The Call of Cthulhu

by H. P. Lovecraft
(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since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity… forms of which poetry and legend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

T HE 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 survival 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 great-
uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown
University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on
ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums;
so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was
intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst
returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled
by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the
precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home in
Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after
perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep
a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent
from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.
 As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to
go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files
and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later
published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found
exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to other eyes. It had been
locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the
professor carried 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 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 pretension 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. This manuscript was divided into two
sections, the first of which was headed "1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7
Thomas St., Providence, R. I.", and the second, "Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121
Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb's
Acct." The other manuscript papers were 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 illness 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 1
March 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor
Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His
card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized him as the
youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying
sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building
near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity,
and had from 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 showed 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
imaginations 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 nightclothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old
age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial
design. Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those
which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not
understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an
admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When
Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or
system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This
bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young
man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal 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 23 March, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his
quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the
home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other
artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and
delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close
watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr Tobey, whom he learned to
be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the
doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of
what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing "miles high" which
walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object but occasional frantic
words, as repeated by Dr Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the
nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object,
the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His
temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the whole condition was
otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On 2 April 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 22 March. Pronounced well by his physician,
he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further
assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept
no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly
usual visions.

Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered
notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrained
skepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist.
The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the
same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it
seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of 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 23 March and 2 April—the period of
young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague
description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is
mentioned a dread of something abnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic
would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their
original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having
edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is
why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of the old data which my uncle had
possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a
disturbing tale. From 28 February to 2 April 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 towards the last. One case, which
the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with
leanings towards 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 dispatch 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 towards the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Haiti, 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 22-
23 March. 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

T HE 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 connection that it is small wonder he
pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.

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

The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire
meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from
New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name
was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an inspector of police. With him he
bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette
whose origin he was at a loss to determine.

It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On
the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations.
The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the
wooden 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 realize 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 recognized 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 towards 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 lifelike, 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 show with any known type of art belonging to
civilization'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 Eskimos
whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate
bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Eskimos 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 as far as he could tell, it
was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.

These 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 Eskimos. 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 Eskimo 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 1 November 1907, there had come to 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 fragments 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 towards 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 polypus 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 towards 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 demoniac 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 organized ululations would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled
chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong 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 hypnotized
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 ringshaped bonfire; in the
centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite
monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested
the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals
with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the
helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers
jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless
bacchanale 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 mulattos, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese
from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But
before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older
than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held
with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any
men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. These 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, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their
tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the
sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the
fleshy minds of mammals.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the
Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die
till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb
to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then
mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil,
with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then
the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy
themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways
and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then
something 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 publication 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 Eskimo 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, be heard from some time as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallized 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 showed 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 connections. 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 a most inexplicable perversity the
coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.

One thing which 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

I F 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 had wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-
tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the
swamp.

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

MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

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

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

The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south
of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict
was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one
survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than
a week.

The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about one 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 showed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink
from shots beneath the water-line 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 marvelous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates
was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events
so carefully noted by my uncle?

March 1st—or February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake
and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth
as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to
dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the
form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island
and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened
vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had
gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April
2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed
from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about
the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of
dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so,
they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to
whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind's soul.

That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took
a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that
little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns.
Waterfront scum was far too common for special 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 Old Ones; "They had
come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them."

Shaken with such a mental resolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to
visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reembarked at once for the Norwegian
capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg.
Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept
alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as
"Christiana." I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a
neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my
summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that
Gustaf Johansen was no more.

He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had
broken him. He had told her no more than he told the public, but had left a long manuscript—
of "technical matters" as he said—written in English, evidently in order to guard her from the
peril of casual perusal. During a walk 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 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 connection 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 show 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 upon
the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun
and air.

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in
ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-
born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's
dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the
Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of her bombardment and
sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was
some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a
duty, and Johansen shows 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 coastline of mingled
mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible
substance of earth's supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in
measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the
dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending
out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the
sensitive and called imperiously to the 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 anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and
hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told
me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal,
non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an
unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and
clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase.
The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling
out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in
those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the
first showed 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 lintel began to give inward at the top;
and they saw that it was balanced.

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his
fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this
phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules
of matter and perspective seemed upset.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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