wife. She had
aged tremendously since her marriage, till now—oddly enough—she seemed
the elder of the two. Her face held the most concentratedly determined
expression I had ever seen, and her whole aspect seemed to gain a vague,
unplaceable repulsiveness. My wife and son noticed it as much as I, and we all
ceased gradually to call on her—for which, Edward admitted in one of his
boyishly tactless moments, she was unmitigatedly grateful. Occasionally the
Derbys would go on long trips—ostensibly to Europe, though Edward
sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations.

It was after the first year that people began talking about the change in Edward
Derby. It was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it
brought up some interesting points. Now and then, it seemed, Edward was
observed to wear an expression and to do things wholly incompatible with his
usual flabby nature. For example—although in the old days he could not drive
a car, he was now seen occasionally to dash into or out of the old
Crowninshield driveway with Asenath’s powerful Packard, handling it like a
master, and meeting traffic entanglements with a skill and determination
utterly alien to his accustomed nature. In such cases he seemed always to be
just back from some trip or just starting on one—what sort of trip, no one could
guess, although he mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.

Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he
looked too much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these
moments—or perhaps these moments seemed unnatural because they were
so rare. Sometimes, hours after starting out in this way, he would return
listlessly sprawled on the rear seat of the car while an obviously hired
chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on the streets
during his decreasing round of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls on
me) was the old-time indecisive one—its irresponsible childishness even more
marked than in the past. While Asenath’s face aged, Edward’s—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 ‘saving 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 disorganised. He had seen
astonishingly little of his parent since his marriage, for Asenath had
concentrated in herself all his vital sense of family linkage. Some called him
callous in his loss—especially since those jaunty and confident moods in the
car began to increase. He now wished to move back into the old Derby
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 St.
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 up 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 lead down to abysses of nighted secrets, of
complex angles that lead 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 whispers—he would suggest things
about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library
in the old days. These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to
revolve around some especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard
were really dead—in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.

At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether
Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off
through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism—some power of the
kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me
things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and
glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see
me, for although he would pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible
force would generally clog his motions or make him forget his destination for
the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was away—‘away in her
own body’, as he once oddly put it. She always found out later—the servants
watched his goings and comings—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
the 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 gossips 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 my 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. . . . Iä! Shub-Niggurath! . . . The shape rose up from
the altar, and there were 500 that howled. . . . The Hooded Thing bleated
‘Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s secret name in the coven. . . . I 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. . . . I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape. . . .
I can’t stand it. . . . I won’t stand it. . . . I’ll kill her if she ever sends me there
again. . . . I’ll kill that entity . . . her, him, it . . . I’ll kill it! I’ll kill it with my own
hands!”

It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next day I got him
decent clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of
hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to be silent; though he began
muttering darkly to himself when the car passed through Augusta—as if the
sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories. It was clear that he did not wish
to go home; and considering the fantastic delusions he seemed to have about
his wife—delusions undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal
to which he had been subjected—I thought it would be better if he did not. I
would, I resolved, put him up myself for a time; no matter what
unpleasantness it would make with Asenath. Later I would help him get a
divorce, for most assuredly there were mental factors which made this
marriage suicidal for him. When we struck open country again Derby’s
muttering faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on the seat beside me as
I drove.

During our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again,
more distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane
drivel about Asenath. The extent to which she had preyed on Edward’s nerves
was plain, for he had woven a whole set of hallucinations around her. His
present predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only one of a long series. She
was getting hold of him, and he knew that some day she would never let go.
Even now she probably let him go only when she had to, because she couldn’t
hold on long at a time. She constantly took his body and went to nameless
places for nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs—
but sometimes she couldn’t hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his
own body again in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place.
Sometimes she’d get hold of him again and sometimes she couldn’t. Often he
was left stranded somewhere as I had found him . . . time and again he had to
find his way home from frightful distances, getting somebody to drive the car
after he found it.

The worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer at a
time. She wanted to be a man—to be fully human—that was why she got hold
of him. She had sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him.
Some day she would crowd him out and disappear with his body—disappear
to become a great magician like her father and leave him marooned in that
female shell that wasn’t even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth
blood now. There had been traffick with things from the sea—it was horrible.
. . . And old Ephraim—he had known the secret, and when he grew old did a
hideous thing to keep alive . . . he wanted to live forever . . . Asenath would
succeed—one successful demonstration had taken place already.

As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression

of change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in
better shape than usual—harder, more normally developed, and without the
trace of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been
really active and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I
judged that Asenath’s force must have pushed him into unwonted channels of
motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a pitiable state; for he was
mumbling wild extravagances about his wife, about black magic, about old
Ephraim, and about some revelation which would convince even me. He
repeated names which I recognised from bygone browsings in forbidden
volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological
consistency—of 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—the 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 when 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 unrecognisably for a moment, while through
the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs,
muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically
different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.
Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept
over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such a freezing,
petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality—that my grasp of the wheel
grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong
friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some damnable,
utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.

I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my
companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him.
The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind, so I could
not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and
I knew that he must now be in that queerly energised 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 and diabolic in
them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I
had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman
Derby, was a stranger—an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.

He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his
voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than
I had ever known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether
changed—though vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling
something I could not quite place. There was, I thought, a trace of very
profound and very genuine irony in the timbre—not the flashy, meaninglessly
jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow “sophisticate”, which Derby had habitually
affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marvelled
at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.

“I hope you’ll forget my attack back there, Upton,” he was saying. “You know
what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I’m enormously
grateful, of course, for this lift home.

“And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my
wife—and about things in general. That’s what comes from overstudy in a field
like mine. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets
worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a
rest from now on—you probably won’t see me for some time, and you needn’t
blame Asenath for it.

“This trip was a bit queer, but it’s really very simple. There are certain Indian
relics in the north woods—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 back 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.

V.

The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more
and more in his new energised state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her
few callers. I had only one visit from Edward, when he called briefly in
Asenath’s car—duly reclaimed from wherever he had left it in Maine—to get
some books he had lent me. He was in his new state, and paused only long
enough for some evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothing to
discuss with me when in this condition—and I noticed that he did not even
trouble to give the old three-and-two signal when ringing the doorbell. As on
that evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not
explain; so that his swift departure was a prodigious relief.

In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent
college set talked knowingly of the matter—hinting at a meeting with a
notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from England, who had established
headquarters in New York. For my part I could not get that strange ride from
Maine out of my head. The transformation I had witnessed had affected me
profoundly, and I caught myself again and again trying to account for the
thing—and for the extreme horror it had inspired in me.
But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield
house. The voice seemed to be a woman’s, and some of the younger people
thought it sounded like Asenath’s. It was heard only at rare intervals, and
would sometimes be choked off as if by force. There was talk of an
investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the
streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances—
apologising for her recent absences 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 8:20 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 laid low and pretended to let her
do it, but I had to be on the watch. I could plan if I was careful, for she can’t
read my mind literally, or in detail. All she could read of my planning was a sort
of general mood of rebellion—and she always thought I was helpless. Never
thought I could get the best of her . . . but I had a spell or two that worked.”

Derby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.

“I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were
ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. They’re her kind—
Innsmouth people—and were hand and glove with her. I hope they’ll let me
alone—I 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 of the ride 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—I 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. . . . I 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, he, 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, but I know it
now. Her handwriting shews it when she’s 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 had control of my body?”

The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing, and when
he resumed his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the
asylum, but I would not be the one to send him there. Perhaps time and
freedom from Asenath would do its work. I could see that he would never wish
to dabble in morbid occultism again.
“I’ll tell you more later—I must have a long rest now. I’ll tell you something of
the forbidden horrors she led me into—something of the age-old horrors that
even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests
to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody
ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I’ve been
in it up to my neck, but that’s the end. Today I’d burn that damned
Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic.

“But she can’t get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I
can, and settle down at home. You’ll help me, I know, if I need help. Those
devilish servants, you know . . . and if people should get too inquisitive about
Asenath. You see, I can’t give them her address. . . . Then there are certain
groups of searchers—certain cults, you know—that might misunderstand our
breaking up . . . some of them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I
know you’ll stand by me if anything happens—even if I have to tell you a lot
that will shock you. . . .”

I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in
the morning he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements
for his moving back into the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time
in making the change. He did not call the next evening, but I saw him frequently
during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little as possible about strange and
unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derby house, and
the travels which Edward promised to take with my son and me the following
summer.

Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly
disturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in
connexion with the strange ménage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing
I did not like was what Derby’s banker let fall in an overexpansive mood at the
Miskatonic Club—about the cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses
and Abigail Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those
evil-faced servants were extorting some kind of tribute from him—yet he had
not mentioned the matter to me.

I wished that the summer—and my son’s Harvard vacation—would come, so

that we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as
rapidly as I had hoped he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his
occasional exhilaration, while his moods of fright and depression were
altogether too frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet
Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the
Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could
not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to
postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably
frightened. His father’s old butler—who was there with other reacquired
family 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.

VI.

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—Iä! 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 realised 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 restlessly about the library.

Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily
to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and
having an air of abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always
on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath
would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night,
during which he might eventually do himself harm.

I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the
physician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted
from the first questions were violent and pitiable—and that evening a closed
car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his
guardian and called on him twice weekly—almost weeping to hear his wild
shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases
as “I had to do it—I had to do it . . . it’ll get me . . . it’ll get me . . . down there .
. . down there in the dark. . . . Mother, mother! Dan! Save me . . . save me. . .
.”

How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say; but I tried my best
to be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his
servants to the Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What
to do about the Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and
collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it
momentarily untouched—telling the Derby housemaid 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 energised
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 old-time doorbell signal and stirred
such nebulous fears in me—and now he filled me with the same dim feeling of
blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.

He spoke affably of arrangements for release—and there was nothing for me

to do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I
felt that something was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were
horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a sane person—but was it
indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it—and where
was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined . . . or ought it to be extirpated
from the face of the earth? There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in
everything the creature said—the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling
mockery to certain words about the ‘early liberty earned by an especially close
confinement’. I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a
retreat.

All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had
happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward’s
face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all
efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up
to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close
to a nervous collapse—a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my
subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness
of mine could account for all the evidence.

VII.

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 before midnight. When that call was traced afterward it
was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half
a week from the housemaid’s day to be there. I shall only hint what was found
at that house—the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt,
the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily
used stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The
police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for
those sinister discharged servants—who have dropped out of sight amidst the
present furore. They speak of a ghoulish 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—Asenath—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—I 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? Iwill
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 St. 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,
plied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying
to keep to Edward’s old signal of three-and-two strokes.

Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door—
and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it
. . . was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such
evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he
escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his
return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge
and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he
was good old Edward again, and I would help him!

When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably
foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second
scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been
Edward’s, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time
to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.

The caller had on one of Edward’s overcoats—its bottom almost touching the
ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head
was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I
stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had
heard over the telephone—“glub . . . glub . . .”—and thrust at me a large,
closely written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the
morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seized this 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 putting me in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar.

“I knew what was coming—that’s why I snapped and had to go to the asylum.
Then it came—I found myself choked in the dark—in Asenath’s rotting carcass
down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must
be in my body at the sanitarium—permanently, for it was after Hallowmass,
and the sacrifice would work even without her being there—sane, and ready
for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, and in spite of
everything I clawed my way out.

“I’m too far gone to talk—I couldn’t manage to telephone—but I can still write.
I’ll get fixed up somehow and bring you this last word and warning. Kill that
fiendif 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, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental
work positively identified the skull as Asenath’s.
 OUT OF THE AEONS
By H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald (1933)

(Ms. found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D., curator of
the Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass.)

It is not likely that anyone in Boston—or any alert reader elsewhere—will ever
forget the strange affair of the Cabot Museum. The newspaper publicity given
to that hellish mummy, the antique and terrible rumours vaguely linked with
it, the morbid wave of interest and cult activities during 1932, and the frightful
fate of the two intruders on December 1st of that year, all combined to form
one of those classic mysteries which go down for generations as folklore and
become the nuclei of whole cycles of horrific speculation.

Everyone seems to realise, too, that something very vital and unutterably
hideous was suppressed in the public accounts of the culminant horrors. Those
first disquieting hints as to the condition of one of the two bodies were
dismissed and ignored too abruptly—nor were the singular modifications in
the mummy given the following-up which their news value would normally
prompt. It also struck people as queer that the mummy was never restored to
its case. In these days of expert taxidermy the excuse that its disintegrating
condition made exhibition impracticable seemed a peculiarly lame one.

As curator of the museum I am in a position to reveal all the suppressed facts,

but this I shall not do during my lifetime. There are things about the world and
universe which it is better for the majority not to know, and I have not
departed from the opinion in which all of us—museum staff, physicians,
reporters, and police—concurred at the period of the horror itself. At the same
time it seems proper that a matter of such overwhelming scientific and historic
importance should not remain wholly unrecorded—hence this account which
I have prepared for the benefit of serious students. I shall place it among
various papers to be examined after my death, leaving its fate to the discretion
of my executors. Certain threats and unusual events during the past weeks
have led me to believe that my life—as well as that of other museum officials—
is in some peril through the enmity of several widespread secret cults of
Asiatics, Polynesians, and heterogeneous mystical devotees; hence it is
possible that the work of the executors may not be long postponed.
[Executor’s note: Dr. Johnson died suddenly and rather mysteriously of heart-
failure on April 22,1933. Wentworth Moore, taxidermist of the museum,
disappeared around the middle of the preceding month. On February 18 of the
same year Dr. William Minot, who superintended a dissection connected with
the case, was stabbed in the back, dying the following day.]

The real beginning of the horror, I suppose, was in 1879—long before my term
as curator—when the museum acquired that ghastly, inexplicable mummy
from the Orient Shipping Company. Its very discovery was monstrous and
menacing, for it came from a crypt of unknown origin and fabulous antiquity
on a bit of land suddenly upheaved from the Pacific’s floor.

On May 11, 1878, Capt. Charles Weatherbee of the freighter Eridanus, bound
from Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, had sighted a new island
unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin. It projected quite
boldly out of the sea in the form of a truncated cone. A landing-party under
Capt. Weatherbee noted evidences of long submersion on the rugged slopes
which they climbed, while at the summit there were signs of recent
destruction, as by an earthquake. Among the scattered rubble were massive
stones of manifestly artificial shaping, and a little examination disclosed the
presence of some of that prehistoric Cyclopean masonry found on certain
Pacific islands and forming a perpetual archaeological puzzle.
Finally the sailors entered a massive stone crypt—judged to have been part of
a much larger edifice, and to have originally lain far underground—in one
corner of which the frightful mummy crouched. After a short period of virtual
panic, caused partly by certain carvings on the walls, the men were induced to
move the mummy to the ship, though it was only with fear and loathing that
they touched it. Close to the body, as if once thrust into its clothes, was a
cylinder of an unknown metal containing a roll of thin, bluish-white membrane
of equally unknown nature, inscribed with peculiar characters in a greyish,
indeterminable pigment. In the centre of the vast stone floor was a suggestion
of a trap-door, but the party lacked apparatus sufficiently powerful to move it.

The Cabot Museum, then newly established, saw the meagre reports of the
discovery and at once took steps to acquire the mummy and the cylinder.
Curator Pickman made a personal trip to Valparaiso and outfitted a schooner
to search for the crypt where the thing had been found, though meeting with
failure in this matter. At the recorded position of the island nothing but the
sea’s unbroken expanse could be discerned, and the seekers realised that the
same seismic forces which had suddenly thrust the island up had carried it
down again to the watery darkness where it had brooded for untold aeons.
The secret of that immovable trap-door would never be solved. The mummy
and the cylinder, however, remained—and the former was placed on
exhibition early in November, 1879, in the museum’s hall of mummies.

The Cabot Museum of Archaeology, which specialises in such remnants of

ancient and unknown civilisations as do not fall within the domain of art, is a
small and scarcely famous institution, though one of high standing in scientific
circles. It stands in the heart of Boston’s exclusive Beacon Hill district—in Mt.
Vernon Street, near Joy—housed in a former private mansion with an added
wing in the rear, and was a source of pride to its austere neighbours until the
recent terrible events brought it an undesirable notoriety.
The hall of mummies on the western side of the original mansion (which was
designed by Bulfinch and erected in 1819), on the second floor, is justly
esteemed by historians and anthropologists as harbouring the greatest
collection of its kind in America. Here may be found typical examples of
Egyptian embalming from the earliest Sakkarah specimens to the last Coptic
attempts of the eighth century; mummies of other cultures, including the
prehistoric Indian specimens recently found in the Aleutian Islands; agonised
Pompeian figures moulded in plaster from tragic hollows in the ruin-choking
ashes; naturally mummified bodies from mines and other excavations in all
parts of the earth—some surprised by their terrible entombment in the
grotesque postures caused by their last, tearing death-throes—everything, in
short, which any collection of the sort could well be expected to contain. In
1879, of course, it was much less ample than it is now; yet even then it was
remarkable. But that shocking thing from the primal Cyclopean crypt on an
ephemeral sea-spawned island was always its chief attraction and most
impenetrable mystery.

The mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast
in a peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like hands, had
its under jaw thrust far forward, while the shrivelled features bore an
expression of fright so hideous that few spectators could view them unmoved.
The eyes were closed, with lids clamped down tightly over eyeballs apparently
bulging and prominent. Bits of hair and beard remained, and the colour of the
whole was a sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and
half stony, forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who sought to
ascertain how it was embalmed. In places bits of its substance were eaten
away by time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of
unknown designs, still clung to the object.

Just what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly say. For
one thing, there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless antiquity and utter
alienage which affected one like a view from the brink of a monstrous abyss of
unplumbed blackness—but mostly it was the expression of crazed fear on the
puckered, prognathous, half-shielded face. Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman,
cosmic fright could not help communicating the emotion to the beholder
amidst a disquieting cloud of mystery and vain conjecture.

Among the discriminating few who frequented the Cabot Museum this relic 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 analysis, resembled nothing
known to linguists and palaeographers, and could not be deciphered despite
the transmission of photographic copies to every living expert in the given
field.

It is true that a few scholars, unusually versed in the literature of occultism and
magic, found vague resemblances between some of the hieroglyphs and
certain primal symbols described or cited in two or three very ancient, obscure,
and esoteric texts such as the Book of Eibon, reputed to descend from
forgotten Hyperborea; the Pnakotic fragments, alleged to be pre-human; and
the monstrous and forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.
None of these resemblances, however, was beyond dispute; and because of
the prevailing low estimation of occult studies, no effort was made to circulate
copies of the hieroglyphs among mystical specialists. Had such circulation
occurred at this early date, the later history of the case might have been very
different; indeed, a glance at the hieroglyphs by any reader of von Junzt’s
horrible Nameless Cults would have established a linkage of unmistakable
significance. At this period, however, the readers of that monstrous blasphemy
were exceedingly few; copies having been incredibly scarce in the interval
between the suppression of the original Düsseldorf 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 Château Faussesflammes, in Averoigne, France—brought the
museum prominently into the news columns. True to its “hustling” policy, the
Boston Pillar sent a Sunday feature writer to cover the incident and pad it with
an exaggerated general account of the institution itself; and this young man—
Stuart Reynolds by name—hit upon the nameless mummy as a potential
sensation far surpassing the recent acquisitions nominally forming his chief
assignment. A smattering of theosophical lore, and a fondness for the
speculations of such writers as Colonel Churchward and Lewis Spence
concerning lost continents and primal forgotten civilisations, made Reynolds
especially alert toward any aeonian relic like the unknown mummy.

At the museum the reporter made himself a nuisance through constant and
not always intelligent questionings and endless demands for the movement of
encased objects to permit photographs from unusual angles. In the basement
library room he pored endlessly over the strange metal cylinder and its
membraneous scroll, photographing them from every angle and securing
pictures of every bit of the weird hieroglyphed text. He likewise asked to see
all books with any bearing whatever on the subject of primal cultures and
sunken continents—sitting for three hours taking notes, and leaving only in
order to hasten to Cambridge for a sight (if permission were granted) of the
abhorred and forbidden Necronomicon at the Widener Library.
On April 5th the article appeared in the Sunday Pillar, smothered in
photographs of mummy, cylinder, and hieroglyphed scroll, and couched in the
peculiarly simpering, infantile style which the Pillar affects for the benefit of its
vast and mentally immature clientele. Full of inaccuracies, exaggerations, and
sensationalism, it was precisely the sort of thing to stir the brainless and fickle
interest of the herd—and as a result the once quiet museum began to be
swarmed with chattering and vacuously staring throngs such as its stately
corridors had never known before.

There were scholarly and intelligent visitors, too, despite the puerility of the
article—the pictures had spoken for themselves—and many persons of
mature attainments sometimes see the Pillar by accident. I recall one very
strange character who appeared during November—a dark, turbaned, and
bushily bearded man with a laboured, unnatural voice, curiously
expressionless face, clumsy hands covered with absurd white mittens, who
gave a squalid West End address and called himself “Swami Chandraputra”.
This fellow was unbelievably erudite in occult lore and seemed profoundly and
solemnly moved by the resemblance of the hieroglyphs on the scroll to certain
signs and symbols of a forgotten elder world about which he professed vast
intuitive knowledge.

By June, the fame of the mummy and scroll had leaked far beyond Boston, and
the museum had inquiries and requests for photographs from occultists and
students of arcana all over the world. This was not altogether pleasing to our
staff, since we are a scientific institution without sympathy for fantastic
dreamers; yet we answered all questions with civility. One result of these
catechisms was a highly learned article in The Occult Review by the famous
New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, in which was asserted the
complete identity of some of the odd geometrical designs on the iridescent
cylinder, and of several of the hieroglyphs on the membraneous scroll, with
certain ideographs of horrible significance (transcribed from primal monoliths
or from the secret rituals of hidden bands of esoteric students and devotees)
reproduced in the hellish and suppressed Black Book or Nameless Cults of von
Junzt.

De Marigny recalled the frightful death of von Junzt in 1840, a year after the
publication of his terrible volume at Düsseldorf, and commented on his blood-
curdling and partly suspected sources of information. Above all, he
emphasised the enormous relevance of the tales with which von Junzt linked
most of the monstrous ideographs he had reproduced. That these tales, in
which a cylinder and scroll were expressly mentioned, held a remarkable
suggestion of relationship to the things at the museum, no one could deny; yet
they were of such breath-taking extravagance—involving such unbelievable
sweeps of time and such fantastic anomalies of a forgotten elder world—that
one could much more easily admire than believe them.

Admire them the public certainly did, for copying in the press was universal.
Illustrated articles sprang up everywhere, telling or purporting to tell the
legends in the Black Book, expatiating on the horror of the mummy, comparing
the cylinder’s designs and the scroll’s hieroglyphs with the figures reproduced
by von Junzt, and indulging in the wildest, most sensational, and most
irrational theories and speculations. Attendance at the museum was trebled,
and the widespread nature of the interest was attested by the plethora of mail
on the subject—most of it inane and superfluous—received at the museum.
Apparently the mummy and its origin formed—for imaginative people—a
close rival to the depression as chief topic of 1931 and 1932. For my own part,
the principal effect of the furore was to make me read von Junzt’s monstrous
volume in the Golden Goblin edition—a perusal which left me dizzy and
nauseated, yet thankful that I had not seen the utter infamy of the
unexpurgated text.

III.
The archaic whispers reflected in the Black Book, and linked with designs and
symbols so closely akin to what the mysterious scroll and cylinder bore, were
indeed of a character to hold one spellbound and not a little awestruck.
Leaping an incredible gulf of time—behind all the civilisations, races, and lands
we know—they clustered round a vanished nation and a vanished continent
of the misty, fabulous dawn-years . . . that to which legend has given the name
of Mu, and which old tablets in the primal Naacal tongue speak of as flourishing
200,000 years ago, when Europe harboured only hybrid entities, and lost
Hyperborea knew the nameless worship of black amorphous Tsathoggua.

There was mention of a kingdom or province called K’naa in a very ancient land
where the first human people had found monstrous ruins left by those who
had dwelt there before—vague waves of unknown entities which had filtered
down from the stars and lived out their aeons on a forgotten, nascent world.
K’naa was a sacred place, since from its midst the bleak basalt cliffs of Mount
Yaddith-Gho soared starkly into the sky, topped by a gigantic fortress of
Cyclopean stone, infinitely older than mankind and built by the alien spawn of
the dark planet Yuggoth, which had colonised the earth before the birth of
terrestrial life.

The spawn of Yuggoth had perished aeons before, but had left behind them
one monstrous and terrible living thing which could never die—their hellish
god or patron daemon Ghatanothoa, which lowered and brooded eternally
though unseen in the crypts beneath that fortress on Yaddith-Gho. No human
creature had ever climbed 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 pre-human stronghold on its crest. Vast was the power of the
priests of Ghatanothoa, since upon them alone depended the preservation of
K’naa and of all the land of Mu from the petrifying emergence of Ghatanothoa
out of its unknown burrows.

There were in the land an hundred priests of the Dark God, under Imash-Mo
the High-Priest, who walked before King Thabon at the Nath-feast, and stood
proudly whilst the King knelt at the Dhoric shrine. Each priest had a marble
house, a chest of gold, two hundred slaves, and an hundred concubines,
besides immunity from civil law and the power of life and death over all in
K’naa save the priests of the King. Yet in spite of these defenders there was
ever a fear in the land lest Ghatanothoa slither up from the depths and lurch
viciously down the mountain to bring horror and petrification to mankind. In
the latter years the priests forbade men even to guess or imagine what its
frightful aspect might be.

It was in the Year of the Red Moon (estimated as B. C. 173,148 by von Junzt)
that a human being first dared to breathe defiance against Ghatanothoa and
its nameless menace. This bold heretic was T’yog, High-Priest of Shub-
Niggurath and guardian of the copper temple of the Goat with a Thousand
Young. T’yog had thought long on the powers of the various gods, and had had
strange dreams and revelations touching the life of this and earlier worlds. In
the end he felt sure that the gods friendly to man could be arrayed against the
hostile gods, and believed that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig
the Serpent-god, were ready to take sides with man against the tyranny and
presumption of Ghatanothoa.

Inspired by the Mother Goddess, T’yog wrote down a strange formula in the
hieratic Naacal of his order, which he believed would keep the possessor
immune from the Dark God’s petrifying power. With this protection, he
reflected, it might be possible for a bold man to climb the dreaded basalt cliffs
and—first of all human beings—enter the Cyclopean fortress beneath which
Ghatanothoa reputedly brooded. Face to face with the god, and with the
power of Shub-Niggurath and her sons on his side, T’yog believed that he might
be able to bring it to terms and at last deliver mankind from its brooding
menace. With humanity freed through his efforts, there would be no limits to
the honours he might claim. All the honours of the priests of Ghatanothoa
would perforce be transferred to him; and even kingship or godhood might
conceivably be within his reach.

So T’yog wrote his protective formula on a scroll of pthagon membrane

(according to von Junzt, the inner skin of the extinct yakith-lizard) and enclosed
it in a carven cylinder of lagh metal—the metal brought by the Elder Ones from
Yuggoth, and found in no mine of earth. This charm, carried in his robe, would
make him proof against the menace of Ghatanothoa—it would even restore
the Dark God’s petrified victims if that monstrous entity should ever emerge
and begin its devastations. Thus he proposed to go up the shunned and man-
untrodden mountain, invade the alien-angled citadel of Cyclopean stone, and
confront the shocking devil-entity in its lair. Of what would follow, he could
not even guess; but the hope of being mankind’s saviour lent strength to his
will.

He had, however, reckoned without the jealousy and self-interest of

Ghatanothoa’s pampered priests. No sooner did they hear of his plan than—
fearful for their prestige and privilege in case the Daemon-God should be
dethroned—they set up a frantic clamour against the so-called sacrilege,
crying that no man might prevail against Ghatanothoa, and that any effort to
seek it out would merely provoke it to a hellish onslaught against mankind
which no spell or priestcraft could hope to avert. With those cries they hoped
to turn the public mind against T’yog; yet such was the people’s yearning for
freedom from Ghatanothoa, and such their confidence in the skill and zeal of
T’yog, that all the protestations came to naught. Even the King, usually a
puppet of the priests, refused to forbid T’yog’s daring pilgrimage.

It was then that the priests of Ghatanothoa did by stealth what they could not
do openly. One night Imash-Mo, the High-Priest, stole to T’yog in his temple
chamber and took from his sleeping form the metal cylinder; silently drawing
out the potent scroll and putting in its place another scroll of great similitude,
yet varied enough to have no power against any god or daemon. When the
cylinder was slipped back into the sleeper’s cloak Imash-Mo was content, for
he knew T’yog was little likely to study that cylinder’s contents again. Thinking
himself protected by the true scroll, the heretic would march up the forbidden
mountain and into the Evil Presence—and Ghatanothoa, unchecked by any
magic, would take care of the rest.

It would no longer be needful for Ghatanothoa’s priests to preach against the

defiance. Let T’yog go his way and meet his doom. And secretly, the priests
would always cherish the stolen scroll—the true and potent charm—handing
it down from one High-Priest to another for use in any dim future when it
might be needful to contravene the Devil-God’s will. So the rest of the night
Imash-Mo slept in great peace, with the true scroll in a new cylinder fashioned
for its harbourage.

It was dawn on the Day of the Sky-Flames (nomenclature undefined by von

Junzt) that T’yog, amidst the prayers and chanting of the people and with King
Thabon’s blessing on his head, started up the dreaded mountain with a staff
of tlath-wood in his right hand. Within his robe was the cylinder holding what
he thought to be the true charm—for he had indeed failed to find out the
imposture. Nor did he see any irony in the prayers which Imash-Mo and the
other priests of Ghatanothoa intoned for his safety and success.

All that morning the people stood and watched as T’yog’s dwindling form
struggled up the shunned basalt slope hitherto alien to men’s footsteps, and
many stayed watching long after he had vanished where a perilous ledge led
round to the mountain’s hidden side. That night a few sensitive dreamers
thought they heard a faint tremor convulsing the hated peak; though most
ridiculed them for the statement. Next day vast crowds watched the mountain
and prayed, and wondered how soon T’yog would return. And so the next day,
and the next. For weeks they hoped and waited, and then they wept. Nor did
anyone ever see T’yog, who would have saved mankind from fears, again.

Thereafter men shuddered at T’yog’s presumption, and tried not to think of

the punishment his impiety had met. And the priests of Ghatanothoa smiled
to those who might resent the god’s will or challenge its right to the sacrifices.
In later years the ruse of Imash-Mo became known to the people; yet the
knowledge availed not to change the general feeling that Ghatanothoa were
better left alone. None ever dared to defy it again. And so the ages rolled on,
and King succeeded King, and High-Priest succeeded High-Priest, and nations
rose and decayed, and lands rose above the sea and returned into the sea. And
with many millennia decay fell upon K’naa—till at last on a hideous day of
storm and thunder, terrific rumbling, and mountain-high waves, all the land of
Mu sank into the sea forever.

Yet down the later aeons thin streams of ancient secrets trickled. In distant
lands there met together grey-faced fugitives who had survived the sea-fiend’s
rage, and strange skies drank the smoke of altars reared to vanished gods and
daemons. Though none knew to what bottomless deep the sacred peak and
Cyclopean fortress of dreaded Ghatanothoa had sunk, there were still those
who mumbled its name and offered to it nameless sacrifices lest it bubble up
through leagues of ocean and shamble among men spreading horror and
petrifaction.

Around the scattered priests grew the rudiments of a dark and secret cult—
secret because the people of the new lands had other gods and devils, and
thought only evil of elder and alien ones—and within that cult many hideous
things were done, and many strange objects cherished. It was whispered that
a certain line of elusive priests still harboured the true charm against
Ghatanothoa which Imash-Mo stole from the sleeping T’yog; though none
remained who could read or understand the cryptic syllables, or who could
even guess in what part of the world the lost K’naa, the dreaded peak of
Yaddith-Gho, and the titan fortress of the Devil-God had lain.

Though it flourished chiefly in those Pacific regions around which Mu itself had
once stretched, there were rumours of the hidden and detested cult of
Ghatanothoa in ill-fated Atlantis, and on the abhorred plateau of Leng. Von
Junzt implied its presence in the fabled subterrene kingdom of K’n-yan, and
gave clear evidence that it had penetrated Egypt, Chaldaea, Persia, China, the
forgotten Semite empires of Africa, and Mexico and Peru in the New World.
That it had a strong connexion with the witchcraft movement in Europe,
against which the bulls of popes were vainly directed, he more than strongly
hinted. The West, however, was never favourable to its growth; and public
indignation—aroused by glimpses of hideous rites and nameless sacrifices—
wholly stamped out many of its branches. In the end it became a hunted,
doubly furtive underground affair—yet never could its nucleus be quite
exterminated. It always survived somehow, chiefly in the Far East and on the
Pacific Islands, where its teachings became merged into the esoteric lore of
the Polynesian Areoi.

Von Junzt gave subtle and disquieting hints of actual contact with the cult; so
that as I read I shuddered at what was rumoured about his death. He spoke of
the growth of certain ideas regarding the appearance of the Devil-God—a
creature which no human being (unless it were the too-daring T’yog, who had
never returned) had ever seen—and contrasted this habit of speculation with
the taboo prevailing in ancient Mu against any attempt to imagine what the
horror looked like. There was a peculiar fearfulness 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
Düsseldorf 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 trap-door could be opened.

IV.

What I read in the Black Book formed a fiendishly apt preparation for the news
items and closer events which began to force themselves upon me in the
spring of 1932. I can scarcely recall just when the increasingly frequent reports
of police action against the odd and fantastical religious cults in the Orient and
elsewhere commenced to impress me; but by May or June I realised that there
was, all over the world, a surprising and unwonted burst of activity on the part
of bizarre, furtive, and esoteric mystical organisations ordinarily quiescent and
seldom heard from.

It is not likely that I would have connected these reports with either the hints
of von Junzt or the popular furore over the mummy and cylinder in the
museum, but for certain significant syllables and persistent resemblances—
sensationally dwelt upon by the press—in the rites and speeches of the various
secret celebrants brought to public attention. As it was, I could not help
remarking with disquiet the frequent recurrence of a name—in various corrupt
forms—which seemed to constitute a focal point of all the cult worship, and
which was obviously regarded with a singular mixture of reverence and terror.
Some of the forms quoted were G’tanta, Tanotah, Than-Tha, Gatan, and Ktan-
Tah—and it did not require the suggestions of my now numerous occultist
correspondents to make me see in these variants a hideous and suggestive
kinship to the monstrous name rendered by von Junzt as Ghatanothoa.

There were other disquieting features, too. Again and again the reports cited
vague, awestruck references to a “true scroll”—something on which
tremendous consequences seemed to hinge, and which was mentioned as
being in the custody of a certain “Nagob”, whoever and whatever he might be.
Likewise, there was an insistent repetition of a name which sounded like Tog,
Tiok, Yog, Zob, or Yob, and which my more and more excited consciousness
involuntarily linked with the name of the hapless heretic T’yog as given in the
Black Book. This name was usually uttered in connexion with such cryptical
phrases as “It is none other than he”, “He had looked upon its face”, “He knows
all, though he can neither see nor feel”, “He has brought the memory down
through the aeons”, “The true scroll will release him”, “Nagob has the true
scroll”, “He can tell where to find it”.

Something very queer was undoubtedly in the air, and I did not wonder when
my occultist correspondents, as well as the sensational Sunday papers, began
to connect the new abnormal stirrings with the legends of Mu on the one hand,
and with the frightful mummy’s recent exploitation on the other hand. The
widespread articles in the first wave of press publicity, with their insistent
linkage of the mummy, cylinder, and scroll with the tale in the Black Book, and
their crazily fantastic speculations about the whole matter, might very well
have roused the latent fanaticism in hundreds of those furtive groups of exotic
devotees with which our complex world abounds. Nor did the papers cease
adding fuel to the flames—for the stories on the cult-stirrings were even wilder
than the earlier series of yarns.

As the summer drew on, attendants noticed a curious new element among the
throngs of visitors which—after a lull following the first burst of publicity—
were again drawn to the museum by the second furore. More and more
frequently there were persons of strange and exotic aspect—swarthy Asiatics,
long-haired nondescripts, and bearded brown men who seemed unused to
European clothes—who would invariably inquire for the hall of mummies and
would subsequently be found staring at the hideous Pacific specimen in a
veritable ecstasy of fascination. Some quiet, sinister undercurrent in this flood
of eccentric foreigners seemed to impress all the guards, and I myself was far
from undisturbed. I could not help thinking of the prevailing cult-stirrings
among just such exotics as these—and the connexion of those stirrings with
myths all too close to the frightful mummy and its cylinder scroll.

At times I was half tempted to withdraw the mummy from exhibition—

especially when an attendant told me that he had several times glimpsed
strangers making odd obeisances before it, and had overheard sing-song
mutterings which sounded like chants or rituals addressed to it at hours when
the visiting throngs were somewhat thinned. One of the guards acquired a
queer nervous hallucination about the petrified horror in the lone glass case,
alleging that he could see from day to day certain vague, subtle, and infinitely
slight changes in the frantic flexion of the bony claws, and in the fear-crazed
expression of the leathery face. He could not get rid of the loathsome idea that
those horrible, bulging eyes were about to pop suddenly open.

It was early in September, when the curious crowds had lessened and the hall
of mummies was sometimes vacant, that the attempt to get at the mummy by
cutting the glass of its case was made. The culprit, a swarthy Polynesian, was
spied in time by a guard, and was overpowered before any damage occurred.
Upon investigation the fellow turned out to be an Hawaiian notorious for his
activity in certain underground religious cults, and having a considerable police
record in connexion with abnormal and inhuman rites and sacrifices. Some of
the papers found in his room were highly puzzling and disturbing, including
many sheets covered with hieroglyphs closely resembling those on the scroll
at the museum and in the Black Book of von Junzt; but regarding these things
he could not be prevailed upon to speak.
Scarcely a week after this incident, another attempt to get at the mummy—
this time by tampering with the lock of his case—resulted in a second arrest.
The offender, a Cingalese, had as long and unsavoury a record of loathsome
cult activities as the Hawaiian had possessed, and displayed a kindred
unwillingness to talk to the police. What made this case doubly and darkly
interesting was that a guard had noticed this man several times before, and
had heard him addressing to the mummy a peculiar chant containing
unmistakable repetitions of the word “T’yog”. As a result of this affair I doubled
the guards in the hall of mummies, and ordered them never to leave the now
notorious specimen out of sight, even for a moment.

As may well be imagined, the press made much of these two incidents,
reviewing its talk of primal and fabulous Mu, and claiming boldly that the
hideous mummy was none other than the daring heretic T’yog, petrified by
something he had seen in the pre-human citadel he had invaded, and
preserved intact through 175,000 years of our planet’s turbulent history. That
the strange devotees represented cults descended from Mu, and that they
were worshipping the mummy—or perhaps even seeking to awaken it to life
by spells and incantations—was emphasised and reiterated in the most
sensational fashion.

Writers exploited the insistence of the old legends that the brain of
Ghatanothoa’s petrified victims remained conscious and unaffected—a point
which served as a basis for the wildest and most improbable speculations. The
mention of a “true scroll” also received due attention—it being the prevailing
popular theory that T’yog’s stolen charm against Ghatanothoa was
somewhere in existence, and that cult-members were trying to bring it into
contact with T’yog himself for some purpose of their own. One result of this
exploitation was that a third wave of gaping visitors began flooding the
museum and staring at the hellish mummy which served as a nucleus for the
whole strange and disturbing affair.
It was among this wave of spectators—many of whom made repeated visits—
that talk of the mummy’s vaguely changing aspect first began to be
widespread. I suppose—despite the disturbing notion of the nervous guard
some months before—that the museum’s personnel was too well used to the
constant sight of odd shapes to pay close attention to details; in any case, it
was the excited whispers of visitors which at length aroused the guards to the
subtle mutation which was apparently in progress. Almost simultaneously the
press got hold of it—with blatant results which can well be imagined.

Naturally, I gave the matter my most careful observation, and by the middle of
October decided that a definite disintegration of the mummy was under way.
Through some chemical or physical influence in the air, the half-stony, half-
leathery fibres seemed to be gradually relaxing, causing distinct variations in
the angles of the limbs and in certain details of the fear-twisted facial
expression. After a half-century of perfect preservation this was a highly
disconcerting development, and I had the museum’s taxidermist, Dr. Moore,
go carefully over the gruesome object several times. He reported a general
relaxation and softening, and gave the thing two or three astringent sprayings,
but did not dare to attempt anything drastic lest there be a sudden crumbling
and accelerated decay.

The effect of all this upon the gaping crowds was curious. Heretofore each new
sensation sprung by the press had brought fresh waves of staring and
whispering visitors, but now—though the papers blathered endlessly about
the mummy’s changes—the public seemed to have acquired a definite sense
of fear which outranked even its morbid curiosity. People seemed to feel that
a sinister aura hovered over the museum, and from a high peak the attendance
fell to a level distinctly below normal. This lessened attendance gave added
prominence to the stream of freakish foreigners who continued to infest the
place, and whose numbers seemed in no way diminished.
On November 18th a Peruvian of Indian blood suffered a strange hysterical or
epileptic seizure in front of the mummy, afterward shrieking from his hospital
cot, “It tried to open its eyes!—T’yog tried to open his eyes and stare at me!”
I was by this time on the point of removing the object from exhibition, but
permitted myself to be overruled at a meeting of our very conservative
directors. However, I could see that the museum was beginning to acquire an
unholy reputation in its austere and quiet neighbourhood. After this incident I
gave instructions that no one be allowed to pause before the monstrous Pacific
relic for more than a few minutes at a time.

It was on November 24th, after the museum’s five o’clock closing, that one of
the guards noticed a minute opening of the mummy’s eyes. The phenomenon
was very slight—nothing but a thin crescent of cornea being visible in either
eye—but it was none the less of the highest interest. Dr. Moore, having been
summoned hastily, was about to study the exposed bits of eyeball with a
magnifier when his handling of the mummy caused the leathery lids to fall
tightly shut again. All gentle efforts to open them failed, and the taxidermist
did not dare to apply drastic measures. When he notified me of all this by
telephone I felt a sense of mounting dread hard to reconcile with the
apparently simple event concerned. For a moment I could share the popular
impression that some evil, amorphous blight from unplumbed deeps of time
and space hung murkily and menacingly over the museum.

Two nights later a sullen Filipino was trying to secrete himself in the museum
at closing time. Arrested and taken to the station, he refused even to give his
name, and was detained as a suspicious person. Meanwhile the strict
surveillance of the mummy seemed to discourage the odd hordes of foreigners
from haunting it. At least, the number of exotic visitors distinctly fell off after
the enforcement of the “move along” order.

It was during the early morning hours of Thursday, December 1st, that a
terrible climax developed. At about one o’clock horrible screams of mortal
fright and agony were heard issuing from the museum, and a series of frantic
telephone calls from neighbours brought to the scene quickly and
simultaneously a squad of police and several museum officials, including
myself. Some of the policemen surrounded the building while others, with the
officials, cautiously entered. In the main corridor we found the night
watchman strangled to death—a bit of East Indian hemp still knotted around
his neck—and realised that despite all precautions some darkly evil intruder or
intruders had gained access to the place. Now, however, a tomb-like silence
enfolded everything and we almost feared to advance upstairs to the fateful
wing where we knew the core of the trouble must lurk. We felt a bit more
steadied after flooding the building with light from the central switches in the
corridor, and finally crept reluctantly up the curving staircase and through a
lofty archway to the hall of mummies.

V.

It is from this point onward that reports of the hideous case have been
censored—for we have all agreed that no good can be accomplished by a
public knowledge of those terrestrial conditions implied by the further
developments. I have said that we flooded the whole building with light before
our ascent. Now beneath the beams that beat down on the glistening cases
and their gruesome contents, we saw outspread a mute horror whose baffling
details testified to happenings utterly beyond our comprehension. There were
two intruders—who we afterward agreed must have hidden in the building
before closing time—but they would never be executed for the watchman’s
murder. They had already paid the penalty.

One was a Burmese and the other a Fiji-Islander—both known to the police for
their share in frightful and repulsive cult activities. They were dead, and the
more we examined them the more utterly monstrous and unnamable we felt
their manner of death to be. On both faces was a more wholly frantic and
inhuman look of fright than even the oldest policeman had ever seen before;
yet in the state of the two bodies there were vast and significant differences.

The Burmese lay collapsed close to the nameless mummy’s case, from which
a square of glass had been neatly cut. In his right hand was a scroll of bluish
membrane which I at once saw was covered with greyish hieroglyphs—almost
a duplicate of the scroll in the strange cylinder in the library downstairs, though
later study brought out subtle differences. There was no mark of violence on
the body, and in view of the desperate, agonised expression on the twisted
face we could only conclude that the man died of sheer fright.

It was the closely adjacent Fijian, though, that gave us the profoundest shock.
One of the policemen was the first to feel of him, and the cry of fright he
emitted added another shudder to that neighbourhood’s night of terror. We
ought to have known from the lethal greyness of the once-black, fear-twisted
face, and of the bony hands—one of which still clutched an electric torch—
that something was hideously wrong; yet every one of us was unprepared for
what that officer’s hesitant touch disclosed. Even now I can think of it only with
a paroxysm of dread and repulsion. To be brief—the hapless invader, who less
than an hour before had been a sturdy living Melanesian bent on unknown
evils, was now a rigid, ash-grey figure of stony, leathery petrification, in every
respect identical with the crouching, aeon-old blasphemy in the violated glass
case.

Yet that was not the worst. Crowning all other horrors, and indeed seizing our
shocked attention before we turned to the bodies on the floor, was the state
of the frightful mummy. No longer could its changes be called vague and
subtle, for it had now made radical shifts of posture. It had sagged and
slumped with a curious loss of rigidity; its bony claws had sunk until they no
longer even partly covered its leathery, fear-crazed face; and—God help us!—
its hellish bulging eyes had popped wide open, and seemed to be staring
directly at the two intruders who had died of fright or worse.
That ghastly, dead-fish stare was hideously mesmerising, and it haunted us all
the time we were examining the bodies of the invaders. Its effect on our nerves
was damnably queer, for we somehow felt a curious rigidity creeping over us
and hampering our simplest motions—a rigidity which later vanished very
oddly when we passed the hieroglyphed scroll around for inspection. Every
now and then I felt my gaze drawn irresistibly toward those horrible bulging
eyes in the case, and when I returned to study them after viewing the bodies I
thought I detected something very singular about the glassy surface of the dark
and marvellously well-preserved pupils. The more I looked, the more
fascinated I became; and at last I went down to the office—despite that
strange stiffness in my limbs—and brought up a strong multiple magnifying
glass. With this I commenced a very close and careful survey of the fishy pupils,
while the others crowded expectantly around.

I had always been rather sceptical of the theory that scenes and objects
become photographed on the retina of the eye in cases of death or coma; yet
no sooner did I look through the lens than I realised the presence of some sort
of image other than the room’s reflection in the glassy, bulging optics of this
nameless spawn of the aeons. Certainly, there was a dimly outlined scene on
the age-old retinal surface, and I could not doubt that it formed the last thing
on which those eyes had looked in life—countless millennia ago. It seemed to
be steadily fading, and I fumbled with the magnifier in order to shift another
lens into place. Yet it must have been accurate and clear-cut, even if
infinitesimally small, when—in response to some evil spell or act connected
with their visit—it had confronted those intruders who were frightened to
death. With the extra lens I could make out many details formerly invisible,
and the awed group around me hung on the flood of words with which I tried
to tell what I saw.

For here, in the year 1932, a man in the city of Boston was looking on
something which belonged to an unknown and utterly alien world—a world
that vanished from existence and normal memory aeons ago. There was a vast
room—a chamber of Cyclopean masonry—and I seemed to be viewing it from
one of its corners. On the walls were carvings so hideous that even in this
imperfect image their stark blasphemousness and bestiality sickened me. I
could not believe that the carvers of these things were human, or that they
had ever seen human beings when they shaped the frightful outlines which
leered at the beholder. In the centre of the chamber was a colossal trap-door
of stone, pushed upward to permit the emergence of some object from below.
The object should have been clearly visible—indeed, must have been when the
eyes first opened before the fear-stricken intruders—though under my lenses
it was merely a monstrous blur.

As it happened, I was studying the right eye only when I brought the extra
magnification into play. A moment later I wished fervently that my search had
ended there. As it was, however, the zeal of discovery and revelation was upon
me, and I shifted my powerful lenses to the mummy’s left eye in the hope of
finding the image less faded on that retina. My hands, trembling with
excitement and unnaturally stiff from some obscure influence, were slow in
bringing the magnifier into focus, but a moment later I realised that the image
was less faded than in the other eye. I saw in a morbid flash of half-distinctness
the insufferable thing which was welling up through the prodigious trap-door
in that Cyclopean, immemorially archaic crypt of a lost world—and fell fainting
with an inarticulate shriek of which I am not even ashamed.

By the time I revived there was no distinct image of anything in either eye of
the monstrous mummy. Sergeant Keefe of the police looked with my glass, for
I could not bring myself to face that abnormal entity again. And I thanked all
the powers of the cosmos that I had not looked earlier than I did. It took all my
resolution, and a great deal of solicitation, to make me relate what I had
glimpsed in the hideous moment of revelation. Indeed, I could not speak till
we had all adjourned to the office below, out of sight of that daemoniac thing
which could not be. For I had begun to harbour the most terrible and fantastic
notions about the mummy and its glassy, bulging eyes—that it had a kind of
hellish consciousness, seeing all that occurred before it and trying vainly to
communicate some frightful message from the gulfs of time. That meant
madness—but at last I thought I might be better off if I told what I had half
seen.

After all, it was not a long thing to tell. Oozing and surging up out of that
yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable
behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of its original to kill
with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at
my command. I might call it gigantic—tentacled—proboscidian—octopus-
eyed—semi-amorphous—plastic—partly squamous and partly rugose—ugh!
But nothing I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-
human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that
forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words
the associated mental image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I
told of the sight to the men around me in the office, I had to fight to preserve
the consciousness I had regained.

Nor were my hearers much less moved. Not a man spoke above a whisper for
a full quarter-hour, and there were awed, half-furtive references to the
frightful lore in the Black Book, to the recent newspaper tales of cult-stirrings,
and to the sinister events in the museum. Ghatanothoa . . . Even its smallest
perfect image could petrify—T’yog—the false scroll—he never came back—
the true scroll which could fully or partly undo the petrification—did it
survive?—the hellish cults—the phrases overheard—“It is none other than
he”—“He had looked upon its face”—“He knows all, though he can neither see
nor feel”—“He had brought the memory down through the aeons”—“The true
scroll will release him”—“Nagob has the true scroll”—“He can tell where to
find it.” Only the healing greyness of the dawn brought us back to sanity; a
sanity which made of that glimpse of mine a closed topic—something not to
be explained or thought of again.
We gave out only partial reports to the press, and later on coöperated with the
papers in making other suppressions. For example, when the autopsy shewed
the brain and several other internal organs of the petrified Fijian to be fresh
and unpetrified, though hermetically sealed by the petrification of the exterior
flesh—an anomaly about which physicians are still guardedly and bewilderedly
debating—we did not wish a furore to be started. We knew too well what the
yellow journals, remembering what was said of the intact-brained and still-
conscious state of Ghatanothoa’s stony-leathery victims, would make of this
detail.

As matters stood, they pointed out that the man who had held the
hieroglyphed scroll—and who had evidently thrust it at the mummy through
the opening in the case—was not petrified, while the man who had not held it
was. When they demanded that we make certain experiments—applying the
scroll both to the stony-leathery body of the Fijian and to the mummy itself—
we indignantly refused to abet such superstitious notions. Of course, the
mummy was withdrawn from public view and transferred to the museum
laboratory awaiting a really scientific examination before some suitable
medical authority. Remembering past events, we kept it under a strict guard;
but even so, an attempt was made to enter the museum at 2:25 a.m. on
December 5th. Prompt working of the burglar alarm frustrated the design,
though unfortunately the criminal or criminals escaped.

That no hint of anything further ever reached the public, I am profoundly

thankful. I wish devoutly that there were nothing more to tell. There will, of
course, be leaks, and if anything happens to me I do not know what my
executors will do with this manuscript; but at least the case will not be painfully
fresh in the multitude’s memory when the revelation comes. Besides, no one
will believe the facts when they are finally told. That is the curious thing about
the multitude. When their yellow press makes hints, they are ready to swallow
anything; but when a stupendous and abnormal revelation is actually made,
they laugh it aside as a lie. For the sake of general sanity it is probably better
so.
I have said that a scientific examination of the frightful mummy was planned.
This took place on December 8th, exactly a week after the hideous culmination
of events, and was conducted by the eminent Dr. William Minot, in
conjunction with Wentworth Moore, Sc.D., taxidermist of the museum. Dr.
Minot had witnessed the autopsy of the oddly petrified Fijian the week before.
There were also present Messrs. Lawrence Cabot and Dudley Saltonstall of the
museum’s trustees, Drs. Mason, Wells, and Carver of the museum staff, two
representatives of the press, and myself. During the week the condition of the
hideous specimen had not visibly changed, though some relaxation of its fibres
caused the position of the glassy, open eyes to shift slightly from time to time.
All of the staff dreaded to look at the thing—for its suggestion of quiet,
conscious watching had become intolerable—and it was only with an effort
that I could bring myself to attend the examination.

Dr. Minot arrived shortly after 1:00 p.m., and within a few minutes began his
survey of the mummy. Considerable disintegration took place under his hands,
and in view of this—and of what we told him concerning the gradual relaxation
of the specimen since the first of October—he decided that a thorough
dissection ought to be made before the substance was further impaired. The
proper instruments being present in the laboratory equipment, he began at
once; exclaiming aloud at the odd, fibrous nature of the grey, mummified
substance.

But his exclamation was still louder when he made the first deep incision, for
out of that cut there slowly trickled a thick crimson stream whose nature—
despite the infinite ages dividing this hellish mummy’s lifetime from the
present—was utterly unmistakable. A few more deft strokes revealed various
organs in astonishing degrees of non-petrified preservation—all, indeed, being
intact except where injuries to the petrified exterior had brought about
malformation or destruction. The resemblance of this condition to that found
in the fright-killed Fiji-Islander was so strong that the eminent physician
gasped in bewilderment. The perfection of those ghastly bulging eyes was
uncanny, and their exact state with respect to petrification was very difficult
to determine.

At 3:30 p.m. the brain-case was opened—and ten minutes later our stunned
group took an oath of secrecy which only such guarded documents as this
manuscript will ever modify. Even the two reporters were glad to confirm the
silence. For the opening had revealed a pulsing, living brain.
 THE TREE ON THE HILL
By H. P. Lovecraft and Duane W. Rimel (1934)

I.

Southeast of Hampden, near the tortuous Salmon River gorge, is a range of

steep, rocky hills which have defied all efforts of sturdy homesteaders. The
canyons are too deep and the slopes too precipitous to encourage anything
save seasonal livestock grazing. The last time I visited Hampden the region—
known as Hell’s Acres—was part of the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve. There
are no roads linking this inaccessible locality with the outside world, and the
hillfolk will tell you that it is indeed a spot transplanted from his Satanic
Majesty’s front yard. There is a local superstition that the area is haunted—
but by what or by whom no one seems to know. Natives will not venture within
its mysterious depths, for they believe the stories handed down to them by
the Nez Perce Indians, who have shunned the region for untold generations,
because, according to them, it is a playground of certain giant devils from the
Outside. These suggestive tales made me very curious.

My first excursion—and my last, thank God!—into those hills occurred while

Constantine Theunis and I were living in Hampden the summer of 1938. He
was writing a treatise on Egyptian mythology, and I found myself alone much
of the time, despite the fact that we shared a modest cabin on Beacon Street,
within sight of the infamous Pirate House, built by Exer Jones over sixty years
ago.

The morning of June 23rd found me walking in those oddly shaped hills, which
had, since seven o’clock, seemed very ordinary indeed. I must have been about
seven miles south of Hampden before I noticed anything unusual. I was
climbing a grassy ridge overlooking a particularly deep canyon, when I came
upon an area totally devoid of the usual bunch-grass and greaseweed. It
extended southward, over numerous hills and valleys. At first I thought the
spot had been burned over the previous fall, but upon examining the turf, I
found no signs of a blaze. The nearby slopes and ravines looked terribly scarred
and seared, as if some gigantic torch had blasted them, wiping away all
vegetation. And yet there was no evidence of fire. . . .

I moved on over rich, black soil in which no grass flourished. As I headed for
the approximate center of this desolate area, I began to notice a strange
silence. There were no larks, no rabbits, and even the insects seemed to have
deserted the place. I gained the summit of a lofty knoll and tried to guess at
the size of that bleak, inexplicable region. Then I saw the lone tree.

It stood on a hill somewhat higher than its companions, and attracted the eye
because it was so utterly unexpected. I had seen no trees for miles: thorn and
hackberry bushes clustered the shallower ravines, but there had been no
mature trees. Strange to find one standing on the crest of the hill.

I crossed two steep canyons before I came to it; and a surprise awaited me. It
was not a pine tree, nor a fir tree, nor a hackberry tree. I had never, in all my
life, seen one to compare with it—and I never have to this day, for which I am
eternally thankful!

More than anything it resembled an oak. It had a huge, twisted trunk, fully a
yard in diameter, and the large limbs began spreading outward scarcely seven
feet from the ground. The leaves were round, and curiously alike in size and
design. It might have been a tree painted on a canvas, but I will swear that it
was real. I shall always know that it was real, despite what Theunis said later.

I recall that I glanced at the sun and judged the time to be about ten o’clock
a.m., although I did not look at my watch. The day was becoming warm, and I
sat for a while in the welcome shade of the huge tree. Then I regarded the rank
grass that flourished beneath it—another singular phenomenon when I
remembered the bleak terrain through which I had passed. A wild maze of hills,
ravines, and bluffs hemmed me in on all sides, although the rise on which I sat
was rather higher than any other within miles. I looked far to the east—and I
jumped to my feet, startled and amazed. Shimmering through a blue haze of
distance were the Bitterroot Mountains! There is no other range of snow-
capped peaks within three hundred miles of Hampden; and I knew—at this
altitude—that I shouldn’t be seeing them at all. For several minutes I gazed at
the marvel; then I became drowsy. I lay in the rank grass, beneath the tree. I
unstrapped my camera, took off my hat, and relaxed, staring skyward through
the green leaves. I closed my eyes.

Then a curious phenomenon began to assail me—a vague, cloudy sort of

vision—glimpsing or day-dreaming seemingly without relevance to anything
familiar. I thought I saw a great temple by a sea of ooze, where three suns
gleamed in a pale red sky. The vast tomb, or temple, was an anomalous color—
a nameless blue-violet shade. Large beasts flew in the cloudy sky, and I seemed
to hear the pounding of their scaly wings. I went nearer the stone temple, and
a huge doorway loomed in front of me. Within that portal were swirling
shadows that seemed to dart and leer and try to snatch me inside that awful
darkness. I thought I saw three flaming eyes in the shifting void of a doorway,
and I screamed with mortal fear. In that noisome depth, I knew, lurked utter
destruction—a living hell even worse than death. I screamed again. The vision
faded.

I saw the round leaves and the sane earthly sky. I struggled to rise. I was
trembling; cold perspiration beaded my brow. I had a mad impulse to flee; run
insanely from that sinister tree on the hill—but I checked the absurd intuition
and sat down, trying to collect my senses. Never had I dreamed anything so
realistic; so horrifying. What had caused the vision? I had been reading several
of Theunis’ tomes on ancient Egypt. . . . I mopped my forehead, and decided
that it was time for lunch. But I did not feel like eating.
Then I had an inspiration. I would take a few snapshots of the tree, for Theunis.
They might shock him out of his habitual air of unconcern. Perhaps I would tell
him about the dream. . . . Opening my camera, I took half a dozen shots of the
tree, and every aspect of the landscape as seen from the tree. Also, I included
one of the gleaming, snow-crested peaks. I might want to return, and these
photos would help. . . .

Folding the camera, I returned to my cushion of soft grass. Had that spot
beneath the tree a certain alien enchantment? I know that I was reluctant to
leave it. . . .

I gazed upward at the curious round leaves. I closed my eyes. A breeze stirred
the branches, and their whispered music lulled me into tranquil oblivion. And
suddenly I saw again the pale red sky and the three suns. The land of three
shadows! Again the great temple came into view. I seemed to be floating on
the air—a disembodied spirit exploring the wonders of a mad, multi-
dimensional world! The temple’s oddly angled cornices frightened me, and I
knew that this place was one that no man on earth had ever seen in his wildest
dreams.

Again the vast doorway yawned before me; and I was sucked within that black,
writhing cloud. I seemed to be staring at space unlimited. I saw a void beyond
my vocabulary to describe; a dark, bottomless gulf teeming with nameless
shapes and entities—things of madness and delirium, as tenuous as a mist
from Shamballah.

My soul shrank. I was terribly afraid. I screamed and screamed, and felt that I
would soon go mad. Then in my dream I ran and ran in a fever of utter terror,
but I did not know what I was running from. . . . I left that hideous temple and
that hellish void, yet I knew I must, barring some miracle, return. . . .
At last my eyes flew open. I was not beneath the tree. I was sprawled on a
rocky slope, my clothing torn and disordered. My hands were bleeding. I stood
up, pain stabbing through me. I recognized the spot—the ridge where I had
first seen the blasted area! I must have walked miles—unconscious! The tree
was not in sight, and I was glad. . . . Even the knees of my trousers were torn,
as if I had crawled part of the way. . . .

I glanced at the sun. Late afternoon! Where had I been? I snatched out my
watch. It had stopped at 10:34. . . .

II.

“So you have the snapshots?” Theunis drawled. I met his gray eyes across the
breakfast table. Three days had slipped by since my return from Hell’s Acres. I
had told him about the dream beneath the tree, and he had laughed.

“Yes,” I replied. “They came last night. Haven’t had a chance to open them yet.
Give ’em a good, careful study—if they aren’t all failures. Perhaps you’ll change
your mind.”

Theunis smiled; sipped his coffee. I gave him the unopened envelope and he
quickly broke the seal and withdrew the pictures. He glanced at the first one,
and the smile faded from his leonine face. He crushed out his cigarette.

“My God, man! Look at this!”

I seized the glossy rectangle. It was the first picture of the tree, taken at a
distance of fifty feet or so. The cause of Theunis’ excitement escaped me.
There it was, standing boldly on the hill, while below it grew the jungle of grass
where I had lain. In the distance were my snow-capped mountains!

“There you are,” I cried. “The proof of my story—”

“Look at it!” Theunis snapped. “The shadows—there are three for every rock,
bush, and tree!”

“He was right. . . . Below the tree, spread in fanlike incongruity, lay three
overlapping shadows. Suddenly I realized that the picture held an abnormal
and inconsistent element. The leaves on the thing were too lush for the work
of sane nature, while the trunk was bulged and knotted in the most abhorrent
shapes. Theunis dropped the picture on the table.

“There is something wrong,” I muttered. “The tree I saw didn’t look as

repulsive as that—”

“Are you sure?” Theunis grated. “The fact is, you may have seen many things
not recorded on this film.”

“It shows more than I saw!”

“That’s the point. There is something damnably out of place in this landscape;
something I can’t understand. The tree seems to suggest a thought—beyond
my grasp. . . . It is too misty; too uncertain; too unreal to be natural!” He rapped
nervous fingers on the table. He snatched the remaining films and shuffled
through them, rapidly.
I reached for the snapshot he had dropped, and sensed a touch of bizarre
uncertainty and strangeness as my eyes absorbed its every detail. The flowers
and weeds pointed at varying angles, while some of the grass grew in the most
bewildering fashion. The tree seemed too veiled and clouded to be readily
distinguished, but I noted the huge limbs and the half-bent flower stems that
were ready to fall over, yet did not fall. And the many, overlapping shadows. .
. . They were, altogether, very disquieting shadows—too long or short when
compared to the stems they fell below to give one a feeling of comfortable
normality. The landscape hadn’t shocked me the day of my visit. . . . There was
a dark familiarity and mocking suggestion in it; something tangible, yet distant
as the stars beyond the galaxy.

Theunis came back to earth. “Did you mention three suns in your dreaming
orgy?”

I nodded, frankly puzzled. Then it dawned on me. My fingers trembled slightly

as I stared at the picture again. My dream! Of course—

“The others are just like it,” Theunis said. “That same uncertainness; that
suggestion. I should be able to catch the mood of the thing; see it in its real
light, but it is too. . . . Perhaps later I shall find out, if I look at it long enough.”

We sat in silence for some time. A thought came to me, suddenly, prompted
by a strange, inexplicable longing to visit the tree again. “Let’s make an
excursion. I think I can take you there in half a day.”

“You’d better stay away,” replied Theunis, thoughtfully. “I doubt if you could
find the place again if you wanted to.”
“Nonsense,” I replied. “Surely, with these photos to guide us—”

“Did you see any familiar landmarks in them?”

His observation was uncanny. After looking through the remaining snaps
carefully, I had to admit that there were none.

Theunis muttered under his breath and drew viciously on his cigarette. “A
perfectly normal—or nearly so—picture of a spot apparently dropped from
nowhere. Seeing mountains at this low altitude is preposterous . . . but wait!”

He sprang from the chair as a hunted animal and raced from the room. I could
hear him moving about in our makeshift library, cursing volubly. Before long
he reappeared with an old, leather-bound volume. Theunis opened it
reverently, and peered over the odd characters.

“What do you call that?” I inquired.

“This is an early English translation of the Chronicle of Nath, written by Rudolf

Yergler, a German mystic and alchemist who borrowed some of his lore from
Hermes Trismegistus, the ancient Egyptian sorcerer. There is a passage here
that might interest you—might make you understand why this business is even
further from the natural than you suspect. Listen.”

“So in the year of the Black Goat there came unto Nath a shadow that should
not be on Earth, and that had no form known to the eyes of Earth. And it fed
on the souls of men; they that it gnawed being lured and blinded with dreams
till the horror and the endless night lay upon them. Nor did they see that which
gnawed them; for the shadow took false shapes that men know or dream of,
and only freedom seemed waiting in the Land of the Three Suns. But it was
told by priests of the Old Book that he who could see the shadow’s true shape,
and live after the seeing, might shun its doom and send it back to the starless
gulf of its spawning. This none could do save through the Gem; wherefore did
Ka-Nefer the High-Priest keep that gem sacred in the temple. And when it was
lost with Phrenes, he who braved the horror and was never seen more, there
was weeping in Nath. Yet did the Shadow depart sated at last, nor shall it
hunger again till the cycles roll back to the year of the Black Goat.”

Theunis paused while I stared, bewildered. Finally he spoke. “Now, Single, I

suppose you can guess how all this links up. There is no need of going deep
into the primal lore behind this business, but I may as well tell you that
according to the old legends this is the so-called ‘Year of the Black Goat’—
when certain horrors from the fathomless Outside are supposed to visit the
earth and do infinite harm. We don’t know how they’ll be manifest, but there’s
reason to think that strange mirages and hallucinations will be mixed up in the
matter. I don’t like the thing you’ve run up against—the story or the pictures.
It may be pretty bad, and I warn you to look out. But first I must try to do what
old Yergler says—to see if I can glimpse the matter as it is. Fortunately the old
Gem he mentions has been rediscovered—I know where I can get at it. We
must use it on the photographs and see what we see.

“It’s more or less like a lens or prism, though one can’t take photographs with
it. Someone of peculiar sensitiveness might look through and sketch what he
sees. There’s a bit of danger, and the looker may have his consciousness
shaken a trifle; for the real shape of the shadow isn’t pleasant and doesn’t
belong on this earth. But it would be a lot more dangerous not to do anything
about it. Meanwhile, if you value your life and sanity, keep away from that
hill—and from the thing you think is a tree on it.”

I was more bewildered than ever. “How can there be organized beings from
the Outside in our midst?” I cried. “How do we know that such things exist?”
“You reason in terms of this tiny earth,” Theunis said. “Surely you don’t think
that the world is a rule for measuring the universe. There are entities we never
dream of floating under our very noses. Modern science is thrusting back the
borderland of the unknown and proving that the mystics were not so far off
the track—”

Suddenly I knew that I did not want to look at the picture again; I wanted to
destroy it. I wanted to run from it. Theunis was suggesting something beyond.
. . . A trembling, cosmic fear gripped me and drew me away from the hideous
picture, for I was afraid I would recognize some object in it. . . .

I glanced at my friend. He was poring over the ancient book, a strange

expression on his face. He sat up straight. “Let’s call the thing off for today. I’m
tired of this endless guessing and wondering. I must get the loan of the gem
from the museum where it is, and do what is to be done.”

“As you say,” I replied. “Will you have to go to Croydon?”

He nodded.

“Then we’ll both go home,” I said decisively.

III.

I need not chronicle the events of the fortnight that followed. With me they
formed a constant and enervating struggle between a mad longing to return
to the cryptic tree of dreams and freedom, and a frenzied dread of that
selfsame thing and all connected with it. That I did not return is perhaps less a
matter of my own will than a matter of pure chance. Meanwhile I knew that
Theunis was desperately active in some investigation of the strangest nature—
something which included a mysterious motor trip and a return under
circumstances of the greatest secrecy. By hints over the telephone I was made
to understand that he had somewhere borrowed the obscure and primal
object mentioned in the ancient volume as “The Gem,” and that he was busy
devising a means of applying it to the photographs I had left with him. He spoke
fragmentarily of “refraction,” “polarization,” and “unknown angles of space
and time,” and indicated that he was building a kind of box or camera obscura
for the study of the curious snapshots with the gem’s aid.

It was on the sixteenth day that I received the startling message from the
hospital in Croydon. Theunis was there, and wanted to see me at once. He had
suffered some odd sort of seizure; being found prone and unconscious by
friends who found their way into his house after hearing certain cries of mortal
agony and fear. Though still weak and helpless, he had now regained his senses
and seemed frantic to tell me something and have me perform certain
important duties. This much the hospital informed me over the wire; and
within half an hour I was at my friend’s bedside, marveling at the inroads which
worry and tension had made on his features in so brief a time. His first act was
to move away the nurses in order to speak in utter confidence.

“Single—I saw it!” His voice was strained and husky. “You must destroy them
all—those pictures. I sent it back by seeing it, but the pictures had better go.
That tree will never be seen on the hill again—at least, I hope not—till
thousands of eons bring back the Year of the Black Goat. You are safe now—
mankind is safe.” He paused, breathing heavily, and continued.

“Take the Gem out of the apparatus and put it in the safe—you know the
combination. It must go back where it came from, for there’s a time when it
may be needed to save the world. They won’t let me leave here yet, but I can
rest if I know it’s safe. Don’t look through the box as it is—it would fix you as
it’s fixed me. And burn those damned photographs . . . the one in the box and
the others. . . . .” But Theunis was exhausted now, and the nurses advanced
and motioned me away as he leaned back and closed his eyes.

In another half-hour I was at his house and looking curiously at the long black
box on the library table beside the overturned chair. Scattered papers blew
about in a breeze from the open window, and close to the box I recognized
with a queer sensation the envelope of pictures I had taken. It required only a
moment for me to examine the box and detach at one end my earliest picture
of the tree, and at the other end a strange bit of amber-colored crystal, cut in
devious angles impossible to classify. The touch of the glass fragment seemed
curiously warm and electric, and I could scarcely bear to put it out of sight in
Theunis’ wall safe. The snapshot I handled with a disconcerting mixture of
emotions. Even after I had replaced it in the envelope with the rest I had a
morbid longing to save it and gloat over it and rush out and up the hill toward
its original. Peculiar line-arrangements sprang out of its details to assault and
puzzle my memory . . . pictures behind pictures . . . secrets lurking in half-
familiar shapes. . . . But a saner contrary instinct, operating at the same time,
gave me the vigor and avidity of unplaceable fear as I hastily kindled a fire in
the grate and watched the problematic envelope burn to ashes. Somehow I
felt that the earth had been purged of a horror on whose brink I had trembled,
and which was none the less monstrous because I did not know what it was.

Of the source of Theunis’ terrific shock I could form no coherent guess, nor did
I dare to think too closely about it. It is notable that I did not at any time have
the least impulse to look through the box before removing the gem and
photograph. What was shown in the picture by the antique crystal’s lens or
prism-like power was not, I felt curiously certain, anything that a normal brain
ought to be called upon to face. Whatever it was, I had myself been close to
it—had been completely under the spell of its allurement—as it brooded on
that remote hill in the form of a tree and an unfamiliar landscape. And I did
not wish to know what I had so narrowly escaped.
Would that my ignorance might have remained complete! I could sleep better
at night. As it was, my eye was arrested before I left the room by the pile of
scattered papers rustling on the table beside the black box. All but one were
blank, but that one bore a crude drawing in pencil. Suddenly recalling what
Theunis had once said about sketching the horror revealed by the gem, I strove
to turn away; but sheer curiosity defeated my sane design. Looking again
almost furtively, I observed the nervous haste of the strokes, and the
unfinished edge left by the sketcher’s terrified seizure. Then, in a burst of
perverse boldness, I looked squarely at the dark and forbidden design—and
fell in a faint.

I shall never describe fully what I saw. After a time I regained my senses, thrust
the sheet into the dying fire, and staggered out through the quiet streets to
my home. I thanked God that I had not looked through the crystal at the
photograph, and prayed fervently that I might forget the drawing’s terrible
hint of what Theunis had beheld. Since then I have never been quite the same.
Even the fairest scenes have seemed to hold some vague, ambiguous hint of
the nameless blasphemies which may underlie them and form their
masquerading essence. And yet the sketch was so slight—so little indicative of
all that Theunis, to judge from his guarded accounts later on, must have
discerned!

Only a few basic elements of the landscape were in the thing. For the most
part a cloudy, exotic-looking vapor dominated the view. Every object that
might have been familiar was seen to be part of something vague and
unknown and altogether un-terrestrial—something infinitely vaster than any
human eye could grasp, and infinitely alien, monstrous, and hideous as
guessed from the fragment within range.

Where I had, in the landscape itself, seen the twisted, half-sentient tree, there
was here visible only a gnarled, terrible hand or talon with fingers or feelers
shockingly distended and evidently groping toward something on the ground
or in the spectator’s direction. And squarely below the writhing, bloated digits
I thought I saw an outline in the grass where a man had lain. But the sketch
was hasty, and I could not be sure.
 THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME
By H. P. Lovecraft (1935)

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 July 17–18, 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, a final
abandonment of all 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. Mercifully 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 definitive
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, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of
Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after
my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts
of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of
that fateful night. I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think
he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at
leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue
could hope to convey. He can do as he thinks best with this account—shewing
it, with suitable comment, to 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 lurk 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 at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my
graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic 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 K., 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, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was
quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of
several hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because
they were so unprecedented—must have formed premonitory symptoms. My
head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that
someone 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 shewed no sign
of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at
27 Crane St. and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes
opened and I began to speak, but before long the doctors 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 or of my past, though for some
reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed
strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were
altogether unfamiliar.

Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily
and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had
laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was
barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious
archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. Of the latter one
in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the youngest of
the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase
began to have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United
States—and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it
reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange
Arkham patient of 1908.

Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-

education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general.
Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for
some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw that my attempts to
conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager for
information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had 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 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 symptom 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 everyone I met, as if I
were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea
of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of
distance was oddly widespread and persistent. My own family formed no
exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me
with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping
the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she
ever consent to see me even after my return to normalcy 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 I caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial
expression of the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.

I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may
glean all 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 aroused 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 shewing signs of disappointment. Later in that
year I spent weeks alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent
exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia—black
labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.

My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation,

as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my
own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was
phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by glancing over it
as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures
in an instant was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly
reports of my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I
seemed to have taken care to minimise displays of this faculty.

Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and
scholars suspected of connexion 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
consultation 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 reopened my long-closed house in Crane St. 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 anyone 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 mirrors, 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, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid
till noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark,
curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that
the lights were last seen. At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in
darkness, but with the stranger’s motor still at the curb. By four o’clock the
motor was certainly gone. It was at six 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 table-
top were scratches shewing 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 every remaining scrap of paper on
which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my
breathing very peculiar, but after an hypodermic injection it became more
regular.

At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like face
began to shew 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 after noon—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 that 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. 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
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 realised 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 eternity 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 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. Certain of 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 been an
intruding force from unknown regions, and that my own personality had
suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful speculations
concerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had
held my body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body’s late
tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons,
papers, and magazines. Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to
harmonise 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 non-typical 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 daemoniac-
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 beginning of man’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
with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an
utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and
later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and
anthropological knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and
with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of the rightful
consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable
dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted
out. And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own—even in some
of the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their significantly
typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous
familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too
morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific
mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house before the
second change.

Another thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the

somewhat greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the
typical nightmares was afforded to persons not visited with well-defined
amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less—some so
primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal
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 un-human 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 utterly beyond sane belief? Such
were a few of the formless 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 savour 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 it down and analyse it, instead
of vainly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct
according to the best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice of
such physicians as had studied me during my possession by the other
personality.

My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract
matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and
inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my
own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably
abhorrent. When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in
quiet grey or blue clothing I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain
this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as
possible, and was always shaved at the barber’s.

It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with
the fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such
correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint
on my memory. I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound
and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some
purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion.
Then came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate
efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and
spatial pattern.

The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I
would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone
groinings 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 megalithic type,
with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses
which rested upon them. There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast
pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what seemed to be writing
materials—oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips.
Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above.
On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and
inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods. The windows
were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach
and peer out them, I could see from where I was the 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 into the sky
for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and
never-opened trap-doors, 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 two hundred feet wide. They differed greatly
in aspect, but few were less than five hundred feet square or a thousand feet
high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several
thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey,
steamy heavens. They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of
them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the
building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have
scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and
wide cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion,
but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details.

In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far
above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique
nature, and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built
of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward
their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows
or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower
buildings—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 unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at
large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were
larger and more vivid blossoms of almost 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 skies 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 recognise, I felt I must be in the earth’s southern
hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn. The far horizon was always steamy
and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree-ferns,
calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic
frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would
be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.

By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings

over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads
through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks,
and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me. I
saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent stone 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 strown 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 suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and
there its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.

III.

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, the 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, I felt I must do something. It was then
that I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling
that I might thereby objectivise 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 savoured of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my
own pseudo-memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming
revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on the 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 un-
human.

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 recognised human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and
unmistakably akin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams—
characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew or
was just on the brink of recalling. To complete my black confusion, my
librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of
consultation of the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been
made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still
am ignorant of three of the languages involved.

Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological

and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination
whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me—
the fact that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge
could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into
these primitive fables, I could not even guess, but the pictures had been there.
Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. Cases of
amnesia no doubt created the general myth-pattern—but afterward the
fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and
coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early
tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was it not
natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to
become coloured and moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my
secondary state? A few of the myths had significant connexions with other
cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindoo tales
involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern
theosophists.

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 three
hundred 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 with other galaxies and
universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its
humanly accepted sense.

But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a
queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had
lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated,
was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time.
It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the
earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the
past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of
every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of
prophets, including those in human mythology.

In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of
earth’s annals—histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been
or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their
languages, and their psychologies. With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the
Great Race chose from every era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and
processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past,
secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognised 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; entering the organism’s brain and setting up therein
its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of
the displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process was set up.
The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then
pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore; learning as quickly
as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed
information and techniques.

Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer’s age and body,
would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it
occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners.
Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into
the future had brought back records of that language. If the mind came from
a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever
machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a
musical instrument. The Great Race’s members were immense rugose cones
ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick,
distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or
scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs,
and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to
their vast ten-foot bases.

When the captive mind’s amazement and resentment had worn off, and when
(assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race’s) it
had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study
its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approximating
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 boat-like 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 sad special type of captive whose privileges
were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent
exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members
of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction.
Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the
longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life—especially among those
superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection
of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in
later history—including mankind’s.

As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind had

learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that
which had started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more
it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would
return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged. Only when one
or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration
impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had—like those of the
death-escapers—to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the
captive mind—like the dying permanent exiles—had to end its days in the form
and past age of the Great Race.
This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race—
a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely
concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the
Great Race was very slight—largely because of the tremendous penalties
attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund.
Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the
offending minds in their new future bodies—and sometimes forced re-
exchanges 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 the kind (said the old myths) that mankind had learned what it had
concerning the Great Race. Of all things surviving physically and directly from
that aeon-distant world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in
far places and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic
Manuscripts.

Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most
fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories
that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-
shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds
recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare
times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. There probably never
was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints.
In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was
suggested—a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons
from the days of the Great Race.

And meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned
to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of
exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years
and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental
heritage had come—for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily
form. The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had
looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life;
and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house
them—the cone-shaped things 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, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of
the tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of
the fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my phenomena
readily explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to dark studies
during the amnesia—and then I read the forbidden legends and met the
members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material
for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory.
As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me,
but laid at my door by librarians—I might easily have picked up a smattering
of the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were
doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterward
woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation
with known cult-leaders, but never succeeded in establishing the right
connexions.
At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to
worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant
folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present.
Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and
familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state.
When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves
with the creatures of their household myths—the fabulous invaders supposed
to displace men’s minds—and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge
which they thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. Then
when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and
thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers.
Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth-
pattern.

Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to

supersede all others in my mind—largely because of the greater weakness of
any rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and
anthropologists gradually agreed with me. The more I reflected, the more
convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a really effective
bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me. Suppose I
did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of.
Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories?
These, too, were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state.
Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual
significance.

Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even

though the visions (rather than the abstract impressions) steadily became
more frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake
regular work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to practical use by
accepting an instructorship in psychology at the university. My old chair of
political economy had long been adequately filled—besides which, methods
of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at
this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present
professorship, and we worked together a great deal.

IV.

I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré 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 rumours
regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumours 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
tremendous 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, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish
globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged
along its central circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey
stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled
eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was
fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through
expansion and contraction.

Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their

appearance—for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what
one has known only human beings to do. These objects moved intelligently
around 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 on 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.

Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and
corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the
vast roads in gigantic boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they
seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment. Individual
differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to be
under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical
variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not
only from the majority, but very largely from one another. They wrote a great
deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters—never
the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our
own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the
general mass of the entities.

All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied
consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal; floating freely
about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until
August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say
harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract though infinitely terrible
association of my previously noted body-loathing with the scenes of my
visions. For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down
at myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors
in the strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the
great tables—whose height could not be under ten feet—from a level not
below that of their surfaces.

And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and
greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed
nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my head
lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and
gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone
ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of
Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.

Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these

visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among
the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves
and writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green
tentacles that hung down from my head. Snatches of what I read and wrote
would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worlds and
other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There
were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in
forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences
which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being.
And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of
today has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the
hieroglyphs; which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines,
and which was evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly
unlike any found in human languages. Other volumes were in other unknown
tongues learned in the same queer way. A very few were in languages I knew.
Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records and forming separate
collections, aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down
a history of my own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute and
meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had
mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.

I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old
myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me
were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent
exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my
age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other
strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd
language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar
system.

There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live
incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million
years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-
headed, 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 A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed
brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; 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 100,000 years before the squat, yellow
Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of
the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; 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 A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of
vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official
of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII’s time named Pierre-
Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000;
and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and
dizzying marvels I learned from them.
I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or
discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human
knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I
marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to
history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and
trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the
speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect
on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty
beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race
would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the
earth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time
and space—to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable
entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically
to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.

Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age

which I was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of increased
library and travel opportunities—for the Great Race’s central archives. The
archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city’s centre, which
I came to know well through frequent labours 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 rustless metal of greyish
hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great
Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs. These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular
vaults—like closed, locked shelves—wrought of the same rustless metal and
fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a
specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section
devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races
immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.

But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the
merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments
were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very
imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I
seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a
prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid
travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and
explorations of some of the vast dark windowless ruins from which the Great
Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea-voyages in enormous,
many-decked boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in
closed, projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion. Beyond
the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far
continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who
would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost
minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant
green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and
usually displayed signs of volcanic forces.

Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’s
mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while
food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk
floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the
seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser,
archaic prototypes of many forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs,
labyrinthodonts, rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar
through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could
discern.
The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and
crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst 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 pseudo-memories.

The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than

150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the
Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving—
or even scientifically known—line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a
peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as
much 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 semi-fluid 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—but of other and
incomprehensible senses (not, however, well utilisable 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 quietly disposed of as soon as their

defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence
of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms.
The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as
before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in
time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind
from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its
unfamiliar tenement.

The Great Race seemed to form a single loosely knit nation or league, with
major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The
political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism,
with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small
governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational
and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties
among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were
generally reared by their parents.

Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most

marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were
concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic,
unspecialised 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 scanty, 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 motivations. Warfare, largely civil for the last
few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian and octopodic
invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred 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 subterrene levels.

This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken
suggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which
bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common
shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great
Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and
with that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener
minds ahead en masse in time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other
things presented by dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly
shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it—or perhaps all allusions had for
some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints
were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred
to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more
sharply observant captive minds.
According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible
elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through
space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and
three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago. They were only
partly material—as we understand matter—and their type of consciousness
and media of perception differed wholly 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 aërial 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 for ever—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; fresh rifts caused by that selfsame geologic
change which had choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the
number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered
entities.

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 about 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 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 batterings 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 Str.,

Pilbarra, W. Australia,
18 May, 1934.

Prof. N. W. Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30, E. 41st Str.,
N. Y. 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 3 × 2 × 2 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. They were peculiar curves, just like what the blacks had tried to
describe. I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks, some nearly buried
in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile’s 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 10 or 12 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 with them. Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the
Journal of the American Psychological Society, and in time happened to
mention the stones. He was enormously interested, and became quite excited
when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the stones and 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 civilisation 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 these 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 coöperate in such work if you—or organisations
known to you—can furnish the funds. I can get together a dozen miners for
the heavy digging—the blacks 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 4 days by motor tractor—
which we’d need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of
Warburton’s path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could
float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra—but all that
can be talked over later. Roughly, the stones lie at a point about 22° 3′ 14″
South Latitude, 125° 0′ 39″ East Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the
desert conditions are trying. Any expedition had better be made in winter—
June or July or August. 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.

Professors 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 of sufficiently light draught to get up the river to
that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and scientific
fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might
seem to be in or near its original situation.

Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had
a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal,
down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how
the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I
detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were
given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant,
and intelligent—and his knowledge of psychology led him into many long
discussions with my son and me.

Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length

our party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On
Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of
utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this
actual site of the elder world behind the legends—a terror of course abetted
by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me
with unabated force.

It was on Monday, June 3, 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 aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to

different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale
outlines—either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results
were virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed
some significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced
by another equally insubstantial—a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand.
One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and
disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with
something which I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer
remember. There was a terrible pseudo-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
some 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 11th, when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious hillocks
with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came
upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet
encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away
the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing
the moonlight with my electric torch. Unlike the other very large rocks, this
one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or concave surface. It seemed,
too, to be of a dark basaltic substance wholly dissimilar to the granite and
sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.

Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly
unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I
fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was
something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with
the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. It was one of the blocks of that
basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear—the tall,
windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien Things that
festered in earth’s nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces
the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.

I remained awake all that 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 wind 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 feeling—
in view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my
experience would raise—which impels me to make this record. My son—a
trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my
whole case—shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.

First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know
them. On the night of July 17–18, after a windy day, I retired early but could
not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange
feeling regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical
nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one person—an Australian miner
named Tupper—as I left our precincts. The moon, slightly past full, shone from
a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance
which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind,
nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and
others who did not sleep through the night. The Australian last 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 Prof. 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 Prof.
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 earnestly urged a halt
in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak—for I
mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a
possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things either untrue or
irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes—not
even my son, whose concern for my health was very 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 July 20, 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 on 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, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I
plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half-
shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and
forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous
waste began to oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking
of my maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and
of the present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven
stones.

And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and more

assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought
of some of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from
the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar.
Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while
another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.

The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like
frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with
fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that
each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of
pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too
well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. At moments I
fancied I saw those omniscient conical horrors moving about at their
accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them
in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms
and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal;
the endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads 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 so far seen, 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 realised that there was some utterly unprecedented
quality about these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite
without parallel, but something in the sand-worn 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 these blocks were closely related—parts of one vast
decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come
upon a mass of masonry in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is
true, but none the less existing in a very definite sense.

Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there
clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret
varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design. After a while I
could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the designs
which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The
perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and
unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with
octagonal blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms
opening off on the right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined
planes would have wound down to still lower depths.

I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in
them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level
should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading
upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the long subterrene
passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me?
How did I know that the room of machines, and the rightward-leading tunnel
to the central archives, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that
there would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very
bottom, four levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world,
I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.

Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air
trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre of the huge heap.
Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil
moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean
masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of
nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but
one thing—a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the
surface.

My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground

huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born.
Then thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories
tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What primal,
inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I
be on the brink of uncovering? It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for
more than curiosity and scientific zeal was driving me on and working against
my growing fear.

I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling

fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought
I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then
another, till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness contrasted
oddly with the desert’s 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 desert’s 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
blackness.
I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with
baffling hints and images was my mind, that all objective matters seemed
withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even
fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at me.
Eventually I reached a level floor strown 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
on 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 kicked 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 torchlight slowly and
carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water
seemed to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious
incrustations which I could not explain. In places the masonry was very loose
and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons more this primal, hidden
edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth’s heavings.
But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-
crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the
complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination.
That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not
beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain
myths, they had become embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow
coming to my notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my
subconscious mind. But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in
which each line and spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had
dreamt 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 realised with hideous and instinctive
certainty. What in God’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 eld in the millions of years since the time of
my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked
all its 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, a captive mind
from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain
pictures on the blank spaces of the walls? Would the passage at the second
level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked and traversable?
In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity—a half-plastic denizen of
the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million
years in the future—had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.

I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive
these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time,
I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air.
Shuddering, I realised 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
daemoniac dream—or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and
everything came to me through a kind of haze—sometimes only
intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness,
bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all
blighted with the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting
had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching
almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. It was all the ultimate apex
of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One
thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the
monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if
the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was something
wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself,
vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.

Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered—
often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every
stone and corner of that daemoniac 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 post-human 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 age-
stained walls—some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my
dreams. Since this was a subterrene house-connecting highway, there were no
archways save when the route led through the lower levels of various
buildings. At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look
down well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice
only did I find any radical changes from what I had dreamed of—and in one of
these cases I could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.
I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a
hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great
windowless ruined towers whose alien basalt masonry bespoke a whispered
and horrible origin. This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet
across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here
free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading
upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams
had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great
Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines. In the
dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously
guarded. Now it lay open—black and yawning, and giving forth a current of
cool, damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I
would not permit myself to think.

Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached
a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain,
and I climbed up over it, passing through a vast empty space where my
torchlight could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the
cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far
from the archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.

I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stones, 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 wriggled over the mound of
debris—my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within my mouth—
I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to
form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and
picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held,
intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with
arches—still in a marvellous 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
below 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 sub-classes of volumes.
Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed
metal cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I
dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on
the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs,
though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly
unusual. The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known
to me, and I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the
book within. The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in
area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough
cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived
through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the
text—symbols utterly 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 of aeon-long
death and silence. 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 recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.
I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors
flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling
brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand
twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the
intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe
with a combination lock. Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How
any dream—or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught
me a detail so minute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain
to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole
experience—this shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this
monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what only dreams and
scraps of myth could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason? Probably it
was my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner moments—that I
was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile
hallucination.

Eventually I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline.
For some shadowy reason I tried 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, and 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 to the deafening clatter of toppling objects.
It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so
violently.

Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling
me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it
ought to be—there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been
disturbed not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the
apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of
regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting. When I brought
the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw—for
the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines
of composite impressions—impressions that went in threes, each slightly over
a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in
advance of the other four.

These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two

directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were of
course very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there was an
element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one
end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long
before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp
wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.

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) I 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 tiptoe racing and was standing still, staring at
a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of
almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had
sprung open. My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described—so utter
and insistent was the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up, at a row
near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to
best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the
locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would
grip the torch between my teeth as I had in other places where both hands
were needed. Above all, I must make no noise. How to get down what I wished
to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable fastener
in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the
lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not
the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak—and that my
hand could work it properly.

Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to
climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had expected, the
opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the difficultly 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 dreaming—the implications
would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What
tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings
were a dream. The sense of reality was hideous—and again becomes so as I
recall the scene.

At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared
fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in
prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as
hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not
actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal memory.
I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I
temporised 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 screwed up 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 almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I

kept silence. 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 around 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 underground. Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm,
I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-
giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions
as I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of
apprehension which I had not felt on the downward journey.

I dreaded having to re-pass through that 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 possible
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 blacks, 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-cased 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.
It may have been only my imagination. If so, what followed has a grim irony—
since, save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have
happened.

As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand

and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no
idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to
the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above. I hardly knew
it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast
blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in
scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the
great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden
dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling
avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern
air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.

I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment

of consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the
corridor amidst the clangour—case and torch still with me. Then, just as I
approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came.
For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a
repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This
time there was no doubt about it—and what was worse, it came from a point
not behind but ahead of me.
Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through
the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien
sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether
blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not merely a cool, damp draught, but a
violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable
gulf whence the obscene whistling came.

There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with
that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and
seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly
from the spaces behind and beneath. Though in my rear, that wind had the
odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it acted like a noose
or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a
great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I
recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as
I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors
must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over
and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake.
Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes
bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.

I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked
by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my
descent, the leap across had been easy—but could I clear the gap as readily
when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the
metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought
of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities
which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.

My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure
memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous
whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling
my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became
aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me—tides of abomination
surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.

Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—
and ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled
and plunged upward over the incline’s debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I
saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I
possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniac 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 phantasmagoric 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 vapour clutched and picked at me, and that
eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of
babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.

Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in ruins,

but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and
mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried
books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines. Then, superimposed
upon these pictures, were frightful momentary flashes of a non-visual
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 true memory left off and delirious dream 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
waste.

The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly
in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward
the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the
desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried
blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new doubt all my
faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the
hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—
and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time
were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.

Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred
and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my
present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from
palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling
horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and
wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor?
Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of
stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from
reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe’s secrets past and to
come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those
titan archives? And were those others—those shocking Elder Things of the
mad winds and daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting
and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their
multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?

I do not know. If that abyss and what it 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 the 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 forgotten lair amidst the
undisturbed 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 megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly
pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not
indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the
letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language
in my own handwriting.
 THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK
By H. P. Lovecraft (1936)

(Dedicated to Robert Bloch)

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.
—Nemesis.

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 shewn 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 on Federal Hill—the shrewd
analyst is not slow in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or
unconscious, with at least some of which Blake was secretly connected.

For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of
myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and
effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city—a visit to a strange
old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst
death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him
back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories
despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have
nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.

Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence,
there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories.
They are inclined to take much of Blake’s diary at its face value, and point
significantly to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old
church record, the verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry
Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive
reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and—above all—the look of
monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It
was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the
bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in
the old church steeple—the black windowless steeple, and not the tower
where Blake’s diary said those things originally were. Though widely censured
both officially and unofficially, this man—a reputable physician with a taste for
odd folklore—averred that he had rid the earth of something too dangerous
to rest upon it.

Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The
papers have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others
the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw it—or thought he saw it—or
pretended to see it. Now, studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at
leisure, let us summarise 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 to his quarters and settled down to write and paint—living alone, and
attending to the simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic
room, where the panes of the monitor roof furnished admirable lighting.
During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories—“The
Burrower Beneath”, “The Stairs in the Crypt”, “Shaggai”, “In the Vale of Pnath”,
and “The Feaster from the Stars”—and painted seven canvases; studies of
nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial
landscapes.

At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at the outspread
west—the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house
belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown section, and that shimmering,
spire-crowned mound in the distance whose unknown streets and labyrinthine
gables so potently provoked his fancy. From his few local acquaintances he
learned that the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the
houses were remnants 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
facade, 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 shew, was that earliest experimental form of
Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some
of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared
around 1810 or 1815.

As months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an

oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never lighted, he knew
that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the more his imagination
worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things. He believed that a
vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the
pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves. Around other towers and
belfries his glass would reveal great flocks of birds, but here they never rested.
At least, that is what he thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place
out to several friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or
possessed the faintest notion of what the church was or had been.

In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his long-planned
novel—based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine—but was
strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more he would sit at his
westward window and gaze at the distant hill and the black, frowning steeple
shunned by the birds. When the delicate leaves came out on the garden
boughs the world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake’s restlessness was
merely increased. It was then that he first thought of crossing the city and
climbing bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of
dream.

Late in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his
first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown streets
and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon the ascending
avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches, and blear-paned cupolas
which he felt must lead up to the long-known, unreachable world beyond the
mists. There were dingy blue-and-white street signs which meant nothing to
him, and presently he noted the strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and
the foreign signs over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings.
Nowhere could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once
more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-
world never to be trod by living human feet.

Now and then a battered church facade 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 windswept open
square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This
was the end of his quest; for upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau
which the wall supported—a separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above
the surrounding streets—there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite
Blake’s new perspective, was beyond dispute.

The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone
buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the
brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely
unbroken, though many of the stone mullions 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 priests
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 ould 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 the
thing he could tell. But now there was nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt
nobody now, and those that owned it were dead or far away. They had run
away like rats after the threatening talk in ’77, when people began to mind the
way folks vanished now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day the city
would step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would
come of anybody’s touching it. Better it be left alone for the years to topple,
lest things be stirred that ought to rest forever in their black abyss.

After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled pile. It
excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister to others as to him,
and he wondered what grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the
bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere legends evoked by the evil
look of the place, but even so, they were like a strange coming to life of one of
his own stories.

The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed
unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on
its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had not touched the brown,
withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced yard. Blake found himself edging
nearer the raised area and examining the bank wall and rusted fence for
possible avenues of ingress. There was a terrible lure about the blackened fane
which was not to be resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but
around on the north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps
and walk around 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 this 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 facade. 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 shewed 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-strown concrete floor.
The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions; and in a corner far to the
right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black archway evidently leading upstairs.
He felt a peculiar sense of oppression at being actually within the great spectral
building, but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about—finding a still-
intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open window to provide
for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the wide, cobweb-festooned
space toward the arch. Half choked with the omnipresent dust, and covered
with ghostly gossamer fibres, he reached and began to climb the worn stone
steps which rose into the darkness. He had no light, but groped carefully with
his hands. After a sharp turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling
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, hourglass 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 shew 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 secrets 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 in wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and
diagrams shudderingly recognisable 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 leather-bound record-book filled with entries in
some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the
common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and anciently in
alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts—the devices of the sun, moon,
planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs—here massed in solid pages of text, with
divisions and paragraphings suggesting that each symbol answered to some
alphabetical letter.

In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this volume in his
coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him
unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some later time. He
wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so long. Was he the first
to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which had for nearly sixty years
protected this deserted place from visitors?

Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again
through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen
a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened tower and
steeple—objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The ascent was a choking
experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders had done their worst in this
constricted place. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow wooden treads,
and now and then Blake passed a clouded window looking dizzily out over the
city. Though he had seen no ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of
bells in the tower whose narrow, louver-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 louver-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 some four feet in height and
two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised,
and wholly unrecognisable 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 cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up to the
closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above.
As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the
strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to clear the dust
away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that the figurings were of a
monstrous and utterly alien 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 Dec. 29,
1844.”

“Congregation 97 by end of ’45.”

“1846—3 disappearances—first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.”

“7 disappearances 1848—stories of blood sacrifice begin.”

“Investigation 1853 comes to nothing—stories of sounds.”

“Fr. O’Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins—
says they call up something that can’t exist in light. Flees a little light, and
banished by strong light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably got this
from deathbed confession of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom
in ’49. These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shews 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. March 14, ’72, but people don’t talk about it.”

“6 disappearances 1876—secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle.”

“Action promised Feb. 1877—church closes in April.”

“Gang—Federal Hill Boys—threaten Dr. —— and vestrymen in May.”

“181 persons leave city before end of ’77—mention no names.”

“Ghost stories begin around 1880—try to ascertain truth of report that no

human being has entered church since 1877.”

“Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851.” . . .

Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blake
turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes
were clear, and there could be no doubt but that this man had come to the
deserted edifice forty-two years before in quest of a newspaper sensation
which no one else had been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had
known of his plan—who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper.
Had some bravely suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden
heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their peculiar
state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed oddly dissolved
at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague suggestions of
charring. This charring extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The
skull was in a very peculiar state—stained yellow, and with a charred aperture
in the top as if some powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What
had happened to the skeleton during its four decades of silent entombment
here Blake could not imagine.

Before he realised 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 semi-solid
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 illuminant 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 back. Was there a subtle
phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead
man’s notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? What, anyway,
was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil? What had been done here, and what
might still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an
elusive touch of foetor had arisen somewhere close by, though its source was
not apparent. Blake seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it
down. It moved easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the
unmistakably glowing stone.

At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come from the
steeple’s eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without
question—the only living things to reveal their presence in this accursed pile
since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in the steeple frightened him
horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly down the spiral stairs, across the
ghoulish nave, into the vaulted basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of
the deserted square, and down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and
avenues of Federal Hill toward 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 westward 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 shew fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as
summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a bulwark
which cannot be crossed.

Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time

and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark
Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and
placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their
ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by
the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank
with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy
merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a
temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be
stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil
fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver’s spade
once more brought it forth to curse mankind.
Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake’s entries, though in so
brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general attention to their
contribution. It appears that a new fear had been growing on Federal Hill since
a stranger had entered the dreaded church. The Italians whispered of
unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapings in the dark windowless
steeple, and called on their priests to banish an entity which haunted their
dreams. Something, they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it
were dark enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing
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 July 17 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. Toward 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,
louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and
slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in time—for a long dose of light
would have sent it back into the abyss whence the crazy stranger had called it.
During the dark hour praying crowds had clustered round the church in the
rain with lighted candles and lamps somehow shielded with folded paper and
umbrellas—a guard of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in
darkness. Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled
hideously.

But even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blake read of what
the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical news value of the
scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds of Italians and crawled into
the church through the cellar window after trying the doors in vain. They found
the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave ploughed up in a singular
way, with bits 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 louver-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 an 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 onward Blake’s diary shews 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 has
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 shew
concern over the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and
the strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower
room. He assumed that these things had been removed—whither, and by
whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned himself, and
the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking
horror in the distant steeple—that monstrous thing of night which his rashness
had called out of the ultimate black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant
tugging at his will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit
abstractedly at his desk and stare out of the west window at that far-off, spire-
bristling mound beyond the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell
monotonously on certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy
rapport in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find
himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College Hill
toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the thing in the
steeple knows where to find him.

The week following July 30 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 upward toward 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 daemoniac
flute held in nameless paws.
Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused
him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew—
perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard all summer on
Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron saints, or the saints of their
native villages in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from
the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost
lightless chamber that encompassed him.

He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow
spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a
nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches
reached 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 August 8th. 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 interest 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 the window, and it appears
that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain
across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the constellation of distant
lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he would fumblingly make an entry
in his diary, so that detached phrases such as “The lights must not go”; “It
knows where I am”; “I must destroy it”; and “It is calling to me, but perhaps it
means no injury this time”; are found scattered down two of the pages.

Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m. according
to power-house records, but Blake’s diary gives no indication of the time. The
entry is merely, “Lights out—God help me.” On Federal Hill there were
watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked knots of men paraded the square
and alleys around the evil church with umbrella-shaded candles, electric
flashlights, oil lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts
common to southern Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made
cryptical signs of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused
the flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind blew out
most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly 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. Monahan 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 facade 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 facade. 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 louver-boarding of
that tower’s east window.

Immediately afterward 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 of 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 meteor-like speed toward the east.

That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort,
and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing
what had happened, they did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they
sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an
earsplitting crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the
rain stopped, and in fifteen minutes more the street-lights sprang on again,
sending the weary, bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes.

The next day’s papers gave these matters minor mention in connexion 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
awaked 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
afterward 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

connexion 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 9th, 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
afterward the coroner’s physician made an examination, and despite the
unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by
electrical discharge, as the cause of death. The hideous expression he ignored
altogether, deeming it a not improbable result of the profound shock as
experienced by a person of such abnormal imagination and unbalanced
emotions. He deduced these latter qualities from the books, paintings, and
manuscripts found in the apartment, and from the blindly 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 Dr. Dexter, who
threw the curious box and angled stone—an object certainly self-luminous as
seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found—into the deepest
channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and neurotic unbalance on
Blake’s part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult whose startling
traces he had uncovered, form the dominant interpretation given those final
frenzied jottings. These are the entries—or all that can be made of them.

“Lights still out—must be five minutes now. Everything depends on lightning.

Yaddith grant it will keep up! . . . Some influence seems beating through it. . . .
Rain and thunder and wind deafen. . . . The thing is taking hold of my mind. . .
.
“Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and
other galaxies . . . Dark . . . The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems
light. . . .

“It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be
retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their
candles if the lightning stops!

“What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and

shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more
distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets. . . .

“The long, winging flight through the void . . . cannot cross the universe of light
. . . re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron . . . send
it through the horrible abysses of radiance. . . .

“My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street,

Milwaukee, Wisconsin. . . . I am on this planet. . . .

“Azathoth have mercy!—the lightning no longer flashes—horrible—I can see

everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight—light is dark and dark is
light . . . those people on the hill . . . guard . . . candles and charms . . . their
priests. . . .

“Sense of distance gone—far is near and near is far. No light—no glass—see

that steeple—that tower—window—can hear—Roderick Usher—am mad or
going mad—the thing is stirring and fumbling in the tower—I am it and it is I—
I want to get out . . . must get out and unify the forces. . . . It knows where I
am. . . .
“I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odour
. . . senses transfigured . . . boarding at that tower window cracking and giving
way. . . . Iä . . . ngai . . . ygg. . . .

“I see it—coming here—hell-wind—titan blur—black wings—Yog-Sothoth

save me—the three-lobed burning eye. . . .”